Electronic surveillance

NSA Spying Violates Privacy Rights, EU Court Rules

The in­ter­na­tion­al fal­lout over Ed­ward Snowden’s leaks aboutU.S. sur­veil­lance op­er­a­tions con­tin­ued Tues­day, as the top European court ruled that the Na­tion­al Se­cur­ity Agency is vi­ol­at­ing the pri­vacy rights of mil­lions of Europeans.Al­though the de­cision by the European Court of Justice is likely to do little to ac­tu­ally curb NSA spy­ing, it could be­come a ma­jor head­ache for thou­sands of com­pan­ies on both sides of the At­lantic.

The court scrapped a “safe har­bor” agree­ment between the United States and the European Uni­on that al­lowed com­pan­ies like Google, Face­book, and Amazon to freely store Europeans’ data on U.S. serv­ers. The court held that, be­cause of the NSA’s “mass and un­dif­fer­en­ti­ated” sur­veil­lance, the United States lacks the ad­equate pri­vacy pro­tec­tion re­quired by EU law.