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The lack of adequate independence of the Austrian Data Protection Authority (Datenschutzkommission) is an issue the European Commission deals with since a complaint was filed by the data protection association Arge Daten back in October 2003.

In July 2005 the Commission started infringement procedures against Austria for a faulty implementation of Article 28 (1) second sentence of the data protection directive (95/46/EG) which requires that data protection authorities shall exercise their functions with complete independence.

The Austrian Data Protection Commission is, in terms of organisation and staff, integrated in the Federal Chancellery.

According to a draft law, aiming to change various regulations of the

Data Protection Framework Decision: EDPS concerned about dilution of Data Protection standards
http://edps.europa.eu/EDPSWEB/webdav/site/mySite/shared/Documents/EDPS...

Nuffield Council on Bioethics : The forensic use of bioinformation: ethical issues. This Report considers whether current police powers in the UK to take and retain bioinformation are justified by the need to fight crime. Executive Summary
http://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/fileLibrary/pdf/The_forensic_use_of_b...

Full Report
http://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/fileLibrary/pdf/The_forensic_use_of_b...

On Saturday, 22 September 2007, more than 15,000 took to the streets of Berlin under the slogan "Liberty instead of Fear - stop the Surveillance Mania!". Several Civil Liberty organisations, affiliated in the "Working Group Data Retention" (Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung), organised the march.

55 groups called for participation, among them the "Young Liberals" (Junge Liberale, Youth organisation of the FDP), Buendnis 90 / Die Gruenen, ver.di, journalist associations, ATTAC, the Protestant telephone Counselling (evangelische Telefonseelsorge), medical associations, FoeBuD e.V., and the Chaos Computer Club. German EDRi members CCC, FIfF, FoeBuD and NNM played an active role in organizing the protest. Police initially estimated 8,000 participants, later correcting their count to confirm the working group's numbers.

On 13-14 September 2007 the French Commission for UNESCO, UNESCO and the Council of Europe organised the conference "Ethics and Human Rights in the Information Society" in Strasbourg, to which EDRi was invited to contribute.

This conference was the third in a cycle of regional conferences on the ethical dimensions of the information society, which aims to contribute to the WSIS process and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). The first two regional conferences took place in Latin-America and Africa. While the Latin-American conference contributed to the exchange of views in the region, the African conference was suffering from a lack of participation of local stakeholders. There, mainly African expatriots from the USA and Europe and representatives of South Africa were present.

Alexander Janssen, a German operator of a Tor exit server, has recently revealed in his blog that, at the end of July 2007, the German police arrested him, checked out his entire house and seized his equipment during an investigation of bomb threats considered to have passed through an Internet protocol address that was under his control.

Janssen, who operated a Tor server carrying more than 40GB of random strangers' Internet traffic data per day, was interrogated for hours for an alleged threat to place a bomb in the German Federal Employment Services Agency offices and kill an employee. The police wrongly assumed the Tor server operator was responsible for placing the threat as the IP address related to the posting had been anonymized with the help of the network, thus pointing to the Tor exit node. Janssen was released by a federal German

On 19 September 2007, the French National Assembly adopted a draft law on immigration that allows DNA tests on candidates applying for a more than 3 month visa on family regrouping grounds. The draft law was sent to be examined by the Senate starting with 2 October.

The draft law was passed with a new amendment proposed by its rapporteur, deputy Thierry Mariani that is meant to: "allow a long-term visa applicant to request the comparison, at his (her) expense, of his (her) genetic prints or those of his (her) spouse with those of his (her) minor children for a family regrouping request, in case diplomatic or consular agents have expressed a serious doubt regarding the authenticity of the legal status document presented".

The text adopted by the French National Assembly authorised this procedure

As Google plans to buy out U.S. web advertising supplier DoubleClick, the European Commission has already sent questionnaires to Google customers on the matter, even before Google has actually filed to the European Union's top antitrust regulator for the purchase.

This is considered a rather unusual step as although the European Commission has frequently sent questionnaires to customers, it has done so once a deal has been formally filed and not before.

Google is indeed expected to file for the about 2.29 billion euro purchase of DoubleClick as the company announced its intention to do so in its press release on 13 April 2007. The European Commission will examine the deal after it has been filed, to check for competitiveness.

The European Commissions' action to send questionnaires to customers is

The US Government has announced its intention to use the so called "state secrets" privilege legal tool in order to stop the lawsuit against SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) that has secretly disclosed millions of private financial records to CIA.

According to the Justice Department' s statement during the recent court filings, the lawsuit, initiated by US bank consumers against SWIFT, a corporative company based in Belgium, on invasion-of-privacy grounds, might disrupt the operations of a national security program and reveal highly classified information. In a motion filed on 25 July 2007, the Justice Department asked the court to throw out the suit in order to "preserve" the program against financing terrorism and in order to "protect Swift from the