Thank you NSA, just in time for the Christmas shopping season.
Only when people are confident that their data are safe and cannot be diverted for another purpose will they actually take advantage of the opportunities offered by a digital single market. Even before the revelations about the NSA scandal, 70% of European citizens were worried about the lack of data protection on the internet!
The NSA scandal was a wake-up call. Now that there is evidence that EU embassies, European parliaments, European heads of government and citizens have been spied on by the USA on a grand scale, the European Parliament has called for the suspension of the TFTP Agreement. We are calling for the exchange of bank data with the Americans to be temporarily suspended. The European Parliament will also safeguard the interests and fundamental rights of EU citizens at the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
We must ensure that our citizens’ fundamental rights are protected on the internet too – by ensuring that companies from the USA and other countries which offer services in the EU are subject to our rules, but also by going down new paths: as Europeans we must act with determination and promote standards and procedures which promote our values.
We will see more and more efforts to control the NSA from abroad as we have failed to make them accountable here.
But how could we make them accountable when the leadership lies more than this guy?
In protecting the people and resources of the United States the NSA has failed and instead has used their mandate to violate treaties and associations world wide in an unending quest for "total information awareness". It is now our job to rein in this maverick before our intellectual freedoms are so constrained by boycotts by other entities that we are left to stew in our own mess like the people of North Korea.