Brussels, 12/09/2013 (Agence Europe) - The members of the EP committee on civil liberties in charge of the investigation into surveillance carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA), organised a second public hearing on Thursday 12 September in the presence of Jacob Kohnstamm, the head of the Article 29 group that brings together national authorities for the protection of EU data.
The hearing, however, showed the limits to such an exercise. The official invited to attend himself spoke of the complexity encountered for obtaining all information on the coverage of the programmes, not only American such as the PRISM programme, but also British, such as the Tempora programme. In order to carry out a relevant analysis, Kohnstamm said they rely on “third parties”. His team is working on the legal consequences at European level of these spying programmes.
On Thursday, MEPs focused on the terms of the Safe Harbour agreement, which organises the transfer of data on Europeans to the large US companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook. In their view, the agreement will take up a large part of the debate. By the end of July, Commissioner Viviane Reding had already said in Vilnius during an informal meeting of EU home ministers that she planned to launch scrutiny of the Safe Harbour agreement which, as she put it ironically, is “not very safe”. The conclusions of this assessment will be ready for the October European Council.
Another front opened up on Thursday with a letter from Commissioner Cecilia Malmström to her American counterparts, this time on the subject of surveillance carried out by the United States on the activities of the company SWIFT, which transfers financial data from European citizens, with a view to combating terrorism. The Swedish commissioner urged Washington to provide clarification regarding the allegations and expressed her serious “concerns”. As the president of the Article 29 group said on Thursday morning, these “international agreements” - whether Safe Harbour, PNR agreements or the SWIFT/TFTP agreement - are essentially based on trust, and in particular on trust regarding the way they are used, and, he said, his group was not very enthusiastic about conclusion of such agreements. Many MEPs, like Jan Philipp Albrecht (Greens/EFA, Germany) and Sophia In't Veld (ALDE, Netherlands) for example, believe that, given what has now been exposed, it is difficult for the agreements to continue functioning as they stand. (SP/transl.jl)