Planning

This page can be used to plan the session [[1]].

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, 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

2a) Impose criminal sanctions, as proposed by AKVorrat 2b) Suspend the Terrorist Finance and Tracking Program TFTP which led to exposure of Europeans' financial data at SWIFT and the Safe Harbor decision

3) TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership TTIP / NAFTA

WTO - GATS: investor / state disputes

MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment)

Non tariff barriers

4) Mobilize lawyers / doctors, who are legally obliged to maintain client confidentiality such as [4]

5) Treaties such as INTCFN

6) Industrial espionage

7) Partners with European competitors to US firms (eg Cloud)

• Expose threats to business and losses

• Support the building of a European cloud infrastructure

8) Support whistleblowers

• advocate better laws
• unveil hypocrisy of our government with respect to Snowden / a citizen right being

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

Tshane principles

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

13) Resist 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)