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US–EU Flight Talks Collapse
fantomas writes, "The BBC is reporting that the current US-EU talks over data collected from people flying to the USA collapsed last night. US Customs and Border Protection is insisting on access to the airlines' records and 34 pieces of data to be collected from each passenger. This data has been gathered since 2004, but only as a temporary measure. The European Court of Justice threw out the temporary agreement and set a deadline of Sept. 30 to arrive at a new one. Airlines that refuse to hand over information to US authorities may be fined up to $6,000 per passenger, and the passengers themselves held up in immigration for hours. Good for the EU on protecting the privacy of their citizens? Or are they hindering the War on Terror?" An EU official said that the EU wanted to give away less data, while the US wanted more.
Thank you and props to moofie and portmaster (sister responses). I don't really have anything else to add.
The anonymous guy already answered the "are you correct" part, but let me comment on the other interesting parts of your post here.
:)
"The continent generalized in the news and as EU" - well.. That's really far off.
Some points to help you out:
- You can buy/smoke Cannabis in NL while it's illegal in lots of/most countries on this continent.
- The UK still has its pound, both as currency and a representation for its unit system (read: miles, inches, whatever).
- Switzerland, albeit small, is on the continent (more or less even in the center of it) and neither in the EU nor using the Euro.
- Communication between us is usually limited to english, a language that is non-native to most of the EU countries..
- Traffic is _completely different_. While every country but Germany has global speed limits those vary quite a lot. The UK even drives on the wrong side..
- While I don't claim to know a lot about the political situation in all EU countries: Those that I know are _completely_ different in terms of voting and their organisation of the government. Apart from obvious things like (pseudo-)monarchy Yes/No (Yes for several here, in case you didn't know) it's imo absolutely different/incompatible between every country here.
Reading your post (and I know that you just state a prejudice and don't claim that it's right) it seems like you're comparing the EU to your federation of states, while this is wrong anyway and probably ignores the fact that quite some countries over here are a composition of federal states already anyway. Germany and Switzerland, for example.
No, thinking of the EU countries of being dependent on each other or hard to distingish/hold apart is completely wrong. But interesting and fascinating in a way. It supports the (wrong?) prejudice that americans usually have no clue about Europe, ask if Hitler's still alive and cannot point to any given european country on a worldmap ("Tell me where norway is" - "Uhhhhmm..").
Sorry about that - no offense intended. It's just plain weird to read about the EU like that..