New European rules aimed at curbing questionable transfers of data from EU countries to the US are being finalized in Brussels in the first concrete reaction to the disclosures on US and British mass surveillance of digital communications.
Regulations on European data protection standards are expected to pass the European Parliament committee stage on Monday, after the political groupings agreed on a new compromise draft following two years of gridlock on the issue.
The draft would make it harder for the big US Internet servers and social media providers to transfer European data to third countries, subject them to EU law rather than secret US court orders, and authorize swingeing fines — possibly running into the billions of dollars — for not complying with the new rules.
“As parliamentarians, as politicians, as governments we have lost control over our intelligence services. We have to get it back again,” German Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Jan Philipp Albrecht said, steering the data protection regulation through the parliament.
Data privacy in the EU is currently under the authority of national governments. Standards vary enormously across the 28 countries, complicating efforts to arrive at satisfactory data transfer agreements with the US. The current rules are easily sidestepped by the big Silicon Valley companies, Brussels says.
The new rules would ban the transfer of data unless based on EU law or under a new transatlantic pact with the US complying with EU law.
“Without any concrete agreement there would be no data processing by telecommunications and Internet companies allowed,” a summary of the proposed new regime says.
Such bans were foreseen in initial wording two years ago, but were dropped after intense lobbying from Washington. The proposed ban has been revived directly as a result of the uproar over operations by the US National Security Agency following disclosures by former employee Edward Snowden.
Viviane Reding, EU commissioner for justice and the leading advocate in Brussels of a new system securing individuals’ rights to privacy and data protection, says that the new rulebook will rebalance the power relationship between the US and Europe on the issue, supplying leverage to force US authorities and technology firms to reform.
“The recent data scandals prove that sensitivity has been growing on the US side of how important data protection really is for Europeans,” Reding told a German foreign policy journal. “All those US companies that do dominate the tech market and the Internet want to have access to our goldmine, the internal market with over 500 million potential customers.”
“If they want to access it, they will have to apply our rules. The leverage that we will have in the near future is thus the EU’s data protection regulation. It will make crystal clear that non-European companies, when offering goods and services to European consumers, will have to apply the EU data protection law in full. There will be no legal loopholes any more,” she added.
Yet the proposed rules remain riddled with loopholes for intelligence services to exploit, MEPs say. The EU has no powers over national or European security, nor its own intelligence or security services, which are jealously guarded national prerogatives. National security can be and is invoked to ignore and bypass EU rules.
“This regulation does not regulate the work of intelligence services,” Albrecht said. “Of course, national security is a huge loophole and we need to close it, but we can’t close it with this regulation.”
Direct deals between the US and individual European governments might also allow the rules to be bypassed.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion