The modern innovators of Internet human rights are not U.S. leaders or bold Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They are stodgy bureaucrats, politicians, and lawyers in Brussels, Berlin, and Strasbourg. As the National Security Agency (NSA) and American firms have relied on sucking up massive amounts of data to observe citizens and create and serve consumers, the European Union has fought to establish privacy rights. Over the last ten years, however, the EU initiative seemed to be on the ropes as the United States pressed Europeans to water down their privacy protections in a number of key sectors. But now, the
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “Forget Me Not: What the EU’s New Internet Privacy Ruling Means for the United States,”Foreign Affairs (2014, website only).