When: June 24, 2021, 11:30 - 12:30 am ET (5:30 - 6:30 pm CET)
Where: Online - Register here

Ever since lawyer and data privacy activist Max Schrems filed a lawsuit against Facebook in 2013, he has sparked various court rulings that have overturned U.S.-EU agreements regulating flows of personal data across the Atlantic. How do European approaches to privacy differ from those in the United States? How can the U.S. and the EU manage transatlantic turbulence over privacy rights and data flows? What are the prospects for a new transatlantic data transfer deal? What would be an ideal solution for data sharing among democracies?

Co-sponsoered with the Wilson Center’s Global Europe Program.

Quotes:

Max Schrems
“The EU law basically requires privacy, and the US law requires surveillance, and that is fundamentally the conflict of jurisdiction we have here. So we just have two jurisdictions, one jurisdiction requires privacy, the other surveillance, in very simple terms, and who gets crushed in between these data systems is the companies that do these data transfers.”

“I think in the long run, and I’m talking about like a decade or so, what’s really interesting is, how can we solve the free data flow idea, while still having privacy and not having little silos of data in different countries. I think the only way that we’ll do that, is kind of what we did with the GDPR in Europe – it’s that we have one unified idea of how privacy works, which is very complicated in different cultural backgrounds and different legal traditions, but that could give us some kind of free flow of data.”

“If we look at US surveillance laws, they still have this very nationalistic view of citizen or not citizen, which comes out of the Fourth Amendment, there’s a lot of historic reasons and so on. But I think the question is fair to ask if that is a proposition that in an online environment is still fair to have. (…) It’s a bit like Swiss banks saying ‘give us all your gold, but once your gold is in Switzerland, there’s no property rights anymore for foreigners’. That would be a hard proposition to hold up. But that is basically what the Fourth Amendment now does, and what FISA mirrors.”

Gloria González Fuster
“Nobody wants to stop trade with the United States or collaboration for security purposes, it’s not about this. It’s about doing things in a way that is respectful of our human rights.”

“In a way, legally, the inspiration for the treatment of our data are the investigations on Mexican drug dealers. So there is a lot of doctrine about: can you access the car of a Mexican drug dealer, the house, whatever, if they are beyond the borders of the United States? Yes, you may have a right, the same way that you may have a right to access all of our data, because we are outside of the United States. This is how we are visualized in American law with regards to this. So our concern is not really the general American privacy law – it’s really the treatment of this data that comes from the outside.”

Keynote Speaker: Max Schrems

Max Schrems
Photo courtesy of Wilson Center

Maximilian Schrems is an Austrian activist, lawyer, and author who became known for campaigns against Facebook for its privacy violations, including violations of European privacy laws and the alleged transfer of personal data to the US National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the NSA's PRISM program. His lawsuits invalidated the Safe Harbor Privacy principles and the U.S.-EU Privacy Shield.

Schrems is the co-founder of NOYB – European Center for Digital Rights. The non-profit organization aims to launch strategic court cases and media initiatives in support of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and more data privacy regulation.

Moderator: Mark Scott

Mark Scott
Photo courtesy of Wilson Center

Mark Scott is Chief Technology Correspondent at POLITICO, writing about the global collision of technology and politics. Prior to joining POLITICO, Mark was the European Technology Correspondent for the New York Times and London correspondent for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Along with his current technology beat, he has also covered macroeconomics, the energy and renewables industry, and climate change.

Panelist: Peter Swire

Peter Swire
Photo courtesy Wilson Center

Peter Swire is the Elizabeth and Tommy Holder Chair of Law and Ethics in the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. He has worked extensively on EU/U.S. data privacy issues since his 1998 book “None of Your Business: World Data Flows, Electronic Commerce, and the European Privacy Directive.” Under President Clinton, Swire was Chief Counselor for Privacy in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and was the lead White House privacy official during negotiation of the EU/U.S. Safe Harbor. In 2013, Swire served as one of five members of President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology. In 2015, the International Association of Privacy Professionals awarded Swire its annual Privacy Leadership Award. In 2016, Swire was selected as an independent expert witness (by Facebook) in the Irish High Court trial in the “Schrems II” case. In 2018, Swire was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for his project on “Protecting Human Rights and National Security in the New Age of Data Nationalism.” Swire is senior counsel with the law firm of Alston & Bird, and Research Director of the Cross-Border Data Forum.

Panelist: Gloria González Fuster

Gloria González Fuster
Photo Courtesy Wilson Center

Prof. Dr. Gloria González Fuster is a Research Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)’s Faculty of Law and Criminology. She is Co-Director of the Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) Research Group, and member of the Brussels Privacy Hub (BPH). She investigates legal issues related to privacy, personal data protection and security, and notably teaches the courses ‘Privacy and Data Protection Law‘ and ‘Data Policies in the European Union’ at VUB. She is a member of the steering committee of the Data Protection Law Scholars Network.