Obama Stresses Need to Monitor Data in Fighting Terrorism
BERLIN — The trans-Atlantic debate over digital privacy rights versus the surveillance needs of intelligence agencies was put under a spotlight on Monday, as President Obama called for continued access by law enforcement officials to thwart terrorism, while some European privacy advocates urged greater restraint.
“I want to say this to young people who value their privacy and spend a lot of time on their phones: The threat of terrorism is real,” Mr. Obama said,speaking at a trade show in Hanover, Germany.
“I’ve worked to reform our surveillance programs to ensure that they’re consistent with the rule of law and upholding our values, like privacy — and, by the way, we include the privacy of people outside of the United States,” he added.
Mr. Obama’s message comes at a sensitive time, as cities like Brussels and Paris are still recovering from recent terrorist attacks. But his words are unlikely to slow down European efforts to expand people’s control over their digital lives.
Europe is at the heart of a global debate over the way companies like Google and Facebook, as well as national intelligence agencies, handle people’s digital data. Some regulators in the 28-member bloc have called on companies and governments, particularly that of the United States, to comply with the region’s tough privacy regulations.
“Those who want to play in our backyard must play by our rules,” Viviane Reding, a member of the European Parliament from Luxembourg and a former top European Union official, said on Monday at a privacy conferencein Berlin. “Protection of our personal data shouldn’t have a national barrier.”
Ms. Reding is an author of a European Union privacy law that will go into force in 2018. It will be able to impose fines of up to 4 percent of a company’s global revenue for the most serious breaches of European data protection rules. Those penalties would apply to any company — even if it has no physical presence in Europe — that has customers within the European Union.
At issue are communications via cellphones, as well as data generated in social media, online searches and e-commerce purchases.
The protections pursued in the European Union include the so-called right to be forgotten, detailed by the bloc’s highest court, which requires search giants like Google to remove links to online information in some cases.
And Europe’s national privacy regulators have vowed to take a tough lineagainst a new pact between the United States and the European Union that is intended to ensure the relatively unimpeded flow of personal data across the Atlantic. The national regulators are wary of the ability of American law enforcement and intelligence agencies to monitor data to fight crime or terrorism.
But American agencies, including the Commerce Department and the Federal Trade Commission, argue that they actively monitor companies’ access to individuals’ digital data. They say that American privacy safeguards — including the United States Constitution — often provide better protection than the rules in other jurisdictions, including those in Europe.
“We care about Europeans’ privacy,’’ Mr. Obama said in Hanover, “not just Americans’ privacy.”
Many European officials acknowledge that the region’s privacy laws share many similarities with those in the United States. But they also highlight important differences, including the lack of overarching federal privacy legislation. The differences, they say, must be bridged if Europe and the United States are to effectively supervise the way companies like Facebook and Google gain access to data worldwide.
“The digital world is globalized,” Giovanni Buttarelli, the European Union’s data protection supervisor, said at the Berlin conference on Monday. “So data protection should also be globalized.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/technology/obama-europe-privacy-terrorism.html?_r=0
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