Personally I think this is really about protectionism and the NSA provides a convenient excuse given European intelligence agency involvement.
But the court wasn't asked to decide about the actions of the intelligence agencies, it was asked to decide on a complaint against Facebook.
Personally I think this is really about protectionism and the NSA provides a convenient excuse given European intelligence agency involvement.
On the contrary; if anything, it was the Safe Harbour process that was supported on a convenient excuse, which the Commission allowed despite being clear from the start that the US didn't offer the necessary privacy protections to comply with the Directive. The court has just stated the obvious.
You're right, and as the basis of its ruling it decided that intelligence agency action caused a violation of the law. Given that intelligence agencies in the EU were willing partners in NSA spying in clear violation of US and EU law it stands to reason that much of the EU is similarly incompatible with these laws. Why can we store data in Germany when the BND is shipping your data to the NSA, but not America, where the NSA is doing it first hand (and might be doing it on its own in Germany anyways)?
You are mixing political responsibility and legal responsibility.
I assume an Italian citizen can't vote to change Germany's legal system.
For the same reason we could store data in the US right until this decision.
So if we apply the standard of intelligence agencies violating the laws mean a country is unfit for storing EU data, then many EU nations are now unfit to store this data.
The difference is that EU citizens can hold "unfit" actors responsible, if they are from their own country (or even continent, via the ECJ); but they cannot do anything against the NSA.
"They all do it" is meaningless if one nation has an NSA and Greece has a sketchy looking guy with black shoes and no socks and a tape recorder.
Five Eyes is only one such intelligence alliance. Germany, for instance, cooperated with the NSA despite not being part of FVEY: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intellige...
The Dutch, again not part of Five Eyes, tapped phone calls to pass to the US. We don't know the full extent of which nations played a role. I'm willing to bet it's more than have so far been revealed.
>They don't have first-party access to US government communications, never mind, say, POTUS's cell phone.
Germany wasn't exactly giving the US access to their government's communications either, "just" private citizens. They did assist the US in getting access to the French leadership, though.
>"They all do it" is meaningless if one nation has an NSA and Greece has a sketchy looking guy with black shoes and no socks and a tape recorder.
When the large European nations are aggressively spying on their own citizens and then passing that info around to foreign governments in exchange for special software or information, it sort of renders their complaints about the NSA kind of moot. Yeah, the NSA spied on your citizens, but you helped them.
For those nations that didn't engage in this, I have a feeling not having your data in America isn't going to prevent the NSA from getting it if they desire it. Especially since much of that data will end up in the sorts of European nations that are spying on their citizens and trading data with the NSA anyways.
I did not help them.
Either the German government did or the BND and VS did without orders from the German government. This needs to be investigated and punished accordingly. That is very unlikely, but at least we have parliamentary commision (NSA Untersuchungsausschuss, NSAUA) to investigate these wrongdoings. Some interesting things were already uncovered by the NSAUA.
I doubt that the BND acted without orders from the Chancellor's office, just as the NSA didn't and hasn't acted without orders from the President.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/16/germany-spied-j...
Snark aside, I agree that there isn't full reciprocity when it comes to espionage capabilities, but BND is a capable spy agency with the resources to perform its mission.
The EU regulators are being selfish jerks and forcing Facebook and Google to spend their hard earned cash on a datacenter in Antwerp or whatever. That's... hardly the worst evil afoot.
Not to mention the simple fact that through this ruling the court actually struck down a treaty supported by the EU politicians.
If anything, it's the Commission that has been much more willing to give the US government and companies "some slack" about collecting all this data. Luckily, the Commission's hands are now tied, and the ruling sets a rather clear roadmap for the minimum requirements of privacy in any sort of new EU law or agreement with the US.