© Photo by Patrick Lux/Getty ImagesParticipants work at their laptops at the annual Chaos Computer Club computer hackers' congress in Hamburg, Germany. They probably would not be pleased with FISA.
Europeans, take note: The U.S. government has granted itself authority to secretly snoop on you.
That's according to a new report produced for the European Parliament, which has warned that a U.S. spy law renewed late last year authorizes "purely political surveillance on foreigners' data" if it is stored using U.S. cloud services like those provided by Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
Europeans were previously alarmed by the fact that the PATRIOT Act
could be used to obtain data on citizens outside the United States. But this time the focus is a different law - the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Amendments Act - which poses a "much graver risk to EU data sovereignty than other laws hitherto considered by EU policy-makers," according to the recently published report,
Fighting Cyber Crime and Protecting Privacy in the Cloud, produced by the
Centre for the Study of Conflicts, Liberty and Security.
The FISA Amendments Act was introduced in 2008, retroactively legalizing a controversial "warrantless wiretapping" program initiated following 9/11 by the Bush administration. Late last month,
it was renewed through 2017. During that process, there was
heated debate over how it may violate Americans' privacy. But citizens in foreign jurisdictions have even greater cause for concern, says the report's co-author, Caspar Bowden, who was formerly chief privacy adviser to Microsoft Europe.
