Brussels, 25/05/2007 (Agence Europe) - With the EU and the United States deep in negotiations on a new agreement on air passenger data (see EUROPE 9427), the US administration is showing its willingness to find a transatlantic compromise on data protection. “We want to show US data protection is as strong as European data protection,” Jane Horvath, chief privacy and civil liberties officer at the US Justice Department, told Europe in a telephone interview on 24 May. “We are exploring ways to share (with Europeans) common principles of fair data protection practices,” she said. Ms Horvath is a member of the high level data protection group set up in November last year by European and US leaders (see EUROPE 9301). Since the last negotiations in Brussels in early May, Ms Horvath felt that the working group had made progress. She said that the group was not trying to reconcile legislations as they exist on either side of the Atlantic. Rather the group was working on “a common language, … commonalities … of privacy protection, that we can agree on,” she said, indicating that her administration “is hoping” that ultimately an agreement would be negotiated with the Europeans. Although this was only the start of such work at international level, Ms Horvath said that it could be interesting to extend discussions to other countries at a later stage. (bc)