“Arming Big Brother”, a new report by Transnational Institute (TNI) and Statewatch, reveals the army industry lobbying has led to creating a new European security-industrial complex. According to this report, EU is preparing to spend to €1 billion per year on new "research" into surveillance and control technologies.

Following the demands made in 2003 by the GoP (Group of Personalities) including EU officials and Europe’s largest IT and arms companies arguing Europe multinationals needed a billion euros per year to compete with US multinationals and Government, the European Commission appointed a European Security Research Advisory Board to develop and implement the future European Security Research Programme (ESRP).

Ben Hayes, the author of the report stated “The ESRP is completely

The proposed changes of Slovenian Intelligence Agency Act (ZSOVA) raised questions about its unconstitutionality. The government would like to exclude the current 6-month limitation for use of special operative methods, e.g. mail monitoring, recording of telephone conversations etc. The Government invoked cooperation with EU and NATO in the fight against terrorism as the reason for the proposed changes.

There are two main changes being proposed. According to the first one, the competence to ordain measures that invade individual's information privacy would be transferred from the president of Ljubljana Circuit Court to the president of the Slovenian Supreme Court. Legal experts find this solution better, but still not optimal, as the decision-making is still in the hands of one single person. A panel of 3 Supreme Court judges would be a better

As a follow up to the latest anti-terror plan of action (49 proposals) of November 2005, the Danish government is now proposing new anti-terror legislation.

In the current round of public hearing, massive criticism has been raised by NGOs, legal experts, Danish industry, telecom providers, and from a number of political parties, including the Liberal Party, which is one of the ruling parties in the current government. The criticism concerns both the substance in the proposals and the process of their preparation.

The proposals presented by the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Science & Technology are quite far reaching and encompass a range of intrusions into citizens' privacy.

Among the most debated proposals are: - An access for the police intelligence services (PET) to request

According to declarations of Romanian public officials, during the last month, the total costs of the specialized police services for legal wiretapping in 2005 was at least 118 million euros, an amount very close to the annual national budget for scientific research.

As Catalin Harnagea, former director of a Romanian Secret Service unit, declared the cost for wiretapping one telephone line is around 150 - 200 euros/ hour. This amount includes all the interception and transcription costs. Also according to President Traian Basescu around 6,370 telephones were wiretapped in 2005. Some figures given by the human rights organisation Helsinki Committee (APADOR-CH) show that, in 2002, a telephone line was wiretapped for an average of 220 days. Journalists from the newspaper "Adevarul" estimated every intercept generated about 30 minutes of recorded

Over a 100 phone numbers of Greek Government officials were illegally wiretapped for 11 months, during and after the 2004 Olympic games. This was confirmed on 2 February 2006 by three ministers during the daily Greek government press conference.

The illegal wiretaps were discovered in March 2005 during a routine control at Vodafone, one of the main mobile providers in Greece. Those under surveillance included the Prime Minister, many ministers, the police, army and intelligence heads and headquarters, along with left wing political activists, journalists, and lawyers. The system was deactivated by the mobile operator too soon to trace the perpetrators, yet their approximate location was interpreted by some in the media as being suspiciously close to the US embassy in Athens.

The Slovenian constitutional court issued a decision on 8 December 2005 ascertaining that, in 1996, SOVA (Slovenian intelligence agency) illegally performed eavesdropping to a suspected person later sentenced for unjustified production and trading of drugs. The most aggravating evidences for the defendant were the telephone conversation recordings that SOVA made for the police.

The eavesdropping and recording of telephone conversations were performed in a way that did not exclude the possibility of abuses (montage, erasing, later adding of recordings) and the defence could not examine the transcriptions of the telephone conversations as the documents were labelled as confidential.

From 1993 till 11 April 1997, on the basis of a confidential agreement, SOVA eavesdropped and recorded telephone conversations for the police, which did

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

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.