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During an operation carried out by the German police, prosecuting authorities and State Office of Criminal Investigation (LKA) of the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt millions of credit card transactions were scrutinized in September 2006.

A spokesman from LKA stated that indeed a large amount of credit cards were verified although he could not confirm the number of 22 millions for 2006. But he stated that approx. 22 million credit cards were scrutinized in 2005.

According to Der Spiegel, an individual offered online information to the police directing the agents of Zentralstelle gegen Kinderpornografie (Central Office for Combating Child Pornography) in Halle to a suspicious

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New controversial issues appear in the case of Passanger Name Record (PNR) deal with US that show the level of privacy from the US authorities is very far from the European standards. As Statewatch revealed, the EU Council Presidency admitted that the Council of the European Union and the European Commission had known about the US's "Automated Targeting System" (ATS) profiling all visitors.

The issue has become critical after the Homeland Security Department (DHS) posted a Notice on the Federal Register in November 2006 showing that PNR data on travellers from the EU are included in the ATS used by DHS Customs and Border Protection (CBP) branch.

ATS is a system that U.S. has used for some years to assess risks to

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The "principle of availability" - the free market in access to data/intelligence will rely on "self-regulation" by the law enforcement agencies and make accountability almost meaningless Tony Bunyan, December 2006, Statewatch
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2006/dec/p-of-a-art.pdf

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English health minister Lord Warner has reacted to TheBigOptOut.org, a campaign that mobilises citizens to opt out from a proposed national medical database. He is offering patients an opt-out from one part of the new system - a synopsis for emergency care, which contains things like your prescriptions and whether you are diabetic. He is not offering an easy opt-out from the full database. The plan is to upload data from family doctors and hospitals over the next year or two, to regional hosting centres. Custody of the data will then pass from doctors to the Chief Medical Officer, a government official.

The campaign is now focussed on persuading people to forbid their doctors from uploading the data in the first place. A November poll

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A biometric scanning system called miSense started to be used as a trial on December 2006 at Heathrow Airport, as part of the International Air Transport Association's Simplifying Passenger Travel Programme.

The system allows passengers to scan their passport and right index finger, creating an electronic key that permits them to skip boarding queues, thus aiming to simplify their journey through the airport. The UK Government decided to use it to control immigration and check the identity of people coming to Great Britain.

The UK immigration minister Liam Byrne, said the scanning system would improve security but also allow the passengers to go through the check-in more easily and rapidly: "I think it's going to be popular. People want

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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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A campaign has been launched in the UK to get people to opt out of a government scheme to upload medical records from family doctors' surgeries into a central health database. TheBigOptOut.org was launched in London on 29 November 2006 with support from NGOs such as Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) and No2ID. An opinion poll published at the meeting shows that 53% of UK citizens do not approve of a central medical records database with no right to opt out; another poll the previous week had showed that 51% of family doctors do not intend to upload data without patient consent.

The campaign urges people in England to write to their doctors forbidding the upload of their data. The UK government response has

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On 21-22 November 2006, an opinion was adopted by the Privacy Commissioners represented by Article 29 Working Group ruling against the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) for having transferred transaction details to the US.

The Privacy Commissioners wanted to point out again that fighting terrorism and crime should not lead to limiting citizens' fundamental rights and strongly emphasized the need to observe data protection principles.

The Working Group decided that SWIFT, as a corporative company based in Belgium, was subject to Belgian data protection law that implemented the European Directive on data protection. It also decided that the financial