Shortly after a series of coordinated suicide attacks in Madrid in 2004 and central London in 2005, the European Union reacted by passing the so called Data Retention Directive. The Directive obliged all the Member States to implement laws forcing telecommunication providers to monitor and store a wide range of meta-data about the Internet and phone activities of its citizens for period ranging from several months to years. The hope was that this data could help Europe to better fight terrorism and other serious crimes. Strong protests of citizens in some of the Member States could not stop this massive scale surveillance. This month, the Court of Justice of the European Union -- in its historical role as a constitutional court -- repealed the entire Data Retention Directive and also broadly squashed any future hopes for similarly far-reaching measures. And the national institutions of the Member States seem to be reacting to this decision. In the wake of the decision, the Slovak Constitutional Court last week temporarily suspended the Slovak national implementation until a review on merits is completed.
