Subscribe"Under the new agreement, which goes live at the end of this month, the US will be able to hold the records of European passengers for 15 years compared with the current three year limit.
...'Data on EU citizens will be readily accessible to a broad range of US agencies and there is no limitation to what US authorities are allowed to do with the data.'
...The new agreement will see US authorities gain access to detailed passenger information, from credit card details to home addresses and even what sort of food may have been ordered before a flight. In addition, US authorities will be free to add other information they have obtained about a passenger, leading to concerns about how the information will be shared.
...'If you are going to have this kind of agreement it should involve parliament and the data protection supervisor,' said Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, the civil liberties organisation that campaigns against excessive surveillance.
He warned that under the new system the data will be shared with numerous US agencies. 'The data protection supervisor and the European parliament are angry that they were not consulted,' Bunyan said. 'But they are also angry with a number of elements of the plan such as giving the US the absolute right to pass the data on to third parties.'
Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, another group that campaigns against state surveillance, said the new agreement gave huge powers to the US authorities. 'We have no guarantee about how this data will be used,' Davies said.
A spokeswoman for the Information Commissioner's Office in England and Wales said it would be discussing the matter with European counterparts shortly. 'We are working with the European Data Protection Supervisor and our other EU data protection colleagues to come to a joint opinion on the level of data protection set out in the final agreement,' the spokeswoman said."
The United States and the European Union signed an agreement Thursday that reduces the amount of information provided U.S. authorities about airline passengers before they arrive from Europe.
"Karen Stevens, Tovah Calderon and Teresa Kwong had a lot in common. They had good performance ratings as career lawyers in the Justice Department's civil rights division. And they were minority women transferred out of their jobs two years ago -- over the objections of their immediate supervisors -- by Bradley Schlozman, then the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Schlozman ordered supervisors to tell the women that they had performance problems or that the office was overstaffed. But one lawyer, Conor Dugan, told colleagues that the recent Bush appointee had confided that his real motive was to 'make room for some good Americans' in that high-impact office, according to four lawyers who said they heard the account from Dugan.
In another politically tinged conversation recounted by former colleagues, Schlozman asked a supervisor if a career lawyer who had voted for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a onetime political rival of President Bush, could still be trusted.
...Schlozman's efforts to hire political conservatives for career jobs throughout the division are now being examined as part of a wide-ranging investigation of the Bush administration's alleged politicization of the Justice Department."*
« Older The Lightning Field in New Mexico... | Silent Star Wars.... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
I'm not sure VARCHAR(50) is going to suffice, but OK.
posted by nervousfritz at 9:48 AM on July 28, 2007 [5 favorites]