EDRI - Wiretapping

ENDitorial: Sweden is listening to all internet and phone conversations

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:58:56 +0100

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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

Deutsche Telekom under investigation for spying on its employees

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:57:55 +0100

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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

German Intelligence caught spying on journalist's emails

Wed, 07 May 2008 18:43:14 +0100

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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

Germany: New basic right to privacy of computer systems

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:46:50 +0000

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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

Key privacy concerns in Romania 2007

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:27:45 +0000

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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

US law threatens non-US citizens' privacy rights

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:54:30 +0100

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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

Slovenian intelligence agency scandal

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:35:02 +0100

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The Slovenian intelligence agency (SOVA) is monitoring telecommunications in the Balkans in cooperation with German BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) and UK's MI5. Some believe that the recently disclosed secret location in the Slovenian capital could be a part of Echelon.

The Slovenian intelligence agency is currently a part of a political scandal which has revealed some secret locations and methods that SOVA was using for intelligence purposes. Moreover, international credibility in SOVA and its agents is compromised, as the Slovenian press managed to obtain classified information regarding SOVA's secret financing, its company of straw and its international cooperation with other intelligence agencies.

Data retention and increased surveillance in Germany

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:39:17 +0100

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The German government has approved the draft legislation that implements the data retention directive, but the political opposition and the growing anti-surveillance movement shows an important resistance to the new plans of the federal Minister for the interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, who wants an ever increased surveillance.

The draft bill adopted by the German Government on 18 April 2007, was called by the Minister of Justice, Brigitte Zypries, "reasonable and constitutional." But the adopted draft expands what was initially proposed by Zypres, making traffic data accessible not only for criminal prosecution purposes, but also in order to "prevent considerable dangers" and "fulfil the legal duties" of all security police. Zypries also stated

Monitoring employee's Internet breaches human rights, says ECHR

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:20:40 +0100

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The Welsh Government, through Carmarthenshire College, was found in breach of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for having monitored one of the college employee's e-mails, internet traffic and telephone calls.

As the College is publicly funded, Lynette Copland sued the government for infringing Art.8 of the European Convention on Human Rights that says "everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence".

The government argued that the monitoring was carried out in order to establish whether Copland had extensively used college resources for personal communication, but the court ruled that: "The court is not

Cross-border wiretapping proposed by the Swedish Government

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:04:54 +0000

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Mikael Odenberg, the Swedish defence minister presented on 8 March 2007 a draft law to the parliament that would give the national defence intelligence agency the power to monitor all cross-border phone calls and email traffic without court order.

The proposal, which according to the government, is meant to combat terrorism and other threats to national security, would allow the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) to use computer software to search for sensitive keywords in all cross-border phone and e-mail communications.

Although the Government states that this would affect only a small part of the electronic communications and that communication exchanged between

Wiretapping scandal in Greece ends with record fine

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:25:58 +0000

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As a result of the scandal related to the wiretapping of phone conversations of several Greek officials, including Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, during the period August 2004 – March 2005, Vodafone was fined by the Greek privacy committee for not having protected its network against hacking activities.

The Greek Prime Minister, other ministers, top military officials, human rights activists, the police, army and intelligence heads, journalists and lawyers were illegally monitored for almost a year by unknown hackers through the Vodafone network. The action was discovered in March 2005 but the hackers behind the wiretapping have not been discovered.

Vodafone was blamed by the Hellenic Authority for the Information and

Proposal of computers online searching in Germany

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:13:55 +0000

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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"

Italian authorities messed up by the wiretapping scandal

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:01:01 +0100

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The Italian wiretapping scandal has continued since this summer, showing that Telecom Italia internal security service has tapped phone calls from their own employees, business partners, competition, but also from political and football circles.

The wiretapped phone calls database was apparently used to blackmail various people. According to a prosecutor that is investigating the case the obtained funds were used for corruption activities. The wiretapping was possible due to a series of accomplices from the Police, Prosecutors and Secret services.

The Italian Government issued last week a new normative act on "wiretapping" that tries to prevent the usage of the wiretapped

Telecom Italia wiretapping scandal

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 17:20:59 +0100

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Telecom Italia, one of the major electronic communications providers in Italy is in the middle of a huge scandal regarding the illegal wiretapping and surveillance of the telephone networks.

The journalists from the weekly L'Espresso have proven that an entire system called Radar was capable of recording sensitive information about millions of Italians. The system was discovered by the internal audit, but also by the Milan Prosecutors that have opened an investigation against Marco Mancini, the deputy director and director of the first "foreign" or counter-intelligence division SISMI (Military Intelligence and Security Service) and his friends Giuliano Tavaroli former director of security in

Public debate on draft anti-terror act in Denmark

Wed, 10 May 2006 19:33:21 +0100

On May 10 2006, a public hearing was held in the Danish Parliament on a new proposal for an anti-terror act including surveillance measures. The proposed law may increase camera surveillance, obliges carriers to store passenger data for one year and introduces new measures for the intelligence service. According to the proposal, the intelligence service may obtain personal data from other authorities regardless of whether there may be specific considerations for not forwarding the data (such as professional secrecy). Data may be obtained regardless of whether there is a specific suspect or the intelligence service wish to investigate all individuals having done something specific such as passing by a certain location or borrowing a certain book from the library. This is a measure which has