The legal acts developed within the European Union are mainly influenced by three institutions:

1.- The European Commission is the one who normally initiates the legislative process by producing a draft for a new law and proposing it to the other two main actors: The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The Commission is lead by 27 Commissioners, one per member state, that change every term. Its President is currently Mr José Manuel Durão Barroso.

2.- The European Parliament is composed by 754 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) democratically elected every five years. Together with the Council of the European Union, is the institution in charge of 'law making', which means receiving the drafts proposed by the Commission and modify them to obtain as outcome a final law to be implemented in the 27 member states. To attain this objective, MEPs work in Committees, where they can focus on the topics they are more interested or specialised. At the present, the President of the European Parliament is Mr Martin Schulz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkF2mFV-Rts

 

And if you have missed it, there is a pilot episode with "Hacking The #exile6e" out:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-j7ac1xPKk

Internet has been part of our lives for quite a long time already, but our laws have not fully adapted yet to it. The last legislation related to electronic identification is the Directive on a Community framework for electronic signatures, from 1999. Technology has had 13 years to evolve and has left this directive out of date. Just as an example, according to Eurostat, the percentage of European households with access to internet raised from a 15% in 2004 to a 72% in the present. This means that almost 5 times more people is online now, and it is obvious that the increase would be even bigger if we had data from 1999, the year of the directive. To face this situation, the European Commission has decided to launch a new regulation to update the ways in which we can identify ourselves online.