A Day Like All Days

This article describes an interim deal between the US and the EU to get around the standoff between US aviation security demands and EU data protection laws which I described in this post, which is friends-locked so I repeat the relevant portion below:

Worse yet, apparently the demands of the US Customs Service to view any Passenger Name Record they wish, especially from foreign airlines, is in direct violation of data privacy laws in Europe (and similar laws in Canada). Unless the US adopts data privacy protection by law (not likely) or backs down on this demand (also unlikely) we may see air travel between the US and the rest of the world shut down because in that case no airline can comply with both US and European (or Canadian) law simultaneously. I suspect if that were to happen there would be enormous pressure on Congress to fix the situation.

The article provides a brief history of the deals and compromises that have been and continue to be made to ensure that international air travel is not brought to a screeching halt by this fundamental incompatibility between US and EU law. Essentially, the EU has agreed not to enforce its data-protection laws with respect to Passenger Name Records and the US has agreed to try to take better care that such data is not misused (I use "try" deliberately; the relevant portion of the BBC article cites this as a "non-binding undertaking".)

My guess, without doing the research, is that Canada has made similar compromises with respect to its data protection laws in the face of our government's implacable demands for data.

Of course, in neither case does the other government have any real choice in the matter. I suppose in retrospect it was naive to think that this legal incompatibility could ever be allowed to halt international air travel just to make the point that our government cannot always get what it wants. That's the pity of this whole thing.