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The German government decided to prepare the G8 meeting that will take place during 6-8 June in Heiligendamm, a Baltic seaside resort, by increasing the number of searches and seizures to NGOs and anti-globalization movements offices and servers.

During the entire month of May the Federal Prosecutor gave order to the Police in Hamburg, Berlin and other states to search private homes, offices, libraries, social centres or other locations were there were located servers of the anti-globalisation opponents, without making any arrests. The searches and seizures were explained by the German authorities by the possibility to create a terrorist organization by the altermondialist German

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The laws on computer crimes have become stricter in Germany where the creation, use or distribution of so-called "hacking tools" have been banned.

On 23 May 2007, the Committee on Legal Affairs of the Bundestag (the lower chamber of Germany's Federal Parliament) approved a controversial government bill meant to improve criminal prosecution of computer crimes.

The Criminal Code has been modified so as to make illegal for the unauthorized users to access secure data by bypassing the computer security protection system. The "deliberate acquisition of data by tapping into a non-public transmission of data or by way of reading radiation leaked by a data processing system" is now considered a crime.

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On 19 May 2007 the Opennet Initiative (ONI) held a conference on the state of global internet filtering. On the conference ONI presented the results of its research over the last years. It concludes that an increasing number of coutries is applying filtering to the Internet. The core of the results can be found on ONI's website and will be published in a book in the end of 2007.

"It's an alarming increase," according to Ron Deibert, one of the academics leading the ONI Initiative. "Once the tools are in place, authorities realize that the Internet can be controlled. There used to be a myth that the Internet was immune to regulation. Now governments are realizing it's actually the opposite."

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After six years of debates in trying to reach an agreement, the European Council will adopt a Framework decision that makes incitement to racism and xenophobia a crime in all the EU members states. At the same time, five MEPs promoted a declaration that asks for an increased involvement of the ISPs in the fight against hate webpages.

The text of the new Framework decision on Racism and Xenophobia has been agreed by the Justice and Interior Ministers from EU, that have reached a compromise, thus making the incitement to racism a crime that should be punished by criminal penalties of 1-3 years of imprisonment. However the member countries may "choose to punish only conduct which is either carried

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On 16 March 2007 the Bulgarian special forces for combating organized crime ordered the major ISPs to filter the access to and from the web site arenabg.com, a torrent tracker hosted in the US, claiming that it was the source of copyright infringement activities. Only three big ISPs accepted to do so while the others considered the action as illegal.

The ordinance was withdrawn by the Police after a few days, following a lot of criticism from lawyers that questioned the legality of such an action. EDRI-member ISOC Bulgaria was the only organization of Internet users to publicly criticize these actions.

The police also arrested the owner of the web site who was however released

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On 25 March 2006, several Belarusian web-sites: ucpb.org, svaboda.org, charter97.org, belhelcom.org, belaruspartisan.org, gazetaby.com and livejournal.com providing independent news and information were unavailable from 9.00 till 16.00 within the country borders.

Belarusian authorities have the technical and legal possibility to restrict access because of Beltelecom monopoly. According to article 44 of the national Law On Electronic Communication adopted in 2005: " The national operator of electronic communications is the operator having the duties of the mandatory rendering of the universal electronic communications services on the whole territory of the Republic of Belarus according to the

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The French Ministry of Culture has forwarded to the European Commission a draft decree for the application of the right to reply legislation introduced by art. 6 IV of the law on Digital Economy of 21 June 2004 ('Loi pour la confiance dans l'économie numérique' or LCEN) that implemented the EU e-commerce directive.

Basically, art. 6.IV of LCEN foresees that any natural or legal person directly or indirectly named in an online communication service is granted the right to reply on the same service. With this very extended scope, the French legislator has assimilated the online services to the written press regime, a decision which was opposed by French EDRI-member IRIS during the Parliamentary discussion on the

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The new French law for the prevention of delinquency is yet another vehicle to worsen penalties and to increase the prerogatives of the police, when infractions are committed through or using the Internet. The main purpose of this law is to reduce the limitation of penal responsibility for 16 to 18 years old minors and to increase the powers of mayors, including by providing them with normally private information on families and minors in difficult social situation. As it has become usual in France, the parliamentary discussion has been the occasion to include various provisions having little to do with the core of the law.

The law imposes new obligations to French ISPs, reducing their limitation of