Policy Observatory

On 19 February 2015, the Danish government presented a 12-point plan for new anti-terror initiatives in response to the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris and the shooting incident in Copenhagen on 14 February. This will become the third major anti-terror package since 2001 to be presented to the Danish Parliament.

The focus of the plan is on surveillance measures in Denmark and abroad through increased budgets, new IT-systems, and new powers for the intelligence services, the Danish Defence Intelligence Services (DDIS) and the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET), which is part of the Danish police.

The most controversial element is targeted surveillance and eavesdropping of communications of Danish citizens abroad. This will be done by DDIS without a court order.

Second-hand e-book website Tom Kabinet must go offline within three days unless it can prove it is not allowing illegal downloads to be traded, the appeal court in Amsterdam said on Tuesday.

A Dutch woman is going to court to try to find out who is responsible for placing a home-made sex film she features in online. The woman’s lawyer, Thomas van Vugt, says this is the first time the Dutch courts are being asked to order Facebook to hand over information about one of its users. ‘The verdict will be of great importance to other victims,’ he said.

The US House of Representatives has passed the Email Privacy Act (H.R. 387), that updates the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to require the government to get a probable cause criminal warrant to access emails, social media posts and other online content stored by service providers in the cloud.

An investigation by the Irish Independent newspaper has found that members of the public had their phones tapped without proper justification.

The widespread phone tapping was revealed after a senior officer tried to highlight his concerns about the legality of the covert surveillance. According to this account, he was put under pressure to listen in on private conversations of citizens without a necessary court order.