The Obama administration successfully lobbied the European Commission to strip its data privacy legislation of a measure that would have limited the ability of US intelligence agencies to spy on EU citizens, according to three senior EU officials.
The measure – known in the EU as the “anti-Fisa clause” after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorises the US government to eavesdrop on international phone calls and emails – would have nullified any US request for technology and telecoms groups to hand over data on EU citizens, according to documents obt-ained by the Financial Times.
But the safeguard was scrapped by commission officials in January 2012 despite the assertions of Viviane Reding, the EU’s top justice official, that the exemption would have stopped the kind of surveillance that was disclosed as part of the National Security Agency’s Prism programme.