Article published in EDRi-gram 7.20
The Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) announced on 7 October 2009 that it took the decision to consider unconstitutional the Romanian implementation of the data retention directive.
The Romanian data retention law has been in force since the beginning of 2009, but it received a lot of bad press reviews, as reported by [...]

Article published in EDRi-gram 7.6
The German Police searched the homes of Theodor Reppe, the owner of the domain name wikileaks.de, alleging he was under investigation for “distribution of pornographic material” and “discovery of evidence”
The seven police officers in Dresden and four in Jena having performed the searches in the evening of 24 March 2009 claimed [...]

Article published in EDRi-gram 7.1
While some European countries block the illegal content (mostly child pornography websites), other are considering implementing a similar measure through a hidden list. However the past month has shown, one more time if necessary, that usually the list of any blocked content will leak and thus the allegedly blocked content will [...]

Published in EDRi-gram 6.19
The Bergamo Criminal Court overrules the seizure, but establishes a case law that is a violation of civil rights.
On 16 August 2008 ALCEI reported to the Italian Data Protection Authority the violations of law contained in the pre-emptive seizure order issued by the Justice for preliminary investigation of the Bergamo Tribunal. [...]

Article published in EDRi-gram 6.18
ENDitorial: A stupid law and a perverse “criminal” sentence
by Giancarlo Livraghi - EDRi-member ALCEI Italy
“Censorship” was abolished and outlawed in Italy sixtytwo years ago. Freedom of the press and of personal opinion is not only established by the Constitution, but also deeply rooted in custom and in all perceptions of [...]

Since I’ve been busy in the past weeks, I am copying here the agenda of the past 3 issues of EDRi-gram, maybe you are interested in the topic. You can subscribe via email, free of charge to this biweekly newsletter on digital civil right.

Hungarian Data Retention Law - challenged at the Constitutional Court
Social networking sites [...]

Article published in EDRi-gram 6.11
Lex Orwell, a law proposal for total surveillance, is urgently being pushed to a vote on 17 June 2008 by national security hawks in the peaceful Kingdom of Sweden. It will mandate the “NSA franchise”, the FRA, to turn its forest of parabola ears and world’s 5th largest super computer to [...]

Article wrote by Meryem Marzouki, EDRI-member IRIS for EDRi-gram 6.7
The 9th meeting of the Council of Europe (CoE) group of specialists on Human Rights in the Information Society (MC-S-IS) was held in Strasbourg from 31 March to 2 April 2008. At the same time, on 1-2 April, another division of the CoE was holding in [...]

As of 1 January 2007 a law took effect in Finland allowing the Police to maintain a secret blacklist of child porn sites and distribute it to ISPs so that these may block access to those sites. Use of the lists is ostensibly voluntary to ISPs, but there have been rather strong hints of [...]

 Following a complaint by IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), a Danish bailiff court issued on 4 February 2008 an injunction ordering Tele2, one of the major ISPs in Denmark, to block the access to the PirateBay domains.
IFPI asked the court for this injunction because most of the materials referred on PirateBay are copyrighted [...]