SIRP Chief Vítor Sereno Petitions for a Constitutional Revision to Open Phone Metadata Access to the Secretas — PS and PSD Line Up Behind the Pitch
SIRP secretary-general Vítor Sereno told a 12 June 2026 parliamentary hearing the State 'cannot remain at a disadvantage' and asked for a constitutional revision letting SIS and SIED access mobile phone metadata of terrorism and organised crime suspects.
The Portuguese intelligence community took its long-running fight over metadata access back to the front pages on Friday 12 June 2026 when Vítor Sereno, secretary-general of the Sistema de Informações da República Portuguesa (Portuguese Republic Intelligence System, SIRP), told a closed-door hearing of the Conselho de Fiscalização do SIRP (SIRP Oversight Council, CFSIRP) at the Assembleia da República (Assembly of the Republic) that "the State cannot remain at a disadvantage" against terrorism, cybercrime and organised crime networks that already operate end-to-end on encrypted mobile platforms. He asked Parliament to open a constitutional revision so that the Serviço de Informações de Segurança (Security Intelligence Service, SIS) and the Serviço de Informações Estratégicas de Defesa (Strategic Defence Intelligence Service, SIED) can access location and traffic metadata from suspects' mobile phones.
Metadata, in the sense the secretas (intelligence services) are claiming, covers who contacted whom, when, for how long, and from which geographic area — but not the content of calls, messages or attachments. That dividing line matters legally because the Tribunal Constitucional (Constitutional Court, TC) ruled in Acórdão 268/2022 that Lei 32/2008, the 2008 data-retention law that had given police and intelligence services systematic access to telecoms metadata, was unconstitutional for breaching the inviolability of private communications under Article 34 of the Constitution. The court held that any reopening of metadata access for intelligence purposes — as opposed to criminal investigations under judicial supervision — requires a constitutional revision, not just a new ordinary law.
The political response was unusually quick. PSD parliamentary leader Hugo Soares told reporters as he left the chamber that his party "is available to open the constitutional revision process if PS confirms its in-principle support", while PS justice coordinator Pedro Delgado Alves confirmed that the Socialists "are willing to talk about a narrow, targeted carve-out for the SIS and SIED — not a return to bulk data retention". Read together, the two statements would give the proposal the two-thirds majority of 154 votes needed under Article 286 to revise the Constitution, particularly if Chega joins — which party leader André Ventura has previously signalled it will.
On the other side, the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc, BE), the Partido Comunista Português (PCP), Livre and the Pessoas-Animais-Natureza (PAN) all opposed. BE deputy Joana Mortágua said the request "mistakes the loss of impunity for terrorism and crime for an excuse to widen mass surveillance", while Livre's Rui Tavares argued that the proposal should at minimum be conditioned on prior judicial authorisation for each metadata request — a model closer to the German Bundesnachrichtendienst regime than the current Portuguese arrangement.
The CFSIRP has flagged the metadata gap in its last three annual reports, the most recent of which — the 2025 report, published in May — described the post-2022 legal vacuum as "a serious obstacle to the operational efficacy" of the two services. A draft text for the constitutional revision is unlikely to surface before the autumn 2026 legislative session, when Parliament also has to address the wider Lei Orgânica do Sistema de Informações da República Portuguesa (SIRP Organic Law) review. Until then, SIS and SIED operations remain bound by the post-Acórdão 268/2022 regime, in which any metadata request must go through a criminal-procedure channel and a juiz de instrução criminal (criminal investigation judge).
