This decision has immediate consequences for us here in Germany. As our own constitutional court ruled that the law implementing the directive was invalid, we did not have a data retention law for some time now, since lawmakers wanted to wait out this decision.

So data retention is dead here in Germany and will fall in many other European countries. It is still possible that the court will allow for a severely restricted version of data retention and of course the police can access ISP billing logs if they have a court order, but blind mass-surveillance is a thing of the past.

Yay!

Related news:

NSA allegedly listening to everything in Austria

  As part of "Mystic" apparently the NSA monitored not only 
  all communications in Iraq, but also in Austria. The 
  basis for this was a secret treaty, by which the 
  government knew about it, writes an Austrian magazine. 
  [...]

Austria has implemented the data retention law and officially stores "connection"-data for 6 months, apparently NSA stores "everything" and is working together with the Austrian telekom companies and government.

EU Court of Justice press release:

english http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014...

german http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014...

Full verdict text:

english https://netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/c_293_c_594-1.pdf

german https://netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/C_0293_2012-DE-ARR.pdf

(Edit: direct link instead of scribd, thx eis. Added full verdict text.)

Hard to say how the Swedish government will react. One ISP, Bahnhof immeadetly decided to stop collecting any data as specified by the Swedish DRD laws. And erase anything collected.

Press release in Swedish: https://www.bahnhof.se/press/press-releases/2014/04/08/efter...

In Norway, politicians have promised that they want to go ahead with data retention regardless of the legality of the EU directive. It has been postponed multiple times due to cost and technical issues, but we'll probably get it eventually :-(

I love EU! US, pay attention. This is how you do civil liberties. It seems EU is becoming the new beacon of democracy and civil liberties in the 21st century (if we ignore UK, which seems more interested in being another US state than an EU one, anyway, but without any rights to vote in the former).

Great news, though I guess politicians will find loop holes in this decision that will let them do it anways, albeit slightly differently.

I also wonder if this could have implications on drag net data collections by intelligence agencies.

One mildly interesting / infuriating pre-Snowden tidbit: the UK was having a national discussion about this kind of mass surveilance. GCHQ were asked for their response a few times. They replied saying things like "it's useful for some crime prevention; you need checks and balances" and so on. What they did 't say was "this isn't relevant to us, because the law already allows us to do it (also, we already are doing it)".

With hindsight I can see how carefully they crafted all their answers. It is very frustrating to me that journalists did not read the relevant laws (which clearly list exemptions for GCHQ) and did not question the relevant oversight bodies or GCHQ for more information.

I tend to agree that slurping and storing all content data or all metadata is probably the wrong approach.

It does make me wonder if the technology got released in any form, even as university research, back to the public. I can understand keeping bomb design documets secret, but better database and better data mining tech is less sensitive.

So, contrary to well-founded despair in the U.S. of A. & the U.K., there are still civilized regions on this planet. This gives me hope.

I'm actually curious about which effects this ruling in the United Kingdom (Brittain).

Although they are subject to this regulations, considering their censorship the last years, i don't believe they are willing to coöperate on this (like they are not willing to drop the British pound in favor of the €)

Just a thought.

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Great news, though I guess politicians will find loop holes in this decision that will let them do it anyways, albeit slightly differently.

Great decision. I hope in US something similar will happen. But somehow I doubt that it will in the current sick climate.

hm. This is important, extremely important. I'm very happy as an EU citizen for the direction the EU has been taking lately on technology matters.

I'm not fond of the EU, Brussels or anything, but there's a string of positive decisions in technology related matters that not many people seem to understand. That's good.

EU is run by a leader who is an ex Mao communist and the head banker is ex Goldman Sachs. I trust them not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Manuel_Barroso http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Draghi