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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.
And more specifically, they're talking about a program that undermines SWIFT. As a reminder, in the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration concluded that it could find terrorists through financial transaction tracking. The problem - global wire transfers and other financial messaging is controlled by a Belgian company. The CIA apparently had to be almost restrained from just immediately hacking them outright. Instead the US Treasury got involved and SWIFT were forced to hand over data by virtue of them having a US based datacenter (as a backup for their EU datacenter).
SWIFT have said, several times and on the record, that they are not happy about being abused for political purposes and immediately began constructing a second backup datacenter also in the EU. The USA, seeing that their leverage over SWIFT was starting to disappear, decided to apply heavy pressure the EU in order to avoid losing access to this data source even after the US datacenter was decommissioned. The result was the EU data sharing agreement.
The EU parliament was never particularly happy about this arrangement and insisted on there being auditing, etc, which turned out to be a worthless rubber-stamping exercise in which the EU appointed inspectors tried to visit the US Treasury and get reliable documentation on what the data was being used for, but were told to go fuck themselves and that the information they needed was classified. So basically the EU folded under pressure and was then abused, to nobodies surprise at all.
Now that the TFTP data sharing agreement is suspended, and SWIFT no longer need their US datacenter, the only way back in is hacking. And I'm sure the people at SWIFT know that, and will do their best to stop it.
Anyway, this is a very good thing. Next up - airline passenger data!
"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
In theory we did. The US/UK NATO crypto offers for friendly embassy use was junk from the 1950-90's. It kept the Soviets out but let the NSA and GCHQ in. The UK and US press often hinted at plain text from embassy intercepts over many years. How far back do you want to go:
..."practices the United States uses in gathering intelligence information ... deliberately violating the airspace of other nations ... intercepting and deciphering the secret communications of its own allies ..." ...:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_and_Mitchell_defection 1960?
Thanks to Snowden we have the history needed for the dreamy sock puppets. I saw one offer that the US does not really 'use' the info for finance or domestic political needs.
A huge change from its not possible, would never work, would be found out, the data sets are too large, the US brands would never help, the political and legal protections
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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?