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E.U. Preps for Fight over Passenger Data
narramissic writes "Following last week's signing of a new temporary agreement to pass over airline passenger data to American authorities last week, European Union parliamentarians are gearing up for a fight over data privacy. Sylvia Kaufmann, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), commented that 'The fact that the CIA, an agency whose activities, torturing and kidnapping, this house is investigating in a special committee, will have access to passenger data is the real scandal, especially when one considers that the right of redress held by U.S. citizens is not extended to E.U. citizens.'"
...which might make this data thing seem like childs play.
Theres an article currently on the BBC about possibly tagging passengers during flights and around the airport.
Come in number 5, your time is up.
liqbase
"why such a blatantly pointed statement is considered "news for nerds""
As a nerd/geek, let me tell you that I object to having my digital, or real life rights trampled on so that I can be legally tortured. Heard of Maher Arar? If not, you may want to look that name up and see what the American government did to him based on faulty intelligence shared with them after he was pulled off a plane in New York.
Oh You POS
Biased or not, the part saying
...especially when one considers that the right of redress held by U.S. citizens is not extended to E.U. citizens...
is, to me, the real killer. Not only should our info (as collected by our governments or their representatives) be given to someone not under the control of our own governments, we will also have no rights with regards to the collected information once it reaches the other party.
I think it is a very Good Thing (tm) that the EU is trying to fight this.
Love over Gold.
> So a few people have to suffer for the good of all. I'd rather be safe than free!
Those saying that always means that someone else has to suffer. The notion of self-sacrifice does not occur to them.
You bring up a good point, and it's not brought up very often.
The success of these measures in passing both Congress and the American public in general, lie in that they're perceived as only being applicable to non-citizens.
The Administration tried for a while to assert that it had the authority to detain citizens as "enemy combatants," as in the case of Jose Padilla, but it pretty much has given up this angle. (They more or less threw in the towel and transferred him to Federal prison on conventional charges on the eve of when the USSC might have ruled against it.) They could certainly try doing it again, since no precendent was really set as a result of Padilla, but I suspect that there would be significant public outcry and the opinion of the courts would be rather dim.
Although you make fun of the "strange contradiction" of applying the Constitution only to citizens, I think that's a more popular interpretation than you think. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that it's not the correct one; I think the Constitution is pretty clear in outlining a relationship between citizens of the United States and their government. The relationship between foreigners and the USG should be goverened by the relationship between the foreign government and the U.S. government, hopefully in some sort of friendly, reciprocal fashion (e.g. 'protect our citizens when on your soil, and we'll protect your citizens while they're here'). If the foreign government doesn't like it, they can always bar their citizens from traveling to the United States, or declare war, or do any of the other things that soverign states do for relief against each other. At any rate, that interpretation of the Constitution isn't quite as outlandish as you make it seem -- it wouldn't surprise me if there were at least some Federal judges who espouse it, however quietly or academically.
Understanding this and taking it into account, I think helps make the response of the American public to the jurisprudential wranglings of the Bush administration more understandable. (Whether you agree with them or not is none of my business, but even if you disagree, understanding can be constructive.) So long as the new rules don't apply to U.S. citizens, the public outcry is limited. The electorate, while not particularly bright, is not quite so stupid as pundits on both the right and the left often make it out to be; they are basically self-interested, more than a trifle xenophobic, and there have been precious few arguments so far showing exactly how the new rules will negatively impact a basic white, middle-class, English-speaking, law-abiding, Christian family. Therefore, why should they care?
Talking about the Constitutional rights of foreigners -- or even making moral appeals about not torturing foreigners -- is not going to and has not impressed a great many Americans, and this is why I think there is not more widespread opposition to the policies of the Bush administration. Show, clearly and unequivocally, how these policies could be used against a typical red-state ethnic and religious majority, and you'd probably spark a change in government overnight.
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