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Just five days after the German President Horst Köhler approved the German data retention law that entered into force on 1 January 2008, the German Working group on data retention (Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung) challenged the law in the Federal German Constitutional Court.

The complaint was filed with the Court on 31 December 2007 and, for the first time in the German history, it was backed by 30 000 complainants. The 150-page notice of appeal requested an immediate suspension of the law on the grounds of "apparent unconstitutionality".

The Working Group explains that the appeal is substantiated by the fear that general data retention might severely disrupt free communication in Germany

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The German Federal Parliament adopted on 10 November 2007 the law that implements the EU data retention directive in the German legislation by amending the current wire tapping legislation. This has triggered a strong reaction of the opposition and civil society, more than 13 000 citizens signing to challenge of the law to the Constitutional Court.

The law passed in an open vote (on request by the Greens and the Liberal Party) with 366 parliamentarians voting for the data retention regulations and 156 against them. The members of the SPD (Social Democratic Party), CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and CSU (Christian Social Union) voted for the law pushed by the Federal Minister of Justice Brigitte Zypries and Federal

On Saturday, 22 September 2007, more than 15,000 took to the streets of Berlin under the slogan "Liberty instead of Fear - stop the Surveillance Mania!". Several Civil Liberty organisations, affiliated in the "Working Group Data Retention" (Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung), organised the march.

55 groups called for participation, among them the "Young Liberals" (Junge Liberale, Youth organisation of the FDP), Buendnis 90 / Die Gruenen, ver.di, journalist associations, ATTAC, the Protestant telephone Counselling (evangelische Telefonseelsorge), medical associations, FoeBuD e.V., and the Chaos Computer Club. German EDRi members CCC, FIfF, FoeBuD and NNM played an active role in organizing the protest. Police initially estimated 8,000 participants, later correcting their count to confirm the working group's numbers.

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The transposition into the UK law of most part of the EU Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) was approved on 24 July 2007 by the House of Lords and signed the next day by the Home Secretary.

The approval followed after a period of public consultation proposed by a paper published by the Home Office in March 2007.

As a result of the public consultation, the law applies only to telecom companies that will have to preserve phone call logs for one year, but does not apply to Internet traffic data such as emails, web surfing or VoIP phone calls.

The new law is meant to provide security services with a reliable log of mobile and fixed phone calls they could use in investigations, referring

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The Spanish Plenary Congress of Deputies approved on 21 June 2007 the draft law on the retention of traffic data requiring fixed and mobile telephony, but also ISPs to retain data for a period of one year and to make it available to law enforcement or secret services under court order.

The bill, called Electronic Communications and Public Communications Network Data Storage Act, represents the implementation of the EU Directive 2006/24/CE on data retention. According to the draft act, the data will be retained only with the purpose to: "detect, investigate and prosecute serious crimes stipulated by the Criminal Code and other special laws" and could be accessed by law enforcement and secret services only under court

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Yahoo and Google seems to have problems adapting their business to the tough requirements of the German law regarding content harmful to minors and the implementation of the data retention directive, respectively.

Yahoo has recently changed the way the content filter setting for its photo-sharing service Flickr works for German members so that they can't view photos labelled as "moderate" or "restricted" via the search function. This caused a lot of complaints from German users, that created special groups on the platform such as Against Censorship! Also they started uploading anti-Flickr pictures in the Yahoo photo sharing service and tag them as "thinkflickrthink".

In the end Flickr allowed the German users to turn SafeSearch off to allow

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A spokesman of the Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology has confirmed that due to the flood of responses to the law proposal there is no way to have data retention ready before the deadline set by the directive.

The ministry received a total of 90 statements from various organisations. Most of them voiced severe concerns about the suggested implementation of data retention. The supporters were various bodies of the entertainment industry, demanding longer retention periods and a lower threshold. They demanded extending access to retained data for violations of copyright, by a law that is being implemented to help fight terrorism.

The ministry needs to process all those statements in a diligent way and

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Google has answered several questions related to its data protection standards addressed by the Article 29 Working Party, especially on the period after which the anonymisation of the search server logs can be obtained.

Initially Google announced in March 2007 a reduction of the retention period for data related to users and their searches to 18-24 months, but, after the Article 29 Working Party's letter, Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel at Google, accepted a period of 18 months. However, he also stated that the period could be extended to 24 months, depending on the implementation of the Data retention directive in some of the EU member states.

Google explained that the period is necessary to use for logs in their