4 Big Brother Award ceremonies will take place within the next 2 weeks. The Netherlands will start on Sunday 24 October, followed by a ceremony in Austria on 26 October, and ceremonies in Germany and Spain on 29 October.

For the Dutch BBA 3 persons were nominated in the category 'Persons'. Minister Remkes of the Interior, for a constant stream of proposals to enable intelligence services to data-mine data about innocent citizens and create more satellite interception capacity. EU Commissioner Bolkestein for closing a deal with US authorities to make the EU set aside its privacy principles in order to make it legitimate for airline companies to transfer all kinds of data about passengers to the US. Finally, the head of police of the city of Utrecht is lined up for a Big Brother Award for proposing the police should publish pictures of recurrent criminals on the Internet and in local magazines. The 12 nominations have 1 tendency in common: the fact that government is specialising in the collection of immense amounts of 'soft' data on innocent citizens.

The French digital rights organization IRIS is upset about the continuous delay by the French government in publishing administrative decrees that would define mandatory data retention for telecommunication companies. During the open workshop in Brussels on 21 September 2004, a representative from the French Ministry announced these decrees would be published 'within the next few days' and would set the time period on 12 months. (See EDRI-gram 2.18)

The legal regime for data retention in France has originally been set by the law on daily safety (Loi sur la Sécurité Quotidienne - LSQ) from 15 November 2001, and has been later included in Article L34-1 of the electronic communications Codes. But the administrative decree that would define the obligation to store data beyond the immediate business purpose of transmitting and billing, is still unknown.

The winners of the fifth Swiss Big Brother Awards were announced on Saturday 16 October, during the awards ceremony in the impressive old Steeltec industrial hall in Emmenbrücke (Lucerne). Half of the 52 public nominations were sent in for the 'State' category. The master of ceremony, the actor Ernst Jenni, said he was pleased to see that government was finally learning from corporate marketing practices, and were starting to take their customers more serious. The winner was the commander in chief of the Swiss Air Force, corps commander Hansruedi Fehrlin, for deploying unmanned surveillance drones of the type 'ADS 95 Range', to closely monitor cars, buildings and citizens from an invisible and inaudible height of 1.500 meters. This secret surveillance measure became public when the Luzern police arrested 2 men who had driven into a forest near Emmen to smoke a joint. It turned out their behaviour was registered by the highly sensitive thermal camera's on board of the drone, and the incident reported by the military observers to the Luzern police.

The Dutch presidency of the European union drafted a revised proposal for the mandatory storing of telecommunication data. The new proposal seems to let the members states free in choosing the time period and raises many questions with regard to its scope.

France, Ireland, the UK and Sweden drafted the original proposal to the Council of the European Union to store the telecommunication data of all 450 million EU citizens for a period of 12 to 36 months, for law enforcement purposes. These so-called traffic data reveal who has been calling and e-mailing whom, which websites they have visited, and even where people were with their mobile phones.

The plan addresses providers of telephony and internet, both networks and services. They will have to store the traffic data of all their users, not just those of suspects. The traffic data will be accessible for law enforcement authorities and intelligence services, not just nationally, but across all EU-borders. The member states decide themselves on the powers they grant to obtain access nationally.

The organising committee of the Swiss Big Brother Awards today presented a selection of candidates for the Big Brother Award. A jury of 13 well known individuals will choose the winners out of this selection.

Half of the 52 public nominations were sent in for the 'State' category, including several police departments, the district council and the national assembly. The police of Graubunden was nominated for collecting and sharing data of at least 1.000 demonstrators during the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the police of St. Gallen and Zurich were nominated together for unlawfully collecting genetical data. A very original nomination was sent in for the Bern municipal council, for monitoring all the bicycle parking lots in the innercity.

In the 'business category' many public transport companies were nominated for video surveillance. The supermarket chain Migros was nominated for experimenting with RFIDs on individual products, while the national alliance of medical insurance companies risks getting a Big Brother Award for inventing a new tariff-system that displays extensive, very privacy-sensitive diagnostic information on doctors' bills.

The RFID workshop organised during the FIfF anniversary conference (Berlin, 30 September - 3 October 2004) offered an excellent overview of the technical issues and privacy questions. Robert Gehring introduced the history of RFID, and explained passive chips were first used in World War II air-planes to detect the proximity of enemy planes. The chips were only adopted on a large scale in Europe in 1980s, as huge ear-labels on cows.

In 1999 the Auto-ID center was founded at the US MIT lab. The Center's research was focussed on robots, how they could move in a room with unknown objects. In stead of working on image recognition for the robot, the scientists decided to equip all the furniture with RFIDs and put the intelligence in the objects. After years of large financial support by the industry, on 31 October 2003 the Auto-ID Center closed down. Now several Auto-ID labs are collaborating with EPCglobal to create new standards for data storage and data retrieval.

According to an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Germany is changing its position on the proposal from the EU Council to oblige telecom and internet providers to store traffic data about all their customers for 12 to 36 months. The legislative chamber that represents Germany's 16 states on national issues (the Bundesrat) voted on 1 October to 'take notice of' rather than support the EU proposal. Previously this important legislative body unsuccessfully tried to introduce mandatory data retention for at least 6 months in the new Telecommunication law. The current data retention regime in Germany allows for 90 days storage of traffic data.

Meanwhile, the German government has published a new draft law for telecommunication and post interception on behalf of the Customs Office. 2 Paragraphs of the previous law were declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court on 3 March 2004, for violating the communications secrecy guaranteed in Article 10. The new proposal defines the surveillance powers of the Customs Office much more precisely, listing for example the crimes that interception can be called for, in stead of the previous, more general description of 'criminal offences of substantial importance'. Also, in case of a possible hand-over of personal data to other public institutions the materials must be marked as 'sensitive', to respect the communication secrecy.

The Europarl Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) today organised a hearing with experts on biometrics. In his opening remarks the MEP Carlos Coelho (Conservative, Portugal) said he generally agreed with the objective of securing people's identities, but has some doubts about adding biometric identifiers to travel documents. Coelho is the rapporteur on 3 different reports for the European Parliament involving the inclusion of biometric features in personal documents.

After listening to what the four experts had to tell him, Mr. Coelho's closing remarks sounded somewhat more critical: "Technological solutions seem handy sometimes, but may hide the new problems they may be causing.

While the contrary can also apply - technology being blocked because measures to work around the problem don't come to the surface - we must make sure that there is a fair balance between the values of security and of freedom. None of the two may be sacrificed for the other." In the two-and-a-half hours that lay between the two remarks, four experts had warned unanimously for the unforeseeable effects of what could be a premature introduction of a technology not yet ready for wide-spread application. Julian Ashbourn who acts as an adviser to the British, U.S. and Japanese governments on biometrics, warned that the focus was presently too much on technological aspects of biometrics, while societal impacts that would inevitably concern the present-day generation as well as our grandchildren were largely undiscussed. In the public discussion, assumptions on the values of biometrics were being made that were simply false - like believing that biometrics could prove that a person actually is who she or he claims to be. "History will show", Mr. Ashbourn said, "that certain assumptions involving biometrics will prove to be ill founded." If related biometric-related initiatives were poorly conceived, states risked the alienation of responsible citizens. Much more discussion, M. Ashbourn argued, was needed before biometrics had sufficient acceptance to be widely implemented - a 25 year time frame would be realistic.