By now the ISPs/Telcos had to save the data. When the directive came into action the ISPs/Telcos protested as they had additional costs nobody covered. So loop holes will not help if the data is not stored in the first place.
Unless there's some sort of "full feed copy" wiretap forwarding everything to a spy agency. Isn't this the way it's done in case of NSA and GCHQ, not by stealing archived traffic data off telecom servers?
If the ISPs already complained about extra costs, I wonder if most EU national secret agencies could pull it off on their own. Even if they had direct access, the infrastructure for the storage and querying of all (header) data of all the ISPs.
They don't all have billion dollar budgets like the NSA+GHCQ (which is the main reason I think it's fair to be infuriated with people that are okay with the global privacy breaches as long as it's not US citizens because "the secret agency in my country is doing just the same"--except they're not, they'd love to[0], but they don't have the resources to pull it off on the frankly insane and megalomaniac scale as NSA+GHCQ do).
That's the benefit of decentralizing, I guess.
[0] for the Dutch-reading HNers, in case you thought our AIVD are really basically just nice guys, check Louis Seveke's story http://www.vn.nl/Standaard-Media-Pagina/Louis-Seveke-kwelgee... (and no Seveke was absolutely no saint either, but they went too far and back in those days you had to physically tail someone, so at least it didn't scale very well)
Are there any leaks about European (except UK-GCHQ) governments spying on their citizens? By now they did not have to because it was done by the ISPs anyway.
Nah. The CFREU (Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU) is binding on EU bodies, and national bodies only when they are implementing EU law. It doesn't directly bind other things national bodies do. That's the job of the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights), which is not part of the EU.
The CJEU ruling relies on proportionality and the competence of the EU to legislate what it did. We're not about to get a ruling from the ECtHR that keeping telecoms data for two years violates the ECHR.
Same here in Holland. We have an extra tax (called BPM) on all new cars. It is so high (25K on a BMW X5) we are fined by the EU every year. But it is so profitable our government pays the fine smiling.
The four bold points after "Urteil" and before "Gründe" are the legal holding. The rest is just explaining the holding.
Not even the "Leitsätze" on top are binding in any way. But with those, at least, you can argue that the court indicated pretty clearly that it considers those sentences important, making speculation about future verdicts at least a little bit fruitful.
I also wonder if this could have implications on drag net data collections by intelligence agencies.