Brussels, 25/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 24 February, MEPs at the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) discussed the follow-up to their resolution of March 2014 on action taken by the NSA, the US security agency, whose practices were revealed by former agent, Edward Snowden.
In a resolution prepared by Claude Moraes (S&D, United Kingdom), the president of the LIBE Committee, MEPs called for the suspension of the Safe Harbor agreements until further information regarding the involvement of US giants such as Google and Facebook in NSA activities is forthcoming. They also called for the suspension of the SWIFT-TFTP agreement on the transfer of Europeans' financial data to the US Treasury as long as doubts still remain about the NSA also having access to data covered by this agreement.
Almost a year later, Claude Moraes has now presented his colleagues with a follow-up report and announced that a delegation of MEPs would go to Washington in the middle of March. The aim of this visit would be to develop a new resolution that would be voted on over the next few months. In a work document, Moraes explained the different developments that have occurred at an international level on the subject of private life issues, particularly the UN provisions regarding online rights and the commitment made by the US government to provide European citizens with the same access to courts as their US counterparts in cases of litigation on the subject of their data but only in the context of the Privacy Act. This commitment was made in the context of the on-going negotiations on the transatlantic framework agreement on the protection of personal data and reiterated at the beginning of February in Riga during an informal EU/US ministerial meeting. Claude Moraes has written to explain that it is still not clear whether this option will be guaranteed in all cases covering EU law. The work document also looks at the legislative developments in member states such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Belgium, countries the EP sought to question in the context of its resolution of last year. With regard to Safe Harbor, MEPs say that they have still not received enough information about the situation and that the US has not respected the planned deadline for implementing the 13 recommendations from the former European Commission in summer 2014. LIBE MEPs are still calling on the Commission to strengthen protection of whistle-blowers, improve the security of the institutions' information systems and organise the next hearing on the most recent hacking scandal of SIM cards manufactured by the Dutch company, Gemalto, which is also suspected to be linked to the NSA and the British surveillance service, GCHQ. (Translation from the original French version)