The European
Union no longer considers the United States a “safe harbor” for
data because the National Security Agency surveillance exposed by
whistleblower Edward Snowden “enables interference, by United
States public authorities, with the fundamental rights of persons.”
The EU’s
highest court, the Court of Justice, declared on Tuesday that an
international commercial data-sharing agreement allowing U.S.
companies free-flowing access to large amounts of European citizens’
data was no longer valid.
As Snowden
revealed in 2013, the NSA has been interpreting section 702 of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as giving it license to
intercept Internet and telephone communications in and out of the
U.S. on a massive scale. That is known as “Upstream” collection.
The NSA is not required to demonstrate probable cause of a crime
before a court or judge before examining the data. Another 702
program, called PRISM, explicitly collects communications of
“targeted individuals” from providers such as Facebook, Yahoo and
Skype.
When Max
Schrems, an Austrian law student, learned about Snowden’s
revelations, he argued that Facebook was ignoring stronger European
privacy laws when it sent his data from its European headquarters in
Ireland back to the United States, where it was being intercepted by
the NSA. Schrems wrote that the lawsuit he launched against Facebook
was about “transparency” and “user control” because he could
not determine what was being done with his data—which goes against
the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights.
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