Growing opposition to U.S. access to European airline reservations

My analysis of the leaked draft of a proposed “”Agreement between the United States of America and the European Union on the use transfer of Passenger Name Record [PNR] data to the United States Department of Homeland Security” has gotten extensive coverage in Europe, including reports and links from the Austrian state broadcasting company ORF and the Swedish EU news site EuropaPortalen.se.

If you’re looking for additional background, see my testimony last year on this issue to members of the European Parliament, especially the annotated salides summarized the key ideas, and my FAQ: Transfers of PNR Data from the EU to the USA.

If you don’t read German or Swedish, the gist of both articles is that opposition to the proposed “agreement” (not really an agreement in any sense you would expect, since it would be binding only on one side, the EU, and not on the USA) has spread from Members of the European Parliament — the EU legislature — to influential EU member national governments (in their capacity as members of the Council of the EU, the EU executive).

This is important because both the Council and Parliament must approve any such agreement. And it leaves the European Commission (the administrative branch of the EU) increasingly isolated and out-of-touch in pushing for an “agreement” that would give travel companies immunity form EU law when they send airline reservation data to the USA, and let EU data protection authorities off the hook for their ongoing failure to enforce the laws against the current PNR data transfers.

I’ll be talking more about the proposed agreement, and the current USA-EU negotiations for an overarching “framework agreement” for all personal data transfers from the EU to the USA that would pre-empt it, on a panel with the key EU and US decision-makers at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy later this month in Washington.