Biden Executive Order Implements New Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Safeguards

pcmag.com:

President Biden signed an executive order Friday(Opens in a new window) implementing a new data-privacy deal between the US and the European Union—the third such agreement since 2015. 

That document—formally an Executive Order on Enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activities(Opens in a new window)—gives US intelligence agencies and their oversight bodies an official to-do list following the European Union-US Data Privacy Framework that the US and the European Commission announced(Opens in a new window) in March.

This framework commits Washington to limit its signals intelligence gathering in the EU, take extra care with any such data collected, and to create an appeals process for European citizens who think that American intelligence agencies harvested their information in violation of either US law or the principles laid out in the framework.

One such complaint from an Austrian privacy activist named Max Schrems sank an earlier transatlantic framework called Safe Harbor. In 2015, the European Court of Justice struck it down, ruling(Opens in a new window) that this agreement settled in 2000 did not provide Schrems with sufficient protection from data gathering by the National Security Agency and other US intelligence organizations. 

Brussels and Washington shipped a 2.0 release called Privacy Shield in 2016 that increased the data-protection requirements for US companies operating in Europe and moving data back and forth across the Atlantic. Schrems sued a second time and won again(Opens in a new window), with the ECJ declaring(Opens in a new window) Privacy Shield invalid in 2020. 

The prospect of US firms having to confine the data of their European customers to EU-based servers led to some