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Deutsch: Das Telekompaket in der zweiten Lesung – gefährliche Zusätze

Several alarming amendments to the Telecom Package second reading in the European Parliament are to be voted on 31 March 2009 by ITRE/IMCO committee. The amendments are meant to give additional control to the entertainment industry, telecoms and IT security companies over the Internet.

An agreement on several delicate issues of the telecom package is sought in a trialogue between the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Commission to agree on a resolution regarding politically sensitive and technically difficult aspects of the Telecoms Package. Although the European Parliament is suppose

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Deutsch: Rumänisches Gesetz zur Vorratsdatenspeicherung von der Regierung aufg...

In a sudden and unexpected move, the Romanian Government has decided on 25 February 2009 to suspend the application of the data retention law until the end of the year - 31 December 2009.

The official reason from the press release of the Ministry of Communications and Information Society are related to the:

- complications that the law brings to the penal cases, especially in the initial phases of information gathering;

- the area of the crimes for which the retained data is accessible is contested (by whom?

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Deutsch: Norwegische Gruppen schließen sich dem Justizzentrum gegen das schwed...

The Norwegian organisation of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) has filed a petition, known as a Third Party Intervention, in support of the case brought to the European Court of Human Rights challenging the Sweden's FRA law that authorizes the Sweden's National Defence Radio Establishment (Försvarets radioanstalt - FRA) to wiretap all telephone and Internet traffic that crosses Sweden's borders.

The legislative package which was passed by the Parliament of Sweden on 18 June 2008 and took effect on 1 January 2009, was fiercely criticized and opposed in Sweden by the publi

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After the decision at the end of last year when the Bulgarian Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) annulled article 5 of the national legislation that implements the Data retention Directive, new initiatives by the Bulgarian authorities raise concerns in relation with data retention.

Thus, in 2009, only a few days before the Parliamentary Transport and Communications Commission meeting, a proposal for changes in the Digital Messages Act was submitted by the Interior Ministry, copying the Data Retention Regulation, including the articles abolished by the SAC.

Several civil society NGOs, including Electronic Frontier Bulgaria and the Association for Electronic Communicatio

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On 10 February 2009 the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decided that the data retenion directive was correctly adopted on the basis of the EC Treaty as it relates predominantly to the functioning of the internal market.

This was the conclusion of the court in the suit that Ireland, supported by Slovakia, started against the European Parliament asking the Court of Justice to annul the directive grounds of inappropriate legal basis.

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The year of 2008 can be marked as the year where privacy moved high on the public agenda in Germany. On 1st of January, the law on data retention went into effect, which made Germany drop from number one to seven in the country ranking published by Privacy International. At the same day, a constitutional challenge was submitted at the supreme court. The German working group on data retention and its allies managed to have more than 34,000 people participate in this case - the largest constitutional complaint ever seen in German history.

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In Austria the international data protection day on 28 January will pass by widely unrecognised. This year, as already in 2008, the Data Protection Commission (DSK; the Austrian Data Protection Authority) and the Data Protection Council (DSR; a political advisory board) will together organise a meeting for a strictly limited amount of interested persons (max. 100 participants) where they will present European and international developments in data protection. In contrary to 2008, where they were confronted with by far more than 100 registrations, the event was promoted very poorly.

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Privacy is a sporadic keyword in the Romanian mass-media. And even less used in public speech. Becoming an ideal motivation only when talking about some local stars' private life and their juicy intricacies, the real debate on the most important issues lacks completely. The Human Rights Committees in the Parliament seem unfamiliar with the topic and the Data Protection Authority prefers to keep its quiet status.