Read the full piece at The Washington Post.
Carrie Cordero at Lawfare has written a post which appears to be in large part a riposte to an earlier Monkey Cage post that one of us wrote on President Obama’s recent remarks on European privacy. Cordero describes Obama’s comments, which criticized European privacy policy as anti-competitive as both “refreshing” and fundamentally right. As another Lawfare blogger summarizes her argument, she “applauded the remarks and described how Europe used the Snowden revelations to support European industry while hamstringing American companies under the guise of concerns over government surveillance.” I recommend that readers interested in looking at the counter-case go and read Cordero’s comments. However, they’re perhaps more useful in conveying the collective wisdom among some circles in Washington D.C. (Cordero has enjoyed a distinguished career in the intelligence and national security community before going into private practice) than in really explaining what is at stake in EU-US disagreements over privacy.
Was Obama really talking about privacy and national security?
This is at best doubtful. Cordero argues that Obama was criticizing the Europeans for “taking advantage” and engaging in “game playing” by “conflating consumer privacy laws and policies with national security laws and policies.” As she describes it, “The European pressure on U.S. companies following the Snowden disclosures has, as the President alluded [sic], taken advantage of the situation by conflating consumer privacy laws and policies with national security laws and policies.” However, there isn’t any actual evidence in the interview that Obama is “allud[ing to]” European “pressure on US companies following the Snowden disclosures” Obama is responding to a question about EU investigations into the consumer privacy practices of Google and Facebook which started long before Snowden made any disclosures. He only mentions Snowden once in the entire interview, in a completely different context.