Last month, Egypt’s Public Prosecutor refused to hand over phone records requested by the Italian prosecution for the ongoing investigation into the murder of Italian doctorate student Giulio Regeni in Cairo in January. The Assistant Public Prosecutor, Mostafa Suleiman, claimed that handing over the phone records would be “unconstitutional.” Along with the phone records, Italy’s request to obtain footage from surveillance cameras in the metro station where Regeni disappeared was denied. Suleiman explained that such footage is automatically deleted. I examine here the two key points addressed by the Egyptian Public Prosecutor in refusing to hand over the phone records and footage in an attempt to address the question of security and investigative practices, as well as the concept of privacy in Egypt. In order to reinforce that Italy’s request is in fact reasonable, we need to understand the role of video recordings in security internationally and how it has evolved over the years. In the early days, security surveillance was based on Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), where a security guard monitored few screens, watching for suspicious activity. Some systems employed a switcher that rotated the images from various cameras…
