European parliament
Source: BBC
The EU’s Justice Commissioner has written to the US attorney general, questioning him about America’s data surveillance programme, Prism.
Viviane Reding wrote that she was concerned America’s efforts “could have grave adverse consequences for the fundamental rights of EU citizens”.
A series of leaks suggest major tech firms have passed information to the National Security Agency, the US government’s snooping organisation.
Experts say they could now be sued.
‘Unfettered access’
“European data protection laws put restrictions on how data gathered about people, including social networking data, can be used,” said Dr Ian Brown, associate director of Oxford University’s Cyber Security Centre.
“The firms will now face serious questions from national data commissioners and even potentially from individual users in Europe over whether they followed all the European data protection laws that are supposed to stop things like this happening.”
Categories: Europe, Human Rights, Human values
Quoting CNN
The leaks have spurred great concern in Europe. EU officials in Dublin raised questions and German Chancellor Angela Merkel told CNN in an interview that European officials are particularly concerned about the PRISM program — the secret set of tools used to collect data about overseas Internet communications. The NSA and FBI have obtained massive numbers of U.S. phone logs through a court order.
Merkel intends to discuss the PRISM surveillance program with President Obama, she told CNN in Berlin on Friday. She wants the greatest possible transparency on all these issues, she said.
The European Union has “serious concerns” about the reported large-scale surveillance of online data by United States authorities, European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding said.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/14/world/europe/nsa-leaks/index.html?hpt=hp_t1