U.S. Businesses lobby against proposals to restrict surveillance

In its comments submitted on Oct. 29. to USTR for its annual report on foreign trade barriers, Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA: an advocacy organization based in Washington, DC) said : "Data localization requirements run afoul of global trade norms where trade restrictive measures are supposed to be limited to policies that are both necessary for achieving a legitimate national security or public policy objective and the least trade restrictive method possible for achieving that desired policy outcome... In addition, these regulations are often vaguely construed, inadequately articulated and, therefore, nearly impossible to effectively implement..."U.S. business proponents argue that data restrictions do not achieve their intended outcome of boosting domestic business and protecting data from government spying. Instead, the consolidation of the data impedes economic growth because it makes cloud computing inefficient. However, from the European side strong signals that the Safe Harbour agreement is not ensuring the proper level of protection for EU citizens, are being shown. In the European Parliament calls have been made for a  suspension of the agreement pending a response from the U.S. on whether it will commit to limit the scope of a national security exception, as the European Commission has demanded. The exception allows the framework's principles to be suspended if law enforcement orintelligence authorities request data from firms.

CCIA Comments to USTR on National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers (October 2014): https://www.ccianet.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CCIA-NTE-Foreign-Trade-Barriers.pdfVia Inside U.S. Trade - 11/21/2014, Vol. 32, No. 46