For the full article posted today on the European Law Blog, click here. Can the U.S. Government create, by non-statutory means, an independent redress authority capable of providing an effective remedy for a European person who believes that her or his rights have been infringed by an intelligence service? In this article we put forward a novel non-statutory solution that could resolve the “redress” problem in the EU/US adequacy negotiations. This solution is based on three “building blocks” inspired by methods utilized in U.S. administrative law. First, the U.S. Department of Justice should issue a binding regulation creating within that executive agency an independent “Foreign Intelligence Redress Authority” (FIRA). Second, the President should issue a separate Executive Order providing the necessary investigative powers and giving FIRA’s decisions binding effect across the intelligence agencies and other components of the U.S. government. Finally, European individuals could obtain judicial review of an independent redress decision by using the existing Administrative Procedure Act.

In the Schrems II case, a central concern of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) concerned the lack of redress – the ability of an individual to invoke an effective remedy concerning foreign intelligence surveillance. The CJEU specifically stated that Article 47 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which requires an “effective remedy,” operates on “the premis[e] that data subjects must have the possibility of bringing legal action before an independent and impartial court.” In the negotiations between the EU and the U.S. for a new Privacy Shield, a key issue has been to determine what sort of legal action must be provided in the U.S. to provide an effective remedy.

Must the U.S. Congress change statutory law to solve the major issue of “redress” in the EU-US adequacy negotiations? This is a crucial question, especially since a series of political, pragmatic and even legal/constitutional difficulties mean that the U.S. might not be able to come up with a short-term statutory solution for redress. In this article we analyse this question for the first time in detail, and argue that, provided the U.S. is able to address the deficiencies highlighted by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in its Schrems II judgment (independence of the redress body; ability to substantively review the requests; and authority to issue decisions that are binding on the intelligence agencies), then relying on a non-statutory solution could be compatible with the “essential equivalence” requirements of Article 45 of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In a second, forthcoming article, we set forth specific elements of a novel non-statutory solution and assess whether it would meet the substantive European legal requirements for redress.

This post provides a link to a chapter of the book “Surveillance and Privacy in the Digital Age: European, Transatlantic, and Global Perspectives” (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), edited by Valsamis Mitsilegas and Niovi Vavoula, and is provided here with the permission of the publisher. Cloud computing has revolutionized the ways in which individuals, companies and governments operate in the twenty-first century.  Such progress however can also beget more sophisticated mechanisms for coordinating and executing criminal acts.  When evidence sought by one government is stored on a server in another country with a different data privacy regime, how can these conflicting interests be reconciled?  What are the responsibilities of service providers when such transfers are concerned?

In the IAPP piece New EU data blockage as German court would ban many cookie management providers, Dan Felz and Peter Swire examine the potential EU-wide impacts of a Wiesbaden court decision prohibiting a cookie management provider from utilizing a U.S.-based service to collect data, regardless of whether such data had ever actually been transferred out of the EU. Although the decision was made at the interim injunction stage and could thus be modified if the case proceeds to trial, its implications are significant.

In the Monday, December 20th Lawfare article titled Towards OECD Principles for Government Access to Data: Can Democracies Show the Way?, Theodore Christakis, Kenneth Propp and Peter Swire discuss the role that democracies can play in establishing trusted international standards for cross-border data flows.  Drawing upon documents made available by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as well as interviews conducted by the team with governments, institutions, corporate bodies and academic thought leaders in the field, the authors provide a high-level summary of the current state of play in OECD negotiations, new challenges and approaches involved in balancing national security needs with data protection and privacy rights, and what to expect as we approach the new year.