Laws in the European Union and the United States regarding government access to personal information in the cloud are more harmonious than many in the EU believe. Those governments specifically authorize derogations from individual privacy rights in the interest of protecting national security, combating terrorism, and investigating serious crime, writes Alan Charles Raul, partner in Sidley Austin LLP’s Washington, D.C., office. The United States is not an outlier because Europe recognizes the same imperatives to balance data protection and privacy against security and law enforcement needs, the author says. Raul contends that concerns of an EU parliamentarian from the Netherlands—that U.S.-based cloud-computing providers are more exposed to government intrusion than EU providers—do not acknowledge parallels between U.S. and EU law.
Reproduced with permission from BNA’s Daily Report for Executives, 7/26/2011. Copyright 2011 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) http://www.bna.com