Policy Observatory

As previously reported in the EDRi-gram, the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) ruled in its decision no. 440 on 8 July 2014 that the second Romanian data retention law (no. 82/2012) was not constitutional. The full reasoning for this was published in the Official Journal on 4 September 2014 in Romanian. EDRi-member ApTI is working on the translation of the text, and an English version will follow soon.

A former Conservative cabinet minister who chaired the parliamentary inquiry into the snooper’s charter has told four senior peers not to go ahead on Monday with their last-minute attempt to sneak it into law before the general election.

Lord Blencathra, a former Home Office minister, has written to the former Tory defence secretary Lord King, voicing strong concerns over his attempt to “insert the whole of the discredited draft communications data bill” into the counter-terror legislation being fast-tracked through the House of Lords.

A UK court vindicated Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing on Friday by ruling that the secrecy surrounding one of the programs he exposed was, in fact, illegal. The decision is more evidence that not only were the Snowden revelations necessary and justified, but are also slowly forcing changes in both US and UK, even as both governments fiercely resist.

In a stunning ruling, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) – which oversees (and usually rubber stamps) Britain’s spy agencies – declared that the intelligence-sharing rules between the NSA and GCHQ (Britain’s NSA equivalent and partner-in-crime) governing their mass surveillance program violated UK human rights laws because they were kept secret for so long.

Last week, several proposed adding whole sections of the defeated Communications Data Bill to the counter-terrorism legislation. The move did not receive enough support last week but the peers hope to push through the proposals on Monday.

The proposed amendments sought to require internet service providers to log more of what people do online and to make that data more easily accessible to law enforcement and security services.

The legislation has already cleared its first hurdle in the House of Lords, and undergone detailed scrutiny in committee. Peers will now embark on the first of two days' report-stage scrutiny, during which amendments will be proposed and changes made to the bill in committee considered.

The UK government has passed new legislation that exempts GCHQ, police, and other intelligence officers from prosecution for hacking into computers and mobile phones. The changes to the Computer Misuse Act were introduced over a year ago without a real public debate and entered into force on May 3.

According to Privacy International's legal experts, the amended Computer Misuse Act "grants UK law enforcement new leeway to potentially conduct cyber attacks within the UK."

Judging that the new bill contains provisions incompatible with the EU Fundamental Rights Chart, a number of deputies plan to the refer to the European Commission.