US Cybersecurity Legislation

At the very end of 2014, Barrack Obama signed Federal Information Security Modernization Act, Border Patrol Agent Pay Reform Act, Cybersecurity Workforce Assessment Act, National Cybersecurity Protection Act and Cybersecurity Enhancement Act. All of these should contribute to ensuring the US cybersecurity.

4th or 5th? The choice is yours...

Rather interesting decision on the Silk Road case can be found here. District court concluded that privacy protection does not apply when defendant refuses to admit the data belongs to him. Therefore the data can be ceased without warrant. It is defendant's choice whether to exercise its 4th amendment or 5th amendment rights.

For coverage see also WIRED,

2nd RESPECT Policy Workshop in Barcelona

Barcelona hosts 2nd RESPECT Policy Workshop titled "Technology and Crime: Law, Privacy and Policy in the Era of Big Data"on 17th and 18th September 2014.

Call for abstracts has been issued and the deadline was recently extended to 7th July 2014.

Web: respectbarcelona.eu

CJEU and Google

CJEU in its recent judgment articulated the right to be forgotten by extensive interpretation of the current legislation. Unfortunately, as some of the comments point out, it completely failed to take into consideration balance between the freedom of speech and the right to be forgotten. By the same judgment the court managed to subject Google to the EU standard of privacy and data protection, and therefore if the data protection package should become law, enforcement would be simpler with regard to non-EU based companies (this solution was already pointed out by ENISA back in 2012).

CJEU and Data Retention: Victory for privacy?

CJEU ruled in Joined Cases C-293/12 and C-594/12 that the "Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC is invalid."
This awaited decision is already vastly commented as it received attention by both professionals and public even during the procedure itself. Some of the comments can be found here.

EP approved Data Protection package

European Parliament approved both the draft regulation and draft directive. Regulation was approved by 621 votes to 10 (22 abstentions) and directive was approved by 371 votes to 276 (30 abstentions).

Press release is already available online.

Smarter Law for Smart Surveillance

Final conference of the SMART project entitled Smarter Law for Smart Surveillance takes place in at Rue Belliard 99-101 (Committee of the Regions) in Brussels on 4th and 5th March 2014, which is less than a week now.

Programme involves (but is not limited to) speech by Jan Philipp Albrecht and presentation of a model law for smart surveillance.