EU Efforts to Limit Data-Sharing Regarding Air Passengers

Our national dialogue relating to terrorism pays close attention to every development relating to the detention and prosecution of terrorism suspects--and for good reason.  Yet most of us pay relatively little attention to the legal and policy issues associated with data gathering, except when something juicy like warrantless surveillance within the United States comes up.  That’s unfortunate, to say the least, because important developments are afoot on the data-gathering front. As Edward Cody reports in the Washington Post, the European Parliament is pressing for revisions to an important U.S-E.U. agreement that governs the sharing of air passenger data.  There is a lot of history behind this agreement, detailed vividly by Stewart Baker here and here.  Suffice to say that European commitments to data privacy for some time have been in some tension with America’s desire to maximize the advance flow of information about passengers inbound to the United States; that the European Parliament arguably will take a tougher line on the data privacy question than would the European Commission or the individual European governments (note the prominent role played in the Post article by Sophia in’t Veld, a Dutch MEP who serves as vice chair of the EP’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and who also serves on the advisory board of the NGO “Privacy International”); and that in the aftermath of the Lisbon Treaty the European Parliament has new authority to reject such measures and thus have its voice heard.  And in case you doubt that the EP would use such authority, recall that it already has used it to reject an agreement between the U.S. and EU relating to the monitoring of SWIFT transactions, forcing changes before a revised agreement could be reached. The question is not whether the administration is going to push hard for U.S. interests in this negotiation.  I’m sure it will.   The question is whether that will be enough in the end in light of the shift in institutional gravity within the EU to the European Parliament, and what else this shift may augur for the future of US-EU intelligence and counterterrorism cooperation.