News: UK Local Authority use of RIPA to be Restricted

From the Times: The Home Secretary Alan Johnson has announced curbs to the surveillance powers of local authorities. Computer Weekly summarises the important proposals as follows:

• raise the rank of the authorising officer to at least director level;

• give elected councillors a role in overseeing how local authorities use covert investigatory techniques;

• require voters' communications with MPs on constituency business to be treated as confidential information, and therefore subject to authorisation by a higher rank of officer;

• treat covert surveillance of legal consultations as "intrusive" rather than "directed" surveillance, meaning it can be carried out only by very few public authorities.

• clarify the test of necessity and proportionality so that powers will not be used to investigate dog fouling or people putting bins out a day early;

News: More than 1 in 10 in UK on DNA Database

From the Telegraph: English and Welsh police have taken DNA samples from more than 5,500,000 people. Combined with Scotland and Northern Ireland there are almost 6,000,000 people on what the Telegraph are reporting to be the largest DNA database in the world.

News: Companies Clumsily Disclosing your Info may be Forced to go Public

From The Register: The EC is considering passing new laws that would make it mandatory for organisations which accidentally lose personal data to inform the people concerned and relevant authorities:

Supporters of such schemes say that the fear of public recriminations for data loss will improve companies' performances, while opponents fear that if every breach is revealed the public will become desensitised to the issue of data loss.

News: Romanian Constitutional Court Strikes Down Data Retention Directive

From EDRI: The Romanian Consitutional Court (CCR) has declared the Data Retention Directive incompatible with the Romanian constitution. The case was initiated by a Romanian NGO, the Civil Society Commissariat, who sued its mobile phone company for retaining traffic data according to the new regulations, forcing a CCR ruling on the law's constitutionality:

CCR has accepted the motion for law's unconstitutionality through decision 1258/2009, based on the breach of article 28 of the Romanian Constitution, which stipulates the secrecy of correspondence. Other articles invoked were articles 25, 26 and 30 which deal with freedom of movement, privacy and freedom of expression respectively.

Conference News: Madrid Global Privacy Conference & Declaration

I’ve just gotten back from a privacy conference in Madrid titled “Global Privacy Standards for a Global World” which was organized by The Public Voice. One highlight of the conference was the presentation of a Civil Society Declaration calling for the development of international privacy standards — and perhaps most controversially — a moratorium on “the development or implementation of new systems of mass surveillance, including facial recognition, whole body imaging, biometric identifiers, and embedded RFID tags, subject to a full and transparent evaluation by independent authorities and democratic debate." Numerous organizations and individuals have signed the statement (already dubbed “The Madrid Declaration”) and you can, too, by sending an e-mail to privacyATDatos-personalesDOTorg.

Another highlight was an emphatic speech by Stavros Lambrinidis, Vice President of the EU Parliament, declaring that the growing scope of surveillance within the western world is incompatible with democratic society and urging everyone not to simply allow the expanding creep of the level of surveillance to continue unchecked. There is a danger that the ultimate surveillance society will not emerge under a totalitarian regime, he claimed, but rather with citizens’ unreflected “consent.” You can have a look at what else was discussed by calling up the conference agenda here.

One special guest not listed on the program was a representative of Un barrio feliz – a grass-roots movement which has sprung up in opposition to plans to install a system of video surveillance cameras in Madrid’s Lavapiés district. You can view the movement’s blog in Spanish here. One major complaint was that the police have not been forthcoming concerning the plan and the underlying reasons for it. We heard that the local police have cited different grounds for installing camera systems in other neighborhoods (in one case – pick-pocketing, in another – prostitution), and that cameras were needed in Lavapiés because unsavory characters inhabited or frequented the area. The speaker from Un barrio feliz, however, reported that crime statistics indicate that criminal incidents have been decreasing in Lavapiés, making the police’s explanation all the more baffling. Lambrinidis picked up on these examples in his speech to question whether many of the methods of surveillance that have been proposed or implemented could be deemed necessary, proportional, and appropriate in a legal sense.