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MEPs Vote To Suspend Data Sharing With US
New submitter mrspoonsi writes with this news, excerpted from the BBC: "The European Parliament has voted to suspend the sharing of financial data with the U.S., following allegations that citizens' data was spied on....The European Parliament voted to suspend its Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) agreement with the US, in response to the alleged tapping of EU citizens' bank data held by the Belgian company SWIFT. The agreement granted the U.S. authorities access to bank data for terror-related investigations but leaked documents made public by whistleblower Edward Snowden allege that the global bank transfer network was the target of wider U.S. surveillance."
Seriously? The US is in the middle of seriously pissing off all its allies, and your response is simply "We don't care! We'll do what we want and you can't stop us!"
And people use to wonder why the Middle Eastern countries hated America. This is Europe getting some of the same treatment.
No, we're surprised that shills keep posting "we already knew this" and thinking they're clever.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Why do they need to even bother to stop it? If the US are doing things that we don't want them to do anyway, why go to ANY effort to help them do them legally? This is about removing our assistance that we give them to do it, not stopping them being able to do it.
Let them take the administrative burden (and I highly doubt they are monitoring every flight and every person on every flight, or else the agreement wouldn't have existed in the first place anyway), let them take the fall when the data is released by accident, and let it look to EU citizens like you're not caving in to the US (which is what we all accused them of when this agreement first appeared).
Nobody expects it to STOP the US stealing the data, but why should we help them do so at enormous expense to us? It's like piracy - the data is going to be stolen anyway, so why bother putting in a system of controls, contracts and everything else to our cost?
But, to be honest, this is nothing to do with data leaks or agreements. If you're not already reading this as the first step to broken EU/US relations, then you haven't been paying attention. That this happened is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than what's actually happened. No more easy rides for the US when they want something from us. (As it should be, because they never play ball when we ask for something).
Even Anglo-US relations are tenuous nowadays. You've just pissed off the French and the Germans. That's pretty much the three biggest economies/countries in the EU. There's not much of a step left until the whole of the EU has problems with the way you do things.
And then you can say bye-bye to us lending a hand for things like extraditions and terrorist bug-hunts. The EU followed the US into a pointless, long and very, very expensive "war" that never was (you can say what you want - it was NOT a war, legally or ethically - it's was a criminal hunt with guns in foreign countries), in the middle of massive economic troubles, and what did we see from it? Much stricter airport controls for ourselves, giving the US all our data (and getting nothing back), and lots and lots of expensive military action.
And what do we get back for our assistance? The US spied on us and then couldn't even be bothered to keep the information properly secret (Note: A whistleblower running around the world telling people all these things is TEN TIMES more damning than the fact that you spied them in the first place - it's just amateur). That's not how you treat an ally.
The biggest thing here is that the EU no longer wants to play ball with the US. If more things emerge, that distrust will deepen. You can play the "most important country in the world" card all you like, the fact is that the EU has more money in trade, and a much greater influence over other countries. It's going to hurt if the US continue to piss off the EU, and there aren't that many people in the EU who would care.
It's a question of how long before this affects US trade and before we're the ones imposing sanctions and forcing agreements on the US. Because, seriously guys, you might be big, but without the co-operation of your allies, you're in serious trouble.
"There's no way our government would do that."
"There's no way we wouldnt already know if they were doing that."
And from the last several years,
"Obama is going to fix all the abuses of the warmongering Republicans. So whatever evils were there they will be going away."
In the end we have purchased what has befallen us, but not through informed consent. It's simply been done through willful ignorance and denial. It takes minimal awareness to recognize how clueless most Americans are, wholly consumed with the mind-rot like Jersey Shore or Facebook.
So yes, most are/were surprised.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
As a EU citizen, I can only agree. We're increasingly seeing the US (government) as the actual terrorists, which is the only truth as far as i'm concered. I'm happy these economic and data sharing relations are crumbling down. Maybe it will knock some sense into the US government.
It's a pity for the social and human aspect though, I've been twice and love the country and people.
Yes, take America for example.
America is currently as much of a threat to the rights and freedoms of everyone else in the world as the people they purport to be watching for.
Why would anybody continue to trust the US when they're acting like a bunch of self entitled assholes who think their rights trump ours?