The Italian mobile operator TIM, one of the largest mobile phone companies in Italy has issued a unique warning that the number of wiretaps has reached the limit. In a fax sent to all Italian public prosecutors they say that they have already over-stretched their capacity from 5.000 to 7.000 simultaneously intercepted mobile phones. New requests now have to be processed on a 'first come first serve' basis, they write.

Even more unique in the current secretive environment of law enforcement, the Italian Minister of Justice Roberto Castelli (right-wing Lega Nord) has provided the newspaper Repubblica with statistics about the number of wiretaps and costs. The number of wiretaps has doubled every two years, he said, from 32.000 intercepts in 2001, to 45.000 in 2002, to 77.000 in 2003. He estimates the number of wiretaps in 2004 to be 100.000, costing the Justice department aprox 300.00 million euro in cost reimbursements. In 2003 the department of Justice spent 225 million euro on the intercepts, in 2002 230 million and in 2001 165 million.

Three top officials in Finland’s Security Police (SUPO) and the former head of the security unit of the telecommunications service provider Sonera are to be charged in a case involving suspected illegal telecommunications surveillance, according to the Finnish journal Helsingin Sanomat. The case dates back to November 2000, when Juha E. Miettinen, the head of Sonera's security unit, handed over the traffic data records of 5 mobile phone customers to the SUPO without just cause. The illegal hand-over was brought to light in yet another painful incident compromising the privacy of Sonera staff and customers. Miettinen had personally led an operation to collect telephone records of Sonera employees and outsiders in 2000 and 2001, to investigate which employee had possibly leaked information about internal company affairs to the press.

President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic has condemned a series of police telephone wiretaps as a 'scandalous' invasion of citizens' privacy after press reports stated that officers listened in on his telephone conversations with a businessman.

Czech newspapers reported that police wiretapped entrepreneur Ranko Pecic, an old friend of Klaus, for four months until March 2004 and could overhear his talks with the president.

President Klaus suggested that Jiri Kolar, president of the state police, should be sacked over his remarks on wiretapping. The police chief had said tapping into private conversations by the authorities should not bother people who are innocent. "I consider what is going on in this country to be really scandalous, and I believe that it is the task of us, all citizens ... who wish for freedom, to really fight against it," Klaus said.

According to a press article published on 15 April 2004 in the Belgian daily boulevard paper 'La Dernière Heure', the Ministry of the Interior in Belgium will test new telecom interception hardware and software on the fiberlink used by ADSL broadband users in Belgium. The test will be done by the CTIF (under the federal control of the ministry of interior) during a non determined period (starting Sunday 25 April) on the fiberlink in Brussels. The main purpose seems to test the viability of the technical solution.

This kind of wiretapping is quite different from regular phone (or internet) interception. Those wiretaps require identifying a specific caller line or identity. The Belgian 'black box' will monitor all the traffic transmitted on the fiberlink. If we take the analogy of 'classical' phone interception, it's like monitoring all the in/out phone traffic of an entire city in the hope to find a specific call.

According to a report by the German Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Italy and the Netherlands are the wiretap champions of the Western world.

The report entitled 'Rechtswirklichkeit und Effizienz der Überwachung der Telekommunikation' researches the legal and practical situation in Germany regarding police wiretapping. The report also investigates the situation in surrounding countries, notably in Western Europe and the Anglo-Saxon countries.

The report concludes that Italy has the highest number of wiretaps per capita, 76 per 100.000 inhabitants. The Netherlands follow closely on the second place with 62 and Switzerland gets a third place with 32. Austria has the lowest number in Western-Europe with 9 wiretaps per 100.000 inhabitants. The statistics show a remarkable low figure for the Anglo-Saxon countries. The USA apply only 0,5 wiretaps for the given number of inhabitants. The statistics would mean that Italy engages into wiretapping about 140 times more often then the USA when compared to the number of inhabitants. The report does not go into the use of wiretaps by intelligences services and systems like Echelon.

On Wednesday 5 May, the Mediation Committee, a common organ of the two German legislative bodies, adopted a compromise regarding the new German Telecommunications Act. It brought back a number of privacy restrictions that were already contained in the Government's draft act (See EDRI-gram nr. 21), but had been rejected by the Deutsche Bundestag, the German parliament (See EDRI-gram nr. 2.5).

The exemption from the mandatory identification of customers that was granted with regard to pre-paid phone cards has been abolished. This means everybody who's selling prepaid cards, will probably have to ask for ID, to collect name, address and date of birth of each customer.

The Mediation Committee also removed the provision granting reimbursement for providers that hand over data to the law enforcement authorities through an automatic information procedure. Providers will now have to hand-over data without any reimbursement. In the context of the manual information procedure, it has been stressed that service providers have to hand over, upon request, passwords, PINs and similar data necessary to access terminal equipment or storage media used in terminal or network equipment (which includes, inter alia, hard-drives of servers and similar equipment). And, finally, the exception that providers with less than 1.000 subscribers do not have to allow the interception of telecommunications has also been abolished (again).

The Austrian Constitutional Court (VfGH) has declared parts of the military power law (Militaerbefugnisgesetz, MBG) unconstitutional, in a decision dated 23 January 2004. The case was instigated by Social Democratic members of the Austrian Parliament. The decision does not repair all points that critics have raised.

The military law was adopted in the year 2000 and amended in 2002. It was the first time in Austria that competencies and responsibilities of military authorities were regulated comprehensively. Before that, relevant regulations were scattered in the Austrian legislation while some parts weren't regulated at all.

Part of the law that was declared unconstitutional deals with data collection by observation, by requests of information and by recording sounds and images. These snooping activities are permissible for

The presentation of a crypto mobile telephone has stirred some controversy in the Netherlands. The Cryptophone has been developed in the Netherlands and is sold through a German company. The device is a combined GSM and organiser running Windows Pocket PC. The software encrypts the call when connecting to another Cryptophone. The Cryptophone should make it impossible for any third-party, including the phone company and police, to listen to the call.

The Dutch christian-democrat Member of Parliament Haersma-Buma has asked the Dutch government if there is a possibility of forbidding the phones, since they can make it impossible for police to use the information from a wiretapped mobile phone call. Dutch police relies heavily on phone interception with an estimated 12.000 phone taps per year. This number is