Europe’s privacy rules conflict with NSA spying: EU Court Declares NSA Surveillance Illegal

By Alfredo Lopez

As expected, the European Union court has thrown out an agreement, forged in 2000, that allows virtually uninhibited data sharing and transfer between the United States and EU countries and is the legal basis for National Security Agency's on-line surveillance and data capture programs.

The Court's decision is binding on all EU members and violation of its decisions could end in punitive measures including fines and trade restrictions.

The decision validates an opinion issued by the EU Court's Advocate General last month that the Safe Harbor Framework -- a group of trade regulations approved by the EU in 2000 -- violates the laws of various EU member countries and the EU's 2009 Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Essentially, Safe Harbor allows the United States to retrieve huge amounts of data from servers and other storage devices in a European country without having to worry about the country's privacy laws, which are frequently stricter than those in the United States and are now uniformly compliant with the 2009 Charter. In fact, since these are American officials operating abroad, they don't have to worry about U.S. privacy laws either because these don't apply to activities outside the U.S.

Since much of the data from users of services like Google (including Gmail), Apple and Facebook (as well as 4500 other companies and agencies) is stored in Europe, which is more cost-effective than in the U.S., the NSA was capturing most data without any constraint. That, now, has ended.

The opinion issued by Advocate General Yves Bot last month was a response to a case brought by Austrian technologist Maximillian Schrems. Schrems used information made public by whistle-blower Edward Snowden to demonstrate that the NSA's PRISM program, the agency's main data collection program, was effectively illegal in much of Europe and Safe Harbor was actually facilitating a crime.

After being turned down by Ireland's courts -- the European division of Facebook, the lawsuit's initial target, is based in Ireland -- Schrems took his case to the EU courts which almost immediately saw a major contradiction in the Safe Harbor Framework...

For the rest of this article by ALFREDO LOPEZ in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2880