TECH: Biden Signs Executive Order Protecting Personal Data Transfers Between US and EU

Months after the deal was reached, the White House took for­mal steps to secure data trans­fers between the Unit­ed States and the Euro­pean Union.

Pres­i­dent Biden signed an exec­u­tive order direct­ing the gov­ern­men­t’s efforts to imple­ment the EU-US Data Pri­va­cy Framework.

This approach is pri­mar­i­ly based on the idea that pri­va­cy and civ­il lib­er­ties are “con­sid­ered” before intel­li­gence agen­cies ask for data, and that sur­veil­lance is only per­mit­ted when there is a clear­ly defined need to address nation­al secu­ri­ty concerns.

Intel­li­gence agen­cies also need to review and update their poli­cies to main­tain them on ele­ments such as data han­dling. We will also have a “lay­ered” review process for sus­pect­ed pri­va­cy vio­la­tions for EU residents.

The Office of the Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence (DNI), through its Civ­il Lib­er­ties Offi­cers, will inves­ti­gate pos­si­ble vio­la­tions of the law, and the Attor­ney Gen­er­al will use the new Data Pro­tec­tion Review Court to review its find­ings and issue bind­ing rul­ings. will be lowered.

The Data Pri­va­cy Frame­work responds to the EU Court of Jus­tice’s 2020 with­draw­al of the Pri­va­cy Shield Agreement.

The court deter­mined that the deal gave the US too much free­dom to police EU data and was incon­sis­tent with pri­va­cy require­ments that are vir­tu­al­ly equiv­a­lent to Euro­pean law.

The US object­ed to the refusal, say­ing it called into ques­tion com­pa­nies’ abil­i­ty to legal­ly trans­fer data.

The Euro­pean Com­mis­sion still needs to con­duct a review to deter­mine whether this frame­work pro­vides suf­fi­cient protection.

But between this agree­ment and agree­ments aimed at law enforce­ment agen­cies such as Aus­tralia and the Unit­ed King­dom, the Unit­ed States, despite some con­cerns that spies still have too much pow­er, has changed its approach to inter­na­tion­al data shar­ing is rapid­ly becom­ing established.