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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema