Region: North America

Last week, Obama Administration officials revealed that they will not force technology companies to weaken encryption to give government officials special access to users’ data. However, this is only a partial win for advocates of smart digital security policy. As our U.S. policy manager Amie Stepanovich explains in a post at Just Security, ambiguity remains with regard to the administration’s stand on encryption.

Tomorrow, the EU Court of Justice will determine whether the national Data Protection authority can conduct an independent assessment of a decision in the so-called Schrems case, which deals with Facebook’s transfer of user data between its subsidiary in Ireland and the parent company in the United States.

Access, EFF, and civil society and business groups filed a “We the People” petition asking President Obama to publicly affirm support for strong encryption, and to reject any law, policy, or mandate that would undermine our security.

Earlier this month, negotiators from the United States and the European Union reached a preliminary deal on the so-called Umbrella Agreement. The Umbrella agreement is a transatlantic deal that sets standards for protecting personal data when it is transferred for law enforcement purposes. Notably, these rules do not apply to the transfer of commercial or employee data by companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, or Verizon. These companies must abide by a separate set of rules, the data sharing agreement called the Safe Harbour principles (see our recent press release on the Safe Harbour).

Today Yves Bot, Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), released his opinion in the EU-US Safe Harbor case, which addresses a controversial transatlantic data sharing agreement.