Using PNRs
I guess if your name is Abdul or Achmed you're screwed. I wonder what some barely more that minimum wage and high school education inspector will do with Abdul, Paula.
The US has capitulated to EU demands that its use of European data in counter-terrorism operations should be subject to foreign scrutiny. The two sides finally compromised this week on their long-running disagreements over the US requisition of personal data about European citizens from passenger name records (PNR) held by …
Say , essentially , the role the Euro inspector will be given , is to be shoved into the back orifice as part and parcel off the scenery , nothing more and nothing less!
But then again will the banks all fess up to their customers leaving themselves wide open to be sued for breaches of the assorted Euro privacy laws, remains to be answered!
Now , where was the nearest golf course to the office again?
That's spelt bollocks without the *.
Any person the US wanted watching, it should send the list to EU to monitor. If they're terrorists then we don't want them on the planes, if they're not, the US has no business putting them on a list.
SWIFT broke laws every side of the Atlantic, they broke laws in the US too. You want them to comply? Arrest Lázaro Campos, it's really that simple, you'd be amazed how much compliance you get when you arrest him. He lives in Belgium, his roots are in Spain, it's no problem, you issue a warrant, you pop down the road, with a bunch of police, you march him into the station, and bingo, suddenly SWIFT has a memory recall and remembers it as to comply with European law.
And guess what, every corp, that thinks they're bigger than the countries they operate in, will suddenly remember that they have to comply with the little province called Europe, remember that tiny little province with 350 million of the wealthiest consumers in the world? That one? Ahhh, now you remember!
As I read it these agreements don't amount to diddly squat.
OK, so in some token way there is EU oversight of what the US does with the data it's demanding - but what happens when the US just ignores it ? It's already got the data, it's not breaking any of it's own (non existant) data protection laws, so it can just tell the EU overseer just where to go !
The very fact that there's been all the hoo-har and these negotiations shows that there is a problem with the way the US handles personal data, and I don't see that changing one bit under this ineffectual agreement.
Perhaps the EU needs to impose a legal requirement that any time an EU institution hands personal data over to the US, it should also inform the subject of the data of what has been transferred. Stick in some weasel words that allow the US to apply to an EU court for a two-year delay on informing the subject on a case by case basis for the few times they might have a genuine need for it.