The week passed by the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs of the European Parliament (LIBE by the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee of the European Parliament), discussed the written testimony of Edward Snowden.
Snowden, among other things, said the NSA was indifferent to US law, and described the inefficiency of the resulting mass follow-up of the secret service. He also replied to various written questions from the committee.
Looking at US government reports we will find something valuable. The most recent of these investigations, by the White House's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, determined that the mass surveillance program under investigation was not only ineffective—they found that it had never stopped a single imminent terrorist attack—but and that it had no legal status. In a less diplomatic way language, the United States discovered that an illegal mass surveillance program was operating, and the program's biggest success was the discovery of a taxi driver in the United States who transported $8.500 to Somalia in 2007.
With a sweeping majority, the EU Parliament has also completed a new data protection law backed by tighter penalties.
At Companies που ανακαλύπτονται παραβιάσεις της ιδιωτικής ζωής θα μπορεί πλέον να επιβληθεί πρόστιμο που θα φτάνει τα 100.000.000 ευρώ, ή το 5% του συνολικού κύκλου εργασιών της επιχείρησης.
There will no longer be a system of different privacy laws in every EU Member State: the new law will be pan-European.
Even foreign businesses on the territory of the European Union will have to comply with its laws. (see Google)
Despite the fact that the EU launched this legislation long before Snowden's leaks, legislators and political observers have said that the Snowden revelations made it aware of the need to protect privacy, and as the impact of the final legislation .
"Snowden's revelations have given us the opportunity to react," said Claude Moraes, Member of the European Parliament from the United Kingdom. "I hope we will turn these reactions into something positive and lasting."
LIBE also called for the immediate suspension of an important deal that was in the pipeline between Europe and the US and is known as the Safe Harbor privacy principles.
This could have dramatic effects on trade between the EU and the US, as Safe Harbor allowed EU companies to collect data and transport them to the US.
European lawmakers went even further, saying that by the end of the year, they would make "a comprehensive assessment of the US privacy framework" and "specific recommendations based on the absence of general data protection legislation."
This certainly sounds like a step to repudiate the US as a territory it is not safes for the data of the European Union.
All of this, of course, sounds very good to be true. Maybe Snowden's suggestions have troubled us, and from the stage of indifference we have come to the stage of reflection, but to move to the next stage, the stage of action for change, we have to solve too much. But solving ties that have become gordi from the interests involved is not so easy.
Perhaps European legislation is beginning to support personal privacy and personal data, but laws always exist (as in the case of the NSA that ignores them completely) and they are always trampled.
Besides, as we have mentioned many times from iGuRu.gr, the secret services (see CIA, NSA, BND, GCHQ and many others) are built to do their job. Their job, of course, is to collect information and use it in various ways, benevolent or malicious.
Naturally, the laws of each state are needed for a variety of reasons, except for the class. One of these is to reassure public opinion by enhancing the sentiment of justice and security.
