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Deutsch: Nokia-Gesetz angenommen

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Macedonian: Усвоен Законот Lex Nokia

The snooping law, also called Lex Nokia, was approved in the Finnish Parliament two weeks ago.

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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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The Irish Government has approved the outline of a Bill which, if passed by Parliament, will permit police to break into private property to plant covert audio bugs and video cameras. The Covert Surveillance Bill is intended to legitimise what is already believed to be existing practice, to make Irish law compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights and to allow evidence obtained in this way to be used in court. Judicial approval will be required before this can be done, except in exceptional circumstances.

The procedure to deal with cases of exceptional urgency is too lax.

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The Bavarian Police searched the house of the German Pirate Party spokesman on the 11 September 2008, searching for information on some leaked plans regarding a Skype wire tap project, that were published by the Party.

The Pirate Party published some documents received from an anonymous whistleblower that show the Bavarian government plans to develop a Trojan horse able to eavesdrop on Skype conversations.

Serbia's Republic Agency for Telecommunications (RATEL) published on 21 July 2008 a document of Instructions for Technical Requirements for Subsystems, Devices, Hardware and Installation of Internet Networks. The document explains the technical requirements for authorized monitoring of some telecom services and provides a list of obligations for the telecom operators.

According with the present text, the ISPs will have to let the police access their databases, including users' e-mail content or browsing history. This regulation seems to be the Serbian version of the data retention directive, since the scope is defined as fighting cyber crime and terrorism.

Danica Radovanovic explains on his blog at GlobalVoices what are the present requirements: "Internet Service Providers (ISP) are obligated to enable

The Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment FRA that has made the headlines last month with its law on spying on all communication, has recently announced that it has reported a blogger to the Chancellor of Justice for distributing what they consider classified material proving the Agency was spying on Swedes starting with 1996.

Henrik Alexandersson is the name of the blogger that criticized the new FRA surveillance law. He published two lists of FRA's alleged classified material on his blog. The first document is a list of 103 Swedish citizens that were under surveillance in the early 90's for having contacts with Russia. The other publication is a list of connections between Russian and Swedish corporations from 1996, which may imply that FRA was illegally listening to cable bound traffic.