At a meeting yesterday, the European ministers of Justice and Home Affairs finally approved the retention obligation of telecom data. This concerns information about who calls or e-mails whom, who requests which web pages and when that happened. The House of Representatives had asked Minister Donner to vote against with a widely supported motion, but Donner, as he had already announced, ignored the motion and voted in favor. Only Ireland and Slovakia voted against. So it seems that even with Donner’s vote against, the retention obligation would have been approved. Ministers decided that Member States should have the data retention obligation in their national legislation within 18 months. The retention period is a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years. The data may only be accessible to authorized government institutions – i.e. not private foundations such as BREIN and BSA – in specific cases determined by national law. Gaining unauthorized access to the data should be punishable by law. Each Member State is required to set up a public-law organization to monitor the security of access to traffic data. Minister Donner is considering setting up a foundation to manage the data. He wants to prevent the public from thinking that the government has unlimited access to the traffic data, while in all cases permission from a examining magistrate is required.