International Law

Consultation on the future EU-US international agreement on personal data protection and information sharing for law enforcement purposes - tell them what to do by 12th March 2010

[via The Register] If you have half an hour to spare, and you care about your own personal data privacy and security, and that of your family, you might be able to influence the European Commission, before they get out negotiated by the US Government, or get lobbied too hard by the vested securocrat interests.

Europe moves to curtail US data snooping rights

Free access to financial data may end

By John Oates

Posted in Government, 5th February 2010 15:56 GMT

The European Commission has opened a public consultation on whether the US government should continue to get free access to European bank and financial data under the SWIFT agreement.

The US claims it needs access to our bank accounts in order to fight terrorism - it has had free access since shortly after 11 September 2001. But the Civil Liberties Committee of European MPs yesterday recommended the Parliament reject renewal of the treaty; MEPs only recently got powers over external treaties.

This may sound like just hot air from Brussels, but the treaty is up for a vote next Thursday. MEPs want the data protected in the same way as it would be in Europe.

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So when a US firm brings data out of Europe it must still follow EU law. This is now extended so that the data is passed on to an outsourcer, that company must also follow EU law.

The consultation documents are here. You have until 12 March to have your say.

Actually, that European Commission Consultation document is much wider and more general and applies to any data transfers involving Governments / national security / transnational border crime investigations etc:

Consultation on the future EU-US international agreement on personal data protection and information sharing for law enforcement purposes [69 KB .pdf]

Consultation on the future EU-US international agreement on personal data protection and information sharing for law enforcement purposes [25 KB .doc]

• If you are answering this consultation as a citizen, please click here to submit your contribution.
• If you are answering this consultation on behalf of an organisation, please click here to submit your contribution.
• If you are answering this consultation on behalf of a public authority, please click here to submit your contribution.

[...]

Responsible service:

Directorate-General for Justice, Freedom and Security
Unit A2 - External relations and enlargement

E-mail: JLS-CONSULT-DP-AGRM@ec.europa.eu

Postal address :

European Commission
Directorate-General for Justice, Freedom and Security
Unit A2 - External relations and enlargement
B - 1049 Brussels

From the metadata of these documents, the author is listed as our old friend Jonathan Faull (.pdf), Director General of the European Commission's Justice, Freedom and Security department since 15 March 2003, with whom we have corresponded in the past

See our blog category archive EU Plans for internet censorship

The Questions which are asked in this short consultation document, are all well and good, provided that they are actually Answered and Implemented properly.

However, there are a few important Questions which are missing - notably in the areas of:

• mandatory Data Security Breach Notification and Public Reporting,
• mandatory use of strong Encryption to protect such data transfers in transit and storage,
• the principle of Data Minimisation,
• Data Retention and Destruction policies,
• applying the same principles and protections for transfers between countries within the European Union as between any EU state and the USA,
• the publication annually of how much public money is being spent on such data transfers, so that we can gauge whether they are cost effective or not.

See our comments below:

Full post as published by Spy Blog on February 07, 2010 (boomark / email).