Leigh Phillips reports:
The EU justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, has confronted Washington over data protection rights in the fight against terror, accusing the US of being interested only in accessing European citizens’ bank records and flight schedules but not in protecting their rights while doing so.
Today Reding complained that at a meeting in Washington this month to agree what principles should underpin data privacy rights when information on citizens is transferred across the Atlantic, she found her American counterparts, the attorney general, Eric Holder, and Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, “unprepared” and “uninterested”.
She said: “The meeting turned out to be somewhat disappointing on data protection. From the outset we have noted an apparent lack of interest on the US side to talk seriously about data protection.”
Read more in the Guardian.