EU Court Blocks Passenger Data Deal with U.S.

Reinier writes "The BBC reports that the European Court of Justice has ruled the airline data agreement with the United States is illegal. The 'agreement' required airlines to share 34 items of personal data of their passengers with American authorities at least fifteen minutes before take-off of any flight to the US. The Court of Justice examined the agreement after the European Parliament objected. A PDF of the ruling is available online."

Comments

Dear Land of the Free

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what courts standing up for individual privacy rights look like.

Note how the US played the "Terrorism" card, and the courts didn't immediately fold.
You may wish to send this news item to your Attorney General.
Or you may wish to remain asleep.

Whatevers good with you.

Re:Dear Land of the Free

[Anonymous Coward]

And I, for one, an American with a family history that goes back to the Mayflower, welcome this with open arms!

My fellow Americans are definitely asleep. They spout off about how "moral" they are, and then allow torture. They support war crimes. They support public bribery of every public official. They allow their elections to be rigged with wild abandon. And, through their ignorance and abject greed they are quite willing to kill off the rest of the world with their environmental stupidity.

Europe is my only remaining hope. Bring it on! Please! In all fairness, you should just let us drown in our own effluent, but it really is a small and interconnected world. It is in your best interest, as well as ours, for you to "bitch slap" the hell out of us, and preferrably soon.

BillyDoc

Re:Dear Land of the Free

[Nevynxxx]

" Fact is, we live in an ever-increasingly dangerous world"
This is not a fact. This is compleatly untrue. There have been active terrorists in the world, constantly for the last 100 years.

I work no more than 1 mile from the last IRA attempt, as far as I can see it did us a lot more good than harm, but that's another matter.

Please don't say that just because they are after you now, the world is "more dangerous" maybe your part of it is, but overall, it's ticking along as normal.

Re:Dear Land of the Free

[mrchaotica]

Fact is, we live in an ever-increasingly dangerous world.

No we don't. The real fact is that we live in an ever-decreasingly dangerous world. For example, 500 years ago people couldn't travel without an entourage because otherwise they'd be attacked by freakin' bandits! They had to worry all the time about growing enough food to not starve to death. They were pretty darn likely to die in childhood from diseases that barely even exist anymore. They had to worry about being sold into slavery. They lived in constant fear of attack from neighboring fiefdoms.

Nowadays, the thing most likely to kill you is not bandits or the plague or maurading Huns, but rather is your own gluttony! And yet our entire country gets bent out of shape just beacuse a few thousand people happened to die in the same incident. Honestly, it isn't that big a problem!

Re:Dear Land of the Free

[mrchaotica]

Of course we shouldn't ignore it, but we shouldn't get hysterical about it either! And it's certainly not worth giving up our civil liberties for, seeing as how those are more important than any individual's life anyway.

Big help

[Confused]

That'll help all those EU-citizens a lot, that had their data sent to the USA in the past two years to be stored for the rest of eternity is all kind of dubious databases in the USA.

But better late than never. I always though the implementation of the treaty should have been postponed until this ruling.

Re:Big help

[Confused]

Well, the point isn't to preotect you from getting into legal databases, the point is that a citizen you have certain rights to the data in those databases. And no, those rights don't allow you to have your criminal record deleted immediately or forbid the gouvernement to collect data about you.

These rights are more to prevent the gouvernement to sell this data to the next direct marketeer, which will use it to make personalised adds along the road you drive every morning, or to have pharmacies sell your drug purchase history to your employer.

Sounds like it was more a concern about protection

[RsG]

From TFA, it seems the issue was more that the US doesn't guarantee sufficient protection of passanger data. Given that this data includes things like CC numbers and identifying information, I could see the concern.

Which raises the question as to what specifically the EU courts find lacking in US data security. Perhaps there are too few checks and balances with regard to who gets access to passenger data?

Americans are doomed!

[bogaboga]

With open southern and northern borders, the US government still thinks that al-Qaida and the like will use an airline to get into the US? I laugh at them.

On the otherhand, it's good to see that the EU is flexing some muscle. Bush I believe will say..."they have some backbone..."

Re:Interesting...

[RasendeRutje]

I think every traveller to the US will have to sign a document that allows the Flight Company to pass your personal data to the US (a.k.a. selling your soul).
You don't sign the document? You don't get on the flight.

Result: terrorists fly to mexico and walk into the US.

What if the shoe were on the other foot?

[mark-t]

How would Americans feel if their information had to be given to destination countries or their planes would be denied landing rights there?

How to stamp out international tourism in 1 easy step.

What the USA is asking won't stop terrorists from getting on board planes. Not for a second. All it has the potential to do is flag innocent people.

Re:I see no backbone

[gowen]

The French backed down from sane free-market reforms in order to improve their high unemployment rate

I believe thats called "the right of self-determination". Your grandfather probably helped fight for it in World War 2, only for you to belittle it.

Huh?

[DAldredge]

Let me see if I understand.

Sharing info BAD.
Logging all internet traffic(EU data retention acts) GOOD.

Huh?

Re:Sounds like it was more a concern about protect

[Confused]

The EU, by and large, trusts their governments to deal with privacy and controlling it. The US, by and large, trusts the private sector.

Yes, that sums it up quite well. And given the choice, trusting the gouvernement seems more reasonable, as they already have certain monopols (law making, law enforcement, military power). So if your gouvernement becomes corrupt to a point that even basic trust isn't justified any more, your personal data will be your least concern. Another feature of gouvernements is that it keeps the level of corruption rather equal across the branches. So if you still have a few branches you trust, there's a good chance you can trust the other branches as much.

On the other side you have the private sector, where every corporation does as it thinks it can get away with. If one oversteps the boundary, they'll declare bankrupt and the same people start another corporation with a different name and the same game. Self-regulation has been proven many times in the past not to work, a very popular example for this is boiler safety in the UK and US in the late 1800s. If the major concern is the protection of weak individuals against corporations, asking the industry to play fair and nice is naïve, if so much money can be made by not playing nice. Also corporations will have a hard time being more trustworthy than the gouvernement, which can threaten the people working in the corporation. Never underestimate the persuavie power of free roaming death-squads.

To balance things out, the private sector works far better if the goal is effiency to deliver products and services. So if you want cheap and efficient data protection, go to the private sector, if you want trustworthy data protection, stay with the gouvernement.

Re:An excuse not to let the French into the US now

[jeffasselin]

Because a lot of terrorists striking the US came through this route lately...

Seriously, this and other measures are totally useless and inefficient to deter terrorists. The 9/11 hijackers had perfectly valid travel papers and would have been most likely granted entry even had these rules been in place. Building fences isn't going to do much, I'd rather suggest solving the problem at the source - US involvement in the Middle East.