Brussels, 19/12/2013 (Agence Europe) - Although the political groups on the European Parliament's civil liberties committee are still unable to agree on the hearing of Edward Snowden, which is planned to take place in the next few weeks, the British rapporteur from the special commission of enquiry into NSA phone tapping, Claude Moraes (S&D), delivered the initial conclusions of the investigation on Wednesday 18 December. These will be put to the vote at the end of January. In his conclusions, he stresses that Parliament should only give its approval to a free-trade agreement with the US on the basis of differentiated treatment for the protection of personal data and of the US providing Europeans with effective means to appeal.
At the end of November, the European Commission suggested that the US improve the so-called Safe Harbour agreement by summer 2014 and that, more generally, it provide Europeans with the guarantee that they will be able to obtain redress from the US courts. The report by Moraes is expected to underline the importance of these “injunctions” and of the timetable to guarantee “the continuation of bilateral agreements”. The rapporteur is also expected to request that the US adopt a code of good conduct guaranteeing that it will not spy on the European institutions.
The rapporteur will also recommend that reform of the data protection rules, championed by Viviane Reding, is concluded as soon as possible, “by the end of 2014 at the latest”. Other proposals include: the suspension of Safe Harbour (principles that US companies pledge to respect on transferring their users' data) and the negotiation of new principles based on better protection standards. The so-called SWIFT-TFTP agreement is also expected to be subject to similar treatment as long as there is no genuine investigation into suspected espionage involving this financial data bank.
The rapporteur would like the civil liberties committee to vote on his report at the end of January and the plenary session to vote on it at end of February. Before that, the investigation committee is likely to have held its hearing with Edward Snowden. The committee will probably hear his recorded submission on 9 January.
On Wednesday morning, one of his supporters, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, the first to break the news about the documents from the former NSA consultant, was asked to respond to questions from MEPs. The Guardian journalist now lives in Brazil and explained the extent to which the NSA could infiltrate the privacy of ordinary citizens. He said that, even if European countries also practised this kind of espionage, such as the United Kingdom, Norway and Denmark, “no one could rival the US” in the scale of the programmes used. He also indicated that collecting meta-data was more intrusive than their actual contents (a conversation, for example) and could even be used to establish whether “a woman had had an abortion, for example, or who was suicidal and who someone speaks to late in the evening”. Timothy Kirkhope from the ECR was very sceptical and said that the NSA was not at all interested in this kind of thing. (SP/transl.fl)