PROTECTION OF PERSONAL DATA : US INTERNET SURVEILLANCE PUTS EUROPEANS TO TEST.

Addressing the members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the European Commission finally went beyond a simple declaration: "we are concerned" about the scandalous revelations, on 7 June, by the The Guardian and The Washington Post of the United States' Prism programme of surveillance of non-American internet users.

In an unusually discreet comment on her Twitter account, Reding simply confirmed her meeting with Eric Holder, US attorney general. She stated that "this case shows how much a clear legal framework on data protection is a necessity, not a luxury," in reference to member states' reluctance to approve her draft regulation on enhanced protection.

"We demand full information from the European Commission and the European Council [...]. If any European government was aware or involved in the surveillance of Europeans' data, there should be the most serious consequences," said S&D leader Hannes Swoboda (Austria). "The Commission must clarify whether the IT companies involved respected European data protection legislation by giving the American government access to data on EU citizens," he added.

"We are going to demand clarification and will ask whether access to personal data in the framework of the Prism programme was limited to individual cases based on well-founded and specific suspicions or whether this is a bulk data transfer," added Commissioner Tonio Borg, seeing this new Big Brother as a "potential danger to European citizens' fundamental rights of privacy and data protection".

The functioning of Prism, revealed by a 29-year-old systems analyst, Edward Snowden, employed by a private contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), is still shrouded in mystery. Over the years 2007 to 2011, the sites of Microsoft (Skype), Google (and Youtube), Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTubeAOL and Apple were brought into...