Excerpts From: None of Your Business: World Data Flows, Electronic Commerce, and the European Privacy Directive Peter P. Swire & Robert E. Litan
The Directive's limits on transborder data flows directly confront organizations' expectations to be able to circulate information freely inside the organization's firewalls and other security. Operations in the United States and other third countries will often expect to exchange data about employees with European operations. Wherever there is no finding of adequacy, however, sending data to third countries risks violating the data protection regime. Organizations thus face a compliance dilemma of whether they can implement Intranet and other information technologies consistent with European law.
Keep in mind that ignorance of laws written on foreign shores, in foreign languages, will be no excuse. Americans can expect to be indicted as coconspirators of people they have never met, have never seen, and have never communicated with. "Put down that copy of the Constitution, and slowly back away from the keyboard, Monsieur!"
In an era of transnational business, the accounting and auditing functions of companies require transfer of an increasingly wide range of information across borders. To carry out these functions, auditors and accountants must have the ability to examine the underlying documentation of transactions. This documentation often includes personally identifiable information. The Directive thus challenges the ability of transnational firms to follow accepted and appropriate procedures for audit and accounting.
So we can expect to see governments and megacorporations blow off billions of dollars in order to protect Dimitri Vulis' privacy. Right... "None of Your Business" is full of references to "transnational" corporations and organizations, and the development of "Intranet" and "Extranet" webs within and among them. While it addresses many of the issues which will come into play regarding regional laws and regulations in the expanding global InterNet (and does a damn fine job of it), I believe that, in the end, the single issue which will decide the fate of all who use the InterNet will be the right to privacy. Without privacy, freedom and self-determination are not possible. The more things globally change, the more they will remain the same. Individual Bernsteins will find themselves pitted against the bottomless pockets of governments and corporations, while 'transnational' RSAs will be free to engage in activities of momentous proportions which are forbidden to the Bernsteins of the world in even the smallest of instances. 'Data Protection' will be as big a farce as 'News Protection' currently is. It will be a tool for those with money and power to control and manipulate the information that citizens are allowed to access, and the form in which they will be allowed to view it. The 'personal information' concerning the 'guerilla' mothers and babies who are slaughtered by US troops will be 'protected' (and thus 'unavailable), while the 'personal information' regarding the 'men of valor' who died while slaughtering them will be made available for a nation told to mourn only them. The 'personal information' concerning those who get filthy rich selling the government $10,000 toilet seats will be 'protected', while the 'personal information' regarding every small sin in the lifetime of the whistleblower who exposes the thief will be made available to every media souce on the face of the earth. The citizen's answer, "None of Your Business," will inevitably be countered by the government's question, "What do you have to hide?" With the expansion of global laws to cover every action and activity possible to humankind, 'data' becomes translatable as 'evidence.' And "everything" becomes the government's business. Is it my imagination, or are Swire and Litan, as well as all others who write about the current state of development of global technology, society and law, merely providing real-time footnotes to '1984', without providing Orwell's insight into our true future? ~~~~ 1984AnimalFarmBraveNewWorldMonger "Everything not permitted, is forbidden."