Meeting of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home affairs (LIBE) in Brussels on&nbsp;the electronic mass surveillance of EU citizens. Statements of Claude MORAES (S&amp;D, UK), Chair of the LIBE committee.

Brussels

meeting

Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

MORAES, Claude (S&D, UK)

protection of personal data (T)

Prism programme (T)

Follow-up to the European Parliament Resolution of 12 March 2014 on the electronic mass surveillance of EU citizens

SOUNDBITE (English), Claude MORAES (S&amp;D, UK), Chair of the LIBE committee, "I think the critical updates really are issues like 'safe harbour' where we were really warning about the inter-connections of the transfer of mass data and what that really means for people in their daily lives: citizens, business, commercial transactions.This Edward Snowden issue, this issue of mass data, the idea of that it really doesn't matter, if you are not concerned about that issue, it really didn't matter to your daily life, but it does now matter. Because what matters is the commercial transactions are not protected as financial transactions. They are not protected in the way we made believe that they could be, that there are higher standards of data protection on this continent than from another continent, and these things really matter. And we can see now a scramble, certainly in the United States, for companies who were pretending that everything was ok in a voluntary way, now they know that it is not ok. So that is that kind of update that is really important and it is not cosmetic."

SOUNDBITE (English), Claude MORAES (S&amp;D, UK), Chair of the LIBE committee, "The context changed from the time that we were having the inquiry, it has arguably changed, there have been more terrorist attacks, more demand from certain quarters to protect people from terrorism, but on the other hand more concern as technology encroaches on our private lives, that we should have some element of privacy, so this conflict becomes even starker. The resolution is trying to keep pace with this inevitable clash. And we know that this is now a critical area for: it must not be taken granted, the resolution basically says that; let's get the balance right, let's not cheat this even though it doesn't matter and let's involve everyone. It is commercial, it is business, it is citizen's freedoms, but it is also a day to day matter."

SOUNDBITE (English), Claude MORAES (S&amp;D, UK), Chair of the LIBE committee, "If we didn't know and couldn't really underline many of the things put forward by Snowden and which we couldn't know then we couldn't make policies and couldn't create a much more balanced approach to issues, take 'Safe harbour' for example, the idea that in the future with mass commercial transactions people can be assured of privacy and commercial viability in their transactions, this is very important. It has deep implications, I mean you want to ensure that your financial transactions are safe, it is a very basic thing, this is not some kind of outlandish Human rights request, this is a very basic thing in our daily lives."