On 6 June 2013, Britain's The Guardian newspaper began publishing a series of

revelations by an as yet unknown American whistleblower, revealed several days later to

be ex-CIA and ex-NSA-contracted systems analyst Edward Snowden. Snowden gave a
cache of documents to two journalists: Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, Greenwald
later estimated that the cache contains 15,000 20,000 documents, some very large and
very detailed, and some very small. This was one of the largest news leaks in the
modern history of the United States. In over two months of publications, it became clear
that the NSA operates a complex web of spying programs which allow it to intercept
internet and telephone conversations from over a billion users from dozens of countries
around the world.
Due to this central server and backbone monitoring, many of the programs overlap and
interrelate among one another. These programs are often done with the assistance of US
entities such as the United States Department of Justice and the FBI, are sanctioned by
US laws such as the FISA Amendments Act, and the necessary court orders for them are
signed by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In addition to this, many of
the NSA's programs are directly aided by national and foreign intelligence services,
Britain's GCHQ, as well as by large private telecommunications and internet
corporations, such as Verizon, Telstra, Google and Facebook. Other than to combat
terrorism, these surveillance programs have been employed to assess the foreign policy
and economic stability of other countries, and to gather "commercial secrets".
In his written testimony to the European Parliament, Edward Snowden provided insight
into the impact the NSAs mass surveillance has on EUs citizens. According to him,
One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to
pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass
surveillance. Once the NSA has successfully subverted or helped repeal legal restrictions
against unconstitutional mass surveillance in partner states, it encourages partners to
perform access operations. Access operations are efforts to gain access to the bulk
communications of all major telecommunications providers in their jurisdictions. By the
time this general process has occurred, it is very difficult for the citizens of a country to
protect the privacy of their communications.
Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 authorizes foreign surveillance
programs by the NSA, such as PRISM, which is a clandestine mass electronic
surveillance data mining program launched in 2007 by the National Security
Agency (NSA), with participation from an unknown date by GCHQ, and which collects
Internet communications, granting the NSA acces to an extensive amount of information.
The European Union is looking into the nature and scope of the US mass surveillance,
threatening to freeze crucial data sharing arrangements with the US unless surveillance
ceases. The US will have to adjust their surveillance activities to comply with EU law
and enable legal redress in the US courts for Europeans whose rights may have been
infringed, said Viviane Reding, the EU's justice and rights commissioner who is
negotiating with the US on the fallout from the NSA scandal. The plenary vote on
Parliaments inquiry into mass surveillance of EU citizens concludes a 6-month
investigation by its Civil Liberties Committee. MEPs (members of the European
Parliament) looked into alleged spying by the US and some EU member states, assessed
its impact on EU citizens rights (e.g. data protection, freedom of expression,
presumption of innocence and effective remedy), recommended ways to prevent further

breaches, explored redress mechanisms and suggested how to improve the IT security of
EU institutions.
Parliament's consent to the final Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)
deal with the US could be endangered as long as blanket mass surveillance activities and
the interception of communications in EU institutions and diplomatic representations are
not fully stopped, MEPs say. It should therefore withhold its consent to the TTIP
agreement unless it fully respects EU fundamental rights, the resolution stresses, adding
that data protection should be ruled out of the trade talks.
MEPs also call for the "immediate suspension" of the Safe Harbour privacy principles
(voluntary data protection standards for non-EU companies transferring EU citizens
personal data to the US). These principles do not provide adequate protection for EU
citizens say MEPs, urging the US to propose new personal data transfer rules that meet
EU data protection requirements.
The Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP) deal should also be suspended until
allegations that US authorities have access to EU citizens bank data outside the
agreement are clarified, MEPs insist. The resolution to be voted by the full House on 12
March also looks at the surveillance activities within the EU, pointing out the "lack of
control and effective oversight" by certain EU member states over their intelligence
communities and their cooperation and involvement with US surveillance programmes.
The resolution deems bilateral anti-spying arrangements concluded or under
negotiation between some EU countries (the UK, France and Germany) and the US as
counterproductive and irrelevant, due to the need for a European approach to this
problem. MEPs ask member states for more information on developments on an "EUwide mutual no-spy arrangement".
The European Commission plans to unify data protection within the European
Union (EU) with a single law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The
current EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC does not consider important aspects like
globalization and technological developments like social networks and cloud computing
sufficiently and determined that new guidelines for data protection and privacy were
required. Therefore a proposal for a regulation was released on 25 January 2012.
Subsequently numerous amendments have been proposed in the European Parliament and
the Council of Ministers. The EU's European Council aims for adoption in late 2014 and
the regulation is presently planned to take effect after a transition period of 2 years.