If recent leaks about US internet surveillance spur Europe’s political leaders to press ahead with a proposed privacy directive, so much the better. That looks like one potential outcome from disclosures about the National Security Agency’s Prism program, with German chancellor Angela Merkel this week joining the chorus in favour of moving ahead with a privacy overhaul that was first put forward at the start of last year.
There is a danger, however, that ill-considered responses to the Prism leaks will also risk Balkanising the internet and hampering companies that have been at the forefront of digital innovation. Protecting citizens’ privacy is an important job for governments – but so is using the new tools of online surveillance to make those citizens secure. These two goals should not be confused, and knee-jerk responses to populist outrage could do more harm than good.
International concern about Prism is understandable. The process of approving intelligence service surveillance requests looks like rubber-stamping: only 11 of nearly 34,000 applications have been rejected since 1979, according to privacy group Epic. Also, when it comes to surveillance, the US has clear home-field advantage, thanks to the dominance its companies enjoy over the global internet.