Planning

This page was used to plan the session [[1]].

There may be a follow-up event in 2014. Pre-eventCPDP

One "avenue" for Europeans to counter U.S. surveillance scandals is the negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). However linking international trade policy with data protection has its risks, as exemplified by this Deutsche Welle story In the U.S. there has been a call for keeping data protection issues outside this trade agreement; this call was issued by the NGO Center for Digital Democracy

Update 22.11.2013 Our request to the European Commission had to wait for permission from the Council to give us further information. [2] It bore no fruit, but this news-story explains (why in German) [3]

Here is a new human rights proposal from the recent Warsaw meeting of privacy commissioners.

The Transatlantic Consumer Dialog [TACD] is also working on the TTIP in general, and will hold a meeting in Brussels on 29th October.

There is a new paper on data protection and the TTIP, which will be presented briefly, to which this is the bibliography

These are the notes of the session (edited again in Jan.2014), which set out to list the avenues available to Europeans to combat the vast new set of surveillance practices revealed by Edward Snowden (transcript thanks to Nicolas Pettiaux):

1) Go through the existing data protection system 1a) Impose criminal sanctions, as proposed by AKVorrat, on actions taken in violation of data protection norms. 1b) Suspend the Terrorist Finance and Tracking Program TFTP which led to exposure of Europeans' financial data at SWIFT and the Safe Harbor decision

2) Go through the existing institutions of representative government such as the European Parliament, and its newly published report on surveillance (with panelists)

3) Monitor the negotiations on a Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership TTIP Especially the investor / state dispute provisions based on WTO - GATS and NAFTA are worrisome. this is reminiscent of the attempt to negotiate the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) that failed at the OECD in the late Nineties. Social standards are sometimes treated as merely non tariff barriers in this domain.

4) Mobilize lawyers / doctors, who are legally obliged to maintain client confidentiality such as the German initiative https://rechtsanwaelte-gegen-totalueberwachung.de/

5) Treaties such as that upon which the EU Intelligence Analysis Centre (INTCFN) is based, http://eeas.europa.eu

6) Mobilize companies worried about industrial espionage

7) Mobilize partners with European competitors to US firms (eg Cloud), exposing threats to business and losses, thus supporting the building of a European cloud infrastructure

8) Support whistleblowers, advocate for better laws and unveil the hypocrisy of our government with respect to Snowden; it is a citizen right to defend the truth.

9) Human rights watch

10) Freedom of info (FOI) requests to open up secret agreements

accessinfo.europe asktheeu.org mysociety.org

11) Human rights principles: necessary and proportional

R. Shane's principles, http://rshanegreen.com/category/principles/

12) Track voting of elected politicians (open government, mémoire politique of La Quadrature)

13) Resist the extraterritorial power of USA

14) Attend meetings and share information with NGOs having similar aims (e.g. through the mediakit of La Quadrature, or Digital@Amnesty)