On 2 March 2006, the German Constitutional Court has ruled that emails and mobile phone text messages that have already been transmitted and are still stored on the recipient's device do not fall under the special constitutional protections for telecommunication privacy. The decision was made after a German judge had her computer seized by law enforcement agencies who suspected her of having given internal information to journalists (which could not be confirmed later). The constitutional court decided that emails and similar messages, but also called numbers and numbers of received calls that are still in the address book of a phone, can be treated like files and other documents that do not fall under the constitutional protection for telecommunications. This means that law enforcement agencies can seize these data even in simple

The Ministers at the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Council, following an agreement reached by the Council on 1 and 2 December 2005, adopted the Data Retention Directive on 21 February 2006.

The Directive was adopted by the European Parliament on 14 December 2006 after the Council threatened to push for its own much tougher draft, as a framework decision, if the MEPs were unable to agree on the compromise for a directive.

The Irish and Slovakian representatives in the Council voted against the Directive, considering that more stringent measures were necessary. They argued the Council should have pushed for a framework decision, instead of negotiating with the Parliament over a directive. However, the majority disagreed with this opinion and therefore the Directive was adopted. The

The Czech authorities are currently in a debate with telecommunication companies over the exact amounts they will have to pay to reimburse the costs related to the new data retention legislation that came into force at the middle of the last year. The Czech republic already adopted data retention legislation in the middle of 2005, in anticipation of new EU legislation. It stipulates a maximum period of data retention for 12 months. An ordinance of the Czech telecommunication authority (CTÚ) established, in the middle of December 2005, the minimum retention period of 3-6 months for different types of data. The special CTÚ ordinance stipulates the price of each "service" of transmitting data from the operators to the Czech police and the other security agencies.

According to a report on the popular TV station Nova, the Czech police owed

In a public answer to a written question by Charlotte Cederschiöld (PPE-DE) on timeframe of the impact assessment of the Data Retention Directive, the European Commission has stated that such an assessment will not take place because " it will not provide any added value".

The European Parliament has adopted on 14 December 2005 a version of the Data Retention Directive, including in the paragraph 2 of the Resolution the necessity of a prior impact study of the directive: "Calls on the Commission for an impact assessment study covering all internal market and consumer protection issues"

The original text of the paragraph, as suggested on 28 November 2005 was " Calls on the Commission, prior to the entry into force of this Directive, to commission an impact assessment study from an independent body representing

In a report titled " Threatening the Open Society: Comparing Anti-terror Policies and Strategies in the U.S. and Europe" and released on 13 December 2005, Privacy International compared the anti-terrorism approaches in the U.S. with those in Europe. The report finds that on every policy involving mass surveillance of its citizens, the EU is prepared to go well beyond what the U.S. Government finds acceptable, and violates the privacy of citizens.

The report is highlighting the differences between EU and US in terms of access to communications data, retention of communications transactions data, data profiling and data mining, access to passenger reservation files and biometric registration and is concluding that in each case the EU is implementing surveillance powers well beyond those in U.S., and with far

In November 23, the anti-terrorist draft law proposed by the Ministry on Internal Affairs of France, Nicolas Sarzoky was voted by a large majority of the deputies of the National Assembly. The law facilitates the surveillance of communications allowing the police to obtain communication data from telephone operators, Internet Services Providers, Internet cafes. ( see EDRI-gram 3.18)

In December, the Senate voted also (202 for and 122 against) the law, even though it was harder than expected. Several members of the socialist and communist groups sent the law to the Constitutional Council considering that this law gives a too high power to the Internal Affairs taking at the same time the issue out of the hands of the judges.

Adopted in an emergency procedure, this law comes after a series of other

After the European Parliament adopted the data retention directive, in many countries the debate only began about the costs. The European Parliament decided to delete the article that demanded cost reimbursement for all additional costs of retention, storage and transmission of data. In the draft directive adopted by the Civil Liberties Committee, Members had initially called for a full reimbursement of the costs.

The question everywhere is who's paying for the data retention. The costs don't just involve storing space but also the management, development and security of these data. This concern is shared not only by ISPs but also by the police in some countries, where they are obliged to reimburse the costs for the retrieval of these data.

According to Finland's Ministry of the Interior if the original proposal had

The European Parliament gave its final vote on 14 December 2005 on the European mandatory data retention directive. The Parliament approved the compromise that was reached between Council of Ministers of Justice (JHA Council), representatives from the Commission and the leaders in the European Parliament of the social-democrat and Christian-democrat groups. (see EDRI-gram 3.24)

The final text was approved with 378 for, 197 against and 30 abstentions. The two biggest parties, the PSE (socialist group) and PPE (conservative group) overwhelmingly voted in favour -only 39 PPE MEPs voted against (10 abstained) and 24 PSE MEPs voted against (2 abstained). The Green/EFA and GUE (left group) voted against while the ALDE (liberal group) split with 25 MEPs voting in favour and 37 against (including Mr Alvaro, the rapporteur).