EU Justice Commissioner attacks European 'hypocrisy' on spying

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Some EU countries that have criticized US cyber surveillance are "hypocritical" as they themselves are failing to protect citizens' private information, the European Union's top justice official said on Tuesday. Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding - a critic of the data gathering exposed by former US spy contractor Edward Snowden - said she was seeking more legal assurances from Washington but urged European countries to improve their own behavior.

"There's been a lot of hypocrisy in the debate," Reding said at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels on Tuesday. "If the EU wants to be credible in its efforts to rebuild trust, if it wants to act as an example for other continents, it also has to get its own house in order."

"The EU itself should also look carefully at some of its [data protection] laws. Neither the Commission, the Council, nor the European Parliament can be proud of the Data Retention Directive."

The Directive requires telecom companies to store all telephony metadata, including geo-location data. Criticizing some aspects of the Directive, Reding said that the data "is kept for too long, it is too easily accessed and the risk of abuse is too great."

Reding also repeated her criticisms of Britain which, according to the Snowden leaks, participated in a project codenamed "Tempora" in which the British spy agency GCHQ tapped fiber-optic cables that carry international phone and Internet traffic and shared the data with the United States.

Commenting on the latest leak that implicated the NSA and its UK counterpart, GCHQ, to have the ability to harvest sensitive personal data from phone apps that transmit users’ data across the web, such as the extremely popular Angry Birds game, Reding said:

"Now I know why the ‘Angry birds’ look so angry. Often with applications, the rule is 'take it or leave it'. That’s when trust evaporates. That's when people feel forced to part with their privacy."

Reding urged Washington to provide greater legal safeguards to strengthen an existing trans-Atlantic agreement called "Safe Harbour" that allows companies that gather customer information in Europe to send it to the United States - beyond the EU's legal jurisdiction - as long as certain criteria are met.

"For Safe Harbour to be fully roadworthy the US will have to service it," she said. "Safe Harbour has to be strengthened or it will be suspended."

Private data should not be kept forever simply because storage has become cost-effective, Reding said. "Data should not be processed simply because algorithms are refined. Safeguards should apply and citizens should have rights."

Voice of Russia, RT, Reuters

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_01_29/EU-Justice-Commissioner-attacks-European-hypocrisy-on-spying-6078/