According to German law, Germany’s ISPs and phone services had to retain data about every citizen’s phone calls and emails for six months. Today, however, Germany’s Federal Constitution Court suspended this law and ordered that all the data stored to date must be deleted immediately. According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, the court said that it wasn’t sufficiently clear that the data storage was secure enough and what exactly the data would be used for.

Suspended, But Not Dead

It’s important to note that this isn’t necessarily the end of this law and that the court hasn’t ruled the law unconstitutional – the court only ruled that the implementation of the law was severely flawed. The German constitution, according to the judges, doesn’t disallow saving this information. The European Union issued guidelines for data retention in 2006 that requires all E.U. member states to implement national data read more

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