Introduction When the United States Congress enacted the CLOUD Act in 2018, law enforcement agencies around the world were encouraged that the innovative international agreements envisioned by the legislation would offer a solution to burgeoning difficulties in obtaining access to electronic evidence located in the United States.  Two years later, progress towards that goal has been slow: only one agreement, with the United Kingdom, has been signed, and reservations about this novel type of agreement persist in the privacy and civil liberties community in the United States and abroad.

Dr Clarisse Girot of Asian Business Law Institute, Mark Parsons of Hogan Lovells and Olga Ganopolsky of Macquarie Group discuss practical issues and geopolitical sensitives. The decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Schrems and Facebook Ireland v Data Protection Commissioner[1] (“Schrems II”) concerns the interpretation of the GDPR as a matter of EU law, but the implications of this ruling are global in their dimensions.

On December 9, 2020, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation convened a hearing entitled “The Invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield and the Future of Transatlantic Data Flows”. The hearing: Explored policy issues that led to the Court of Justice of the European Union’s invalidation of the Privacy Shield in the Schrems II ruling; Examined the impact of the Schrems II ruling on U.S. businesses engaging in transatlantic digital commerce; and Examined steps that the U.S. Government is taking to develop a successor to the Privacy Shield.

On December 9, 2020, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation convened a hearing entitled “The Invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield and the Future of Transatlantic Data Flows”. The hearing: Explored policy issues that led to the Court of Justice of the European Union’s invalidation of the Privacy Shield in the Schrems II ruling; Examined the impact of the Schrems II ruling on U.S. businesses engaging in transatlantic digital commerce; and Examined steps that the U.S. Government is taking to develop a successor to the Privacy Shield.

On December 9, 2020, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation convened a hearing entitled “The Invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield and the Future of Transatlantic Data Flows”. The hearing: Explored policy issues that led to the Court of Justice of the European Union’s invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield in the Schrems II ruling; Examined the impact of the Schrems II ruling on U.S. businesses engaging in transatlantic digital commerce; and Examined steps that the U.S. Government is taking to develop a successor to the EU-US Privacy Shield.

This post describes a newly available resource for studying the effects of data localization within the European Union, a prospect that has become newly relevant in the wake of this year’s decision in Schrems II by the Court of Justice for the European Union (CJEU).  In 1998, I co-authored a book entitled, “None of Your Business: World Data Flows, Electronic Commerce, and the European Privacy Directive.”[1] This month the Brookings Institution, for the first time, has made the text of the book available for free download from its website (click “None of Your Business pdf” on the left of the page).