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Almost one in five sites blocked by filters in the UK
EDRi member Open Rights Group’s (ORG) Blocked project reveals that nearly one in five of the most popular websites are blocked by at least one of the “voluntary” filters implemented by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the United Kingdom when strict filtering settings are used. The UK ISPs filter and block the sites by default. […]
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Code Red, global initiative to support a reform of security services
More than two-dozen civil society activists from fourteen countries have joined the steering group of an ambitious global initiative to accelerate police and security services accountability. The project, Code Red, was conceived during the preparation of a report “A Crisis of Accountability” that was published in June 2014 on developments in the twelve months since […]
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Germany asks CIA chief to leave the country over spying scandal
On 10 July 2014, the German government told the senior CIA representative in Berlin, known as the station chief, to leave the country over spying allegations. The decision came one day after German authorities searched an apartment and an office of a German military intelligence official alleged to have been working for the US intelligence. […]
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Slovenia: Data retention unconstitutional, deletion of data ordered
The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia abrogated the data retention provisions of the Act on Electronic Communications (ZEKom-1) in its judgement U-I-65/13-19 of 3 July 2014 following the constitutional request lodged by the Information Commissioner in March 2013 and ECJ judgment of 8 April 2014 in Joined Cases C-293/12 and C-594/12. The Court […]
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ENDitorial: Child abuse online: Is ignorance the best policy?
Why is online child abuse so unimportant that, politically, it does not need laws? Why is online child abuse so unimportant that the policies that are proposed to address this problem are never subject to review to test their effectiveness? Why is online child abuse protection so unimportant that policies that are implemented are never […]
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ENDitorial: Commission Communication on IP Enforcement
On 1 July, 2014, the European Commission launched an oddly-named Communication entitled “Towards a renewed consensus on the enforcement of intellectual property rights.” It is good to see the Commission being ambitious, but renewing something that never existed appears to be quite challenging. The document opens by referring to the impressive statistic that a “recent […]
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UK: Emergency legislation on data retention pushed through
Faced with a lawsuit from NGOs challenging the legality of its data retention regulations (which are based on the data retention directive the European Court of Justice found unlawful in April 2014), the UK government brought in emergency legislation, a Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill (DRIP), to not only declare data retention to be […]
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We are not accusing the German minister of interior of lying
On 30 June 2014, Germany’s Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière announced an initiative to help move forward the proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation. EDRi applauds this “initiative”, which comes after Germany has worked assiduously to stop progress in the Council. According to internal Council documents obtained by the Spiegel in December […]
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Google and the right to be forgotten – the truth is out there
After all of the noise surrounding the Google/Spain case, the “deletion” of search results, the paedophiles whose crimes would be washed away and the end of history, the reality of the case is slowly drifting into the media. We were told by the Wall Street Journal three weeks ago that any search results that were […]
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Romania: No communication without registration
Two bills initiated during the past month by the Romanian Government, with the direct and open support from the Romanian Secret Service (SRI), are attempting to kill any kind of electronic communication without prior identification and to expand dramatically the legal access to computer systems. The first bill aims to make the registration of all […]
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Supreme Court of the US on cell phone searches: get a warrant
In the court case Riley vs California, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) affirmed on 25 June what many digital rights activists have been telling a long time: Our mobile phones, especially smartphones, have become such an extension of ourselves that warrantless searches of them violate fundamental rights. Not only that, SCOTUS was […]
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Flawed Dutch government study on ISDS
On 25 July the Dutch government published a study “The Impact of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) in the TTIP“, requested by the Dutch Parliament. The study is flawed. A first reading reveals the following problems: It does not mention that it is nearly impossible to withdraw from trade agreements. Any mistake in the ISDS procedure […]
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