Atlantic Council EUROPE CENTER
ISSUE BRIEF
The Europe Center conducts research and uses real-time analysis to inform the actions and strategies of key transatlantic decisionmakers in the face of great power competition and a geopolitical rewiring of Europe. The Center convenes US and European leaders to promote dialogue and make the case for the US-EU partnership as a key asset for the United States and Europe alike. The Europe Center’s Transatlantic Digital Marketplace Initiative seeks to foster greater US-EU understanding and collaboration on digital policy matters and makes recommendations for building cooperation and ameliorating differences in this fast-growing area of the transatlantic economy.
Who’s a National Security Risk? The Changing Transatlantic Geopolitics of Data Transfers MAY 2024
Kenneth Propp
Introduction
The geopolitics of transatlantic data transfers have been unvarying for the past decade. European governments criticize the US National Security Agency (NSA) for exploiting personal data moving from Europe to the United States for commercial reasons. The US government responds, through a series of arrangements with the European Union, by providing assurances that NSA collection is not disproportionate, and that Europeans have legal avenues if they believe their data has been illegally used. Although the arrangements have not proven legally stable, on the whole they have sufficed to keep data flowing via subsea cables under the Atlantic Ocean. Now the locus of national security concerns about international data transfers has shifted from Brussels to Washington. The Biden administration and the US Congress, in a series of bold measures, are moving aggressively to interrupt certain cross-border data flows, notably to China and Russia. The geopolitics of international data flows remain largely unchanged in Europe, however. European data protection authorities have been mostly noncommittal about the prospect of Russian state surveillance collecting Europeans’ personal data. Decisions on whether to transfer European data to Russia and China remain in the hands of individual companies. Will Washington’s new focus on data transfers to authoritarian states have an impact in Europe? Will Europe continue to pay more attention to the surveillance activities of its liberal democratic allies, especially the United States? Is there a prospect of Europe and the United States aligning on the national security risks of transfers to authoritarian countries?
Data transfer politics come to America
The US government long considered the movement of personal data across borders as primarily a matter of facilitating international trade.1 US national security authorities’ surveillance of foreigners’ personal data in the course of commercial transfers was regarded as an entirely separate matter. 1
Kenneth Propp, “Transatlantic Digital Trade Protections: From TTIP to ‘Policy Suicide?,’” Lawfare, February 16, 2024, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/transatlantic-digital-trade-protections-from-ttip-to-policy-suicide.