The Bavarian Police searched the house of the German Pirate Party spokesman on the 11 September 2008, searching for information on some leaked plans regarding a Skype wire tap project, that were published by the Party.

The Pirate Party published some documents received from an anonymous whistleblower that show the Bavarian government plans to develop a Trojan horse able to eavesdrop on Skype conversations. Police wanted to find out the source of that information and they searched the house of the spokesman and took away a server, but this was fully encrypted, so there are little chances to discover the source.

The search seems to be related to the two documents leaked on January 2008 that were present on the Internet and then posted on Wikileaks website. The first document is a communication by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice to the

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Serbia's Republic Agency for Telecommunications (RATEL) published on 21 July 2008 a document of Instructions for Technical Requirements for Subsystems, Devices, Hardware and Installation of Internet Networks. The document explains the technical requirements for authorized monitoring of some telecom services and provides a list of obligations for the telecom operators.

According with the present text, the ISPs will have to let the police access their databases, including users' e-mail content or browsing history. This regulation seems to be the Serbian version of the data retention directive, since the scope is defined as fighting cyber crime and terrorism.

Danica Radovanovic explains on his blog at GlobalVoices what are the present

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The Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment FRA that has made the headlines last month with its law on spying on all communication, has recently announced that it has reported a blogger to the Chancellor of Justice for distributing what they consider classified material proving the Agency was spying on Swedes starting with 1996.

Henrik Alexandersson is the name of the blogger that criticized the new FRA surveillance law. He published two lists of FRA's alleged classified material on his blog. The first document is a list of 103 Swedish citizens that were under surveillance in the early 90's for having contacts with Russia. The other publication is a list of connections between Russian

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After nine years of legal battle by civil rights groups in London and Dublin, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on 1 July 2008 that UK Government had violated Human Rights by tapping their communications between 1990 and 1997.

Liberty groups, along with British Irish Rights Watch and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, have claimed their communications were subject to indiscriminate surveillance by MoD's Electronic Test Facility that had eavesdropped on their phone, fax, email and data communications between 1990 and 1997.

After having first lodged complaints with the UK's Interception of Communications Tribunal, the DPP and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal

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In Denmark we already have Data Retention in place and the rest of Europe will follow soon. That means that our own countries demand that Internet companies and phone companies log who we phone, email with, chat with, which websites we visit, etc. This is something that the IT-Political Associations of Denmark (IT-Pol) fights against.

Sweden has now taken one more step towards the complete surveillance of its citizens as well as citizens of the rest of the world.

The Swedish Parliament (Riksdagen) passed a law that instructs all telephone and Internet operators to deliver a copy of all phone and Internet communication crossing Swedish borders to the Swedish intelligence service FRA. FRA will then use a big spying network and one

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The giant German telecommunication company is under investigation by national prosecutors for a presumed breach of privacy, after having spied on the phone calls of its managers, journalists and even board members.

According to Der Spiegel newspaper, the former monopoly incumbent operator - still 31.7% owned by the German government - illegally monitored the phone calls of parts of its staff during 2005-2006 when the company was laying off workers. It seems the company hired an outside agency to monitor contacts between members of its supervisory board and journalists.

The company has partially admitted the allegations saying the monitoring was carried out to find out who was leaking information to the press. Rene

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The German Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has been recently under pressure for having illicitly monitored the e-mails between Spiegel correspondent Susanne Koelbl and Afghanistan's Commerce Minister Amin Farhang.

The German parliamentary commission in charge with investigating the activities of the secret services (PKG) criticised BND, believing the agency had been compromised by this case that it considered "a grave breach of basic rights". "The trust between the PKG and the leadership of the BND has been violated by this," stated PKG. The commission also considered it unacceptable that Uhrlau, the BND president, had not informed the German

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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

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Privacy and data protection seems not to be a hot topic for the Romanian society. The media is generally ignoring the topic, unless something related to an important public figure is making the subject out of the ordinary. The Romanian Data Protection Authority has failed in becoming a privacy public supporter and has rather emerged as a data protection controller's register. Under these general circumstances, 2007 was rather a calm year, where the main success of the government in the field of privacy - the non-adoption of the data retention law - was obtained by mistake only due to bureaucratic reasons.

a. Data retention

The first draft of the data retention law that needs to implement the EU

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A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act proposed by the US Administration was passed by the US Congress on 4 August 2007 allowing US intelligence services to intercept electronic communications between US, but also non-US citizens, if the communication passes across US-based networks, without needing a court order.

A written question was addressed to the European Commission and the Council by MEP Sophie In't Veld and Graham Watson from ALDE (Liberal group in the European Parliament) raising concerns on the US act which they consider as a violation of the privacy and civil rights of EU citizens. The questions refer to the level of protection of the EU citizens' personal data that the