Policy Observatory

The European Commission will not introduce a new law requiring telecom companies to store the communications data of European Union citizens for security purposes, the EU home affairs commissioner said on Thursday.

Turkey has passed a new law that allows the government to close a website. The Internet Service Providers have to comply in just 4 hours. The judiciary is authorized to intervene only ex post.

Act 181/2014 on cybersecurity came into force on the 1st of January 2015. The law aims at making the country more resilient against cyber threats and attacks on important ICT infrastructures. The system for ensuring cyber security consists of: security measures, reporting of cyber security incidents, preparation of countermeasures, reporting of contact details and monitoring activities of supervising authorities. Both the law and related regulation define critical information infrastructures and important information systems. Operators of such infrastructures and systems, who can be either government as well as private organisations, must now comply with sets of rules and obligations. The law also introduces the term of “state of cyber emergency”.  The main control function will be performed by the Czech National Security Authority via Government CERT, which was established in 2011.

The Dutch Senate passed a new law adding a new provision article 34.a to the Dutch data protection law Wet Bescherming Persoonsgegevens, which introduces an obligation to notify the Dutch DPA ‘without delay’ in case of a data breach and the related data subjects, broadens the powers of the Dutch DPA with significantly higher fines for a wide range of privacy violations, sets out the exemption conditions for data breach duty on taking active measures to make the such data incomprehensible and inaccessible, and changes the name of Dutch DPA to Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (Personal Data Authority).

The constitutional council approved the surveillance bill, a law that gives new spying powers to intelligence agencies. The Socialist government justified the bill, which allows intelligence agencies to tap phones and emails, and hack computers without permission from a judge, in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris in January. The bill was passed in June by an overwhelming number of French MPs, despite opposition from green and far-left parliamentarians and human rights activists.

In a report published on Friday, the 18-strong United Nations committee for human rights warned that the surveillance powers granted to French intelligence agencies were “excessively broad”.