The French constitutional council judged on 19 January 2006, that the new national anti-terrorism law, submitted by the French Senators, was not anti-constitutional.

The Senators were particularly concerned with two provisions of this law. The first one was the provision allowing the police to obtain communication data without any judicial order, in order to "prevent and punish" acts of terrorism (article 6). The constitutional council only found necessary to remove the word "punish" from the article, otherwise considering the article in compliance with constitution, arguing that prevention is indeed the role of police forces, and finding that enough safeguards were already provided by this article.

The second one was the provision allowing the police to automatically monitor cars on French roads and highways, taking picture of licence

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

On 22 November 2005 the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice has advised to annul the EU-US agreement on the transfer of passenger data. The AG does not answer the privacy-questions raised by the European Parliament, but finds the agreement unacceptable under the subsidiarity rule of the European Union. Only the member states should decide on these matters, not the European Commission.

US Customs have had access to the passenger lists of Europeans flying to the US since May 2004. European commissioner Frattini promised to send the European Parliament an evaluation in May 2005, but nothing has surfaced yet.

The full court ruling will follow early in 2006. The court might still come up with a ruling that addresses the privacy-issue.

The court press release (available in different languages)

Like France, Denmark is also working on a new round of anti-terrorism measures, to be presented to Parliament in the spring of 2006. The proposals are quite far reaching and encompass a range of intrusions into citizens' digital privacy.

Among the most notorious proposals are: - a recommendation to let the authorities monitor the entire spectrum of telecommunications taking place within a delimited geographical area such as an apartment complex; - to allow intelligence services to request any information stored in any government database about any citizen without it being part of an ongoing investigation; - the introduction of mandatory screening of airline passenger lists by intelligence services; - to oblige all operators of services for electronic communications to implement technical measures to enable the authorities to wiretap any given communication at short notice.

The French government has decided to apply the urgency procedure to a new anti-terrorism draft law, with only one reading by each Chamber. The draft law was already passed by the National Assembly (French Lower House) on 29 November 2005 and will be examined by the French Senate in late December or early January 2006. The proposal creates increasing powers for the police and the intelligence services, thus undermining the protection of formal judicial procedures.

The law will extend the use of video-surveillance, authorising private parties to install CCTV cameras in public places "likely to be exposed to terrorist acts", and in places open to the public when they are "particularly exposed to risks of aggression or theft". Obviously, this covers almost any public or privately-owned place, including shops. In case of emergency, CCTV cameras may be installed prior to any authorisation.

On the closing day of the Summit, Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media and Catherine Trautmann, Member of the European Parliament co-hosted a Workshop on "Human Rights and the Information Society". Trautmann (Social Democrats) also was the special rapporteur on the WSIS for the European Parliament. Her report was adopted in plenary on 23 June 2005.

Speakers included: Ambeyi Ligabo, UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Catherine Trautmann from the EU Parliament, Sidiki Kaba, president of the International League of Human Rights, Sharon Hom from Human Rights in China, and Rikke Frank Jørgensen, Danish Human Rights Institute and author of this contribution.

The purpose of the workshop was to cover a range of issues pertaining to

The French newspaper Le Monde has a number of articles on new plans from the French government for anti-terrorism legislation. On 6 September the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin presented a rough impression of 16 new measures to the members of parliament. The package will be presented to the Council of Ministers in October 2005.

Some of the proposed measures are:

-An extension of the scope of camera surveillance, to include the possibility to film the public streets in front of certain organisations that 'are exposed to the risk of terrorist acts'. In this context, specifically synagogues and confessional schools are mentioned, but local authorities may also order industry and public transport to do the same. Le Monde bluntly states that this intention clearly shows that terrorism is used as a pretext by de Villepin, since he tried to introduce such broader surveillance powers before he became Prime minister. The camera images will have to be kept for 1 month.

The US Transportation Security Administration is facing a scandal involving data being swapped forth and back with a private company engaged in data brokering.

As Associated Press reported, the TSA, which is an agency of the US Department of Homeland Security, is not only storing commercial data about domestic air passengers. It has also passed this data on to EagleForce Associate, a company based in Virginia and engaged in data mining. This company matched the data to other sets of data from different sources and burnt it on CDs, which were then sent back to the TSA. The authority reportedly used the CDs for testing terrorist watchlists. This practice concerns only domestic US flights.

But, as part of a deal with the Commission, the Department of Homeland Security is also receiving in advance data of EU passengers on transatlantic flights. The US have promised to treat this data according to EU data protection standards. The Commission has taken this promise as a sufficient guarantee that the data will be treated adequately, which is a legal condition for the data transfer to take place.