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According to a document revealed by Statewatch, the EU and US are negotiating the data protection principles for which common language has been developed. The Group has as purpose to draft a proposal that should deal with the personal data protection in any future EU-US agreements that will deal with this topic.

In November 2007 Paul Rosenzweig, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the US DHS said, on the EU requirement, that data could only be passed to third states whose laws passed the "adequacy" test guaranteeing equivalent rights:

"The EU should reconsider its decision to apply notions of adequacy to the critical area of law enforcement and public safety. Otherwise the EU runs

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The European Commission (EC) announced on 11 March 2008 that it has cleared the Google-DoubleClick deal after its investigation made according with the EU Merger Regulation.

The decision of the EC considered that "found that Google and DoubleClick were not exerting major competitive constraints on each other's activities and could, therefore, not be considered as competitors at the moment. Even if DoubleClick could become an effective competitor in online intermediation services, it is likely that other competitors would continue to exert sufficient competitive pressure after the merger. The Commission therefore concluded that the elimination of DoubleClick as a potential competitor

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Article 29 Working Party changes its president
http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/privacy/news/docs/pr_18_19_02_08_...

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Following several complaints and notifications, the French Data Protection Authority (Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés - CNIL) is investigating Note2be.com website created in January 2008 that was proposing pupils to grade and evaluate their teachers.

The site encouraged pupils the give the name of the teachers they graded, the name of the school and the teacher's subject. On 13 February, three CNIL representatives made an emergency check out of the locations of the site webmasters.

The site has raised the anger of both the teacher's union as well as that of the pupils' parents. "This site is the antithesis of education and citizenship because it is based on tattling, denigration and disrespect"

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French Internal Affairs Minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, announced on 14 February 2008 new measures to fight against cybercrime, including extending the websites blacklist and pushing for computer online investigations, without the permission of the country of the hosting company.

The Minister visited the Cybercrime Brigade that is located in Nanntere and announced a new "best practices chart" with the operators in order to block websites. According to the statements, the Norwegian model was taken into consideration, meaning the creation of a list with websites not only with child pornography information, but also the ones with information on making explosives or chemical weapons, terrorist propaganda and racial hate speech.

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The European Commission published the Draft Recommendation on RFID Privacy and Security on the Your Voice in Europe-Platform for public consultation.

After a public consultation on RFID Privacy Issues in 2006, some conferences and workshops and various discussions on the topic within the RFID Expert Group, this publication finally represents the measures that the Commission recommends to the member states and stakeholders, in order to achieve a high level of privacy and data protection in the context of RFID applications.

EDRi welcomes this Draft Recommendation, which contains various important measures, like the recommendation that RFID reading areas as well as RFID tagged object should be marked with a clear sign indicating the presence of

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The German Constitutional Court published on 27 February 2008 a landmark ruling about the constitutionality of secret online searches of computers by government agencies. The decision constitutes a new "basic right to the confidentiality and integrity of information-technological systems" as derived from the German Constitution.

The journalist and privacy activist Bettina Winsemann, the politician Fabian Brettel (Left Party), the lawyer and former federal minister for the interior Gerhart Baum (Liberal Party), and the lawyers Julius Reiter and Peter Schantz had challenged the constitutionality of a December 2006 amendmend to the law about the domestic intelligence service of the

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar) The privacy problems created by the Internet and other new technologies such as RFID have an important place on the agenda of the European institutions that seem to be more anxious than ever to tackle those issues. The hearing at the European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee reported in the last EDRi-gram seems to be only the top of the iceberg.

Article 29 working party will discuss at the next meeting, on 18 February 2008, the highly sensitive topic of privacy & search engines, and it is probable to adopt an Opinion on this topic.

But the views of the Working party's members are already public, after the last month meeting at the European Parliament. Moreover, Peter Schaar,