On 22 October, EDRI members FIPR and Privacy International held a public meeting to assess proposed government legislation to retain and snoop on information about the phone and Internet activity of everyone in the UK.

Speakers from the government side tried to convince a sceptical audience that the plans were a necessary and proportionate response to crime. Representatives of the Home Office, Northamptonshire County Council and the Department for Work and Pensions said that access to this data was essential to their work. However, the head of information rights at the Department for Constitutional Affairs said that they still had concerns about the regulation of some government agencies.

Human rights experts in Romania issued harsh criticism at the government resolution adopted last week to set up an Integrated Information System (SII), as they consider it as extremely dense, imprecise and giving room to arbitrary interpretation.

After public criticism the German ministry of economy (Bundeswirtschaftsministerium) is withdrawing plans to discontinue the central yearly statistics on wiretapped telephones. In an article in 'Focus'-magazine the ministry announced its intention to change the next draft of the telecommunications law accordingly. A week later the ministry issued a press release denying the abolishment plan.

According to Focus, the ministry said abolition would improve transparency. Currently, the central statistics are made up out of the raw data from telephone companies, for every phone number, even if they refer to the same phone line, for example with ISDN.

The telephones lines in the EU Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, home of the Council of Ministers, have been tapped for many years. The bugging devices were discovered in the rooms of the delegations of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Austria. The devices were placed on lines between the central switchboard and the national delegations.

The German delegation ordered their Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) to examine the bugging devices. The expert called the building 'wired like a pinball machine'. It is suspected that the devices were installed during the construction of the building in 1995.

After discovery of the bugs a trap was set up to find out if the devices would be 'serviced' by the spying agency that had placed them. Nobody showed up and it is still unclear which country is responsible for the bugging.

According to an item on Warsaw Polish Radio 1 on 19 March 2002, telecommunication providers in Poland have received an order from the Ministry of Infrastructure to install email wiretapping equipment.

In the item counsellor Daniel Wieszczycki stated the order is contrary to the Constitutional right of secrecy of correspondence. In pursuance of the order, the operators are obliged to connect their lines to authorized surveillance institutions. These are the Internal Security Agency, the Intelligence Agency, the Military Gendarmerie, the Border Guard, the police and the military intelligence.

Counsellor Wieszczycki emphasized that the Internet communities have already announced that they would take the order to the Constitutional Tribunal. He said: "we noticed some characteristics of this order, such as a lack of respect for the Constitutional right to protection of secrecy of communication. Indeed, it orders the application of technical solutions which will make impossible court supervision of the installation of such monitoring provisions or of surveillance in general..."

The quantity of police interceptions of telecommunication in the Netherlands is higher than anywhere else in the world, according to the few available official statistics. Government however, tries to maintain secrecy about the exact numbers and the technical specifications of the equipment.

Last week, a Freedom-of-Information request by EDRi-member Bits of Freedom for statistics covering the nineties was turned down by government because of 'the lack of available statistics'. The ministry of Justice could not explain why there seem to be no statistics for most years.

The few official publications show an explosive increase of interception numbers in the nineties. According to a 1996 report by the Ministry of Justice's research centre, in 1993 and 1994 respectively 3.619 and 3.284 telephone lines were wiretapped. The researchers concluded that those numbers already were considerably higher than the absolute quantity in the USA and the UK. According to Ministerial answers to Parliament, in 1999 the number of intercepts had increased to an astonishing 10.000 tapped phones by Dutch police (TK 27591, nr. 2). Official reporting by the US Courts and the UK Communications Commissioner show considerably lower numbers over 1999: 1.277 for the USA and 1.933 for the UK.