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

The draft of new Police Act has raised a lot of criticism in the last days from privacy activists and legal experts on its broad encroachment upon citizens' right to privacy, granted by the Slovenian Constitution. Through the suggested act, the Slovenian government grants more power to the police, using terrorism, the Schengen treaty and recent serious crimes as a handy excuse.

The Minister for Interior Affairs replied that changes to the Police Act were inevitable due to demands of the Schengen treaty. Experts agree that the Police Act should recieve some new provisions if Slovenia wants to fully enter the Schengen regime, however, such disproportionate and overall measures are not required by the Schengen treaty.

Goran Klemencic from the Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security says that

The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has completed a first inspection of the central unit of EURODAC, but the complete results of the report have not been made public, arguing sensitivity of the information.

EURODAC is a community-wide information technology system for the comparison of the fingerprints of asylum seekers, which was adopted on 11 December 2000 and started operations on 15 January 2003. The system was created to allow the Member States to identify Non-EU citizens who had already filed an asylum application in another Member State.

EURODAC Central unit is responsible for the operation of a computerised central database for comparing fingerprints, an automated fingerprint identification system and a secure communications system for data transmission from and towards the Member States.

On 2 March 2006, the German Constitutional Court has ruled that emails and mobile phone text messages that have already been transmitted and are still stored on the recipient's device do not fall under the special constitutional protections for telecommunication privacy. The decision was made after a German judge had her computer seized by law enforcement agencies who suspected her of having given internal information to journalists (which could not be confirmed later). The constitutional court decided that emails and similar messages, but also called numbers and numbers of received calls that are still in the address book of a phone, can be treated like files and other documents that do not fall under the constitutional protection for telecommunications. This means that law enforcement agencies can seize these data even in simple

Report on the International High Level Research Seminar on "TRUST IN THE NET" Vienna, Austria, 9 February 2006
http://www.egov2006.gv.at/Reports/Report_Trust_in_the_Net_Vienna_09_FE...

Working Party 29 Opinion 2/2006 on privacy issues related to the provision of email screening services
http://europa.eu.int/comm/justice_home/fsj/privacy/docs/wpdocs/2006/wp...

AN.ON, the German anonymiser service developed by the university of Dresden and the regional data protection authority of Schleswig Holstein, enabling its users to surf anonymously via a Java-webproxy has no more public funding this year. Although it will be possible for users to surf free via AN.ON, high performance services will be provided against cost.

During the last years the German service has struggled with some legal difficulties. In 2003, AN.ON project was forced by the Lower District Court in Frankfurt /Main to hand over the protocol data record showing the IP-address of visitors to specific websites, through a back door the developers were forced to create.

Within the new version, the payment will be made by common payment methods. The user's personal data, provided according to the payment method chosen,

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

The Ministers at the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Council, following an agreement reached by the Council on 1 and 2 December 2005, adopted the Data Retention Directive on 21 February 2006.

The Directive was adopted by the European Parliament on 14 December 2006 after the Council threatened to push for its own much tougher draft, as a framework decision, if the MEPs were unable to agree on the compromise for a directive.

The Irish and Slovakian representatives in the Council voted against the Directive, considering that more stringent measures were necessary. They argued the Council should have pushed for a framework decision, instead of negotiating with the Parliament over a directive. However, the majority disagreed with this opinion and therefore the Directive was adopted. The