The European Union regards the United States as being
'inadequate' when it comes to data protection. Europeans
have tended to take this at face value and presume that there must
be a good reason why the European Commission has come to such a
radical conclusion. Americans, naturally enough, tend to take
unkindly to being told they are inadequate, particularly when it
implies that their democracy has failed to protect a fundamental
right, like the right to privacy. So who is right?
Contrasting perspectives
There is relatively little probing debate about the legitimacy
of the EU's view of US data protection laws. Instead, the high
level debate in the EU tends to comprise fairly generic references
to the United States not having a 'culture' of privacy, the
bemoaning of any US federal data protection laws and an underlying
suspicion that the US Patriot Act and other US security and
anti-terror legislation is being used in a manner that tramples on
the privacy rights of
