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Deutsch: Das Stockholmprogramm – das neue gefährliche Überwachungssystem de...

Civil rights groups are worried about a new EU proposal that would enhance a "dangerously authoritarian" European surveillance and security system that will include ID card register, Internet surveillance systems, satellite surveillance, automated exit-entry border systems operated by machines reading biometrics and risk profiling systems.

On 15 June 2009, EU justice ministers discussed on the so called Stockholm programme trying to set up the first EU "domestic security strategy for the EU", by the end of this year.

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Deutsch: Glücklicher Sieg für biometrische Pässe in der Schweiz

A referendum that took place in Switzerland on Sunday, 17 May 2009 was in favour of the biometric passports law by a very narrow margin. Thus the official results show that 50.14% of the voters approved the law, with just 5 504 votes separating the two sides.

With one of the closest results in recent Swiss history, the vote on the law was influenced by the low turnout (38%) and by the number of Swiss citizens who voted from abroad for such a project. 14 cantons (including Bern, Geneva or Basel City) voted against the biometric passports.

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Deutsch: Fordern Sie Ihre DNA aus der britischen Datenbank ein!
Macedonian: Акција за повлекување на профили од бр...

A coallition of Human rights groups in UK has launched "Reclaim your DNA" website that helps innocent people contact the police to seek destruction of their DNA and database records. Five months after the European Court of Human Rights decision in the case Marper vs UK, no bill has been introduced in the Parliament to deal with this situation.

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The EU funded European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) issued, on 27 January 2009, its Position Paper on security features in European eID schemes, showing a large disparity between the various systems which might affect their usefulness.

The paper is an analysis of 10 ID card systems already used in EU and 13 under development. The eID cards are presently used mainly in relation to tax declarations and other e-Gov services with some applications in the commercial sector as well, but their application will largely extend in the future.

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A few hundred Romanians gathered on 1 February 2009 to protest against the introduction of the obligatory biometric passports starting with the beginning of 2009.

The event comes after the first passports with biometric identifiers (including fingerprints) were issued at the end of January in the county of Ilfov, as a first implementation in the country.

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The year of 2008 can be marked as the year where privacy moved high on the public agenda in Germany. On 1st of January, the law on data retention went into effect, which made Germany drop from number one to seven in the country ranking published by Privacy International. At the same day, a constitutional challenge was submitted at the supreme court. The German working group on data retention and its allies managed to have more than 34,000 people participate in this case - the largest constitutional complaint ever seen in German history.

(Article corrected on 18 December 2008 on DNA database figures and the Counter Terrorism Act 2008)

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On 4 December 2008, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) gave its judgement in the Marper case related to the controversial National DNA Database used by the UK Police for criminal investigations, stating the retention of cellular samples, fingerprints and DNA profiles constitutes an infringement of the right for private life as per Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The case was brought to court in 2004 by Michael Marper and a boy called "S" who, in separate, unrelated cases, had been taken their DNA after having been arrested.

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Jeroen van Beek, a computer researcher at the University of Amsterdam, has shown in some tests conducted for The Times that the new micro-chipped passports, introduced in UK to protect against terrorism and organised crime, can be easily cloned.

The researcher has succeeded in cloning the chips of two British passports in which he introduced the pictures of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber and in passing the cloned chips as genuine through Golden Reader, which is the standard passport reader software used by the UN agency setting standards for e-passports and which is also recommended for use at airports. The cloning operation took less than an hour.