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The German government has approved the draft legislation that implements the data retention directive, but the political opposition and the growing anti-surveillance movement shows an important resistance to the new plans of the federal Minister for the interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, who wants an ever increased surveillance.

The draft bill adopted by the German Government on 18 April 2007, was called by the Minister of Justice, Brigitte Zypries, "reasonable and constitutional." But the adopted draft expands what was initially proposed by Zypres, making traffic data accessible not only for criminal prosecution purposes, but also in order to "prevent considerable dangers" and "fulfil the legal duties" of all security police. Zypries also stated

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The Welsh Government, through Carmarthenshire College, was found in breach of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for having monitored one of the college employee's e-mails, internet traffic and telephone calls.

As the College is publicly funded, Lynette Copland sued the government for infringing Art.8 of the European Convention on Human Rights that says "everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence".

The government argued that the monitoring was carried out in order to establish whether Copland had extensively used college resources for personal communication, but the court ruled that: "The court is not

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Mikael Odenberg, the Swedish defence minister presented on 8 March 2007 a draft law to the parliament that would give the national defence intelligence agency the power to monitor all cross-border phone calls and email traffic without court order.

The proposal, which according to the government, is meant to combat terrorism and other threats to national security, would allow the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) to use computer software to search for sensitive keywords in all cross-border phone and e-mail communications.

Although the Government states that this would affect only a small part of the electronic communications and that communication exchanged between

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As a result of the scandal related to the wiretapping of phone conversations of several Greek officials, including Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, during the period August 2004 – March 2005, Vodafone was fined by the Greek privacy committee for not having protected its network against hacking activities.

The Greek Prime Minister, other ministers, top military officials, human rights activists, the police, army and intelligence heads, journalists and lawyers were illegally monitored for almost a year by unknown hackers through the Vodafone network. The action was discovered in March 2005 but the hackers behind the wiretapping have not been discovered.

Vodafone was blamed by the Hellenic Authority for the Information and

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Earlier this year, Ingo Wolf, the Minister of the Interior of the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, and Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Federal Minister, proposed certain plans that would give the police and the Interior Federal Office of Criminal Investigation permission to access online computers of the German citizens of as a measure of internal security. The plans have been were recently criticized by Germany's Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar.

In August, Mr. Wolf proposed a draft bill for a new Protection of the Constitution Act giving the Office for the Protection of the Constitution undercover access to "hard disks" and other "information technology systems"

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The Italian wiretapping scandal has continued since this summer, showing that Telecom Italia internal security service has tapped phone calls from their own employees, business partners, competition, but also from political and football circles.

The wiretapped phone calls database was apparently used to blackmail various people. According to a prosecutor that is investigating the case the obtained funds were used for corruption activities. The wiretapping was possible due to a series of accomplices from the Police, Prosecutors and Secret services.

The Italian Government issued last week a new normative act on "wiretapping" that tries to prevent the usage of the wiretapped

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Telecom Italia, one of the major electronic communications providers in Italy is in the middle of a huge scandal regarding the illegal wiretapping and surveillance of the telephone networks.

The journalists from the weekly L'Espresso have proven that an entire system called Radar was capable of recording sensitive information about millions of Italians. The system was discovered by the internal audit, but also by the Milan Prosecutors that have opened an investigation against Marco Mancini, the deputy director and director of the first "foreign" or counter-intelligence division SISMI (Military Intelligence and Security Service) and his friends Giuliano Tavaroli former director of security in

On May 10 2006, a public hearing was held in the Danish Parliament on a new proposal for an anti-terror act including surveillance measures. The proposed law may increase camera surveillance, obliges carriers to store passenger data for one year and introduces new measures for the intelligence service. According to the proposal, the intelligence service may obtain personal data from other authorities regardless of whether there may be specific considerations for not forwarding the data (such as professional secrecy). Data may be obtained regardless of whether there is a specific suspect or the intelligence service wish to investigate all individuals having done something specific such as passing by a certain location or borrowing a certain book from the library. This is a measure which has