Henry Farrell

The Transatlantic Data War: Europe Fights Back against the NSA – with Abraham Newman

Last October, the European Court of Justice struck down the Safe Harbor agreement, a 15-year-old transatlantic arrangement that permitted U.S. companies to transfer data, such as people’s Google-search histories, outside the EU. In invalidating the agreement, the ECJ found that the blurry relationship between private-sector data collection and national security in the United States violates the privacy rights of EU citizens whose data travel overseas. The decision leaves U.S. technology companies with extensive international operations on shaky legal ground.

Although some informed American observers anticipated the decision, most were caught flat-footed; some seemed downright bewildered. Myron Brilliant,

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “The Transatlantic Data War: Europe Fights Back against the NSA,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2016).

Access the full article here.

Other Writing:

Academic Article

Piecing Together the Democratic Peace: The CSCE, Norms and the ‘Construction’ of Security in Post-Cold War Europe – With Gregory Flynn

January 9, 1999 International Organization with Gregory Flynn
The end of the Cold War has profoundly transformed Europe’s security situation. Although traditional security issues remain important, the most immediate threats to security since 1989 have originated not from relations between states, but from instability and conflict within states that has threatened to spill over into the interstate arena. States’ efforts to shape and ...
Read Article
Academic Article

Breaking the Path of Institutional Development: Alternatives to the New Determinism in Political Economy

February 9, 2004 Rationality and Society with Colin Crouch
The concept of path dependence is being used in highly deterministic ways in neo-institutionalist analysis, so that studies using this framework have dif.culty in accounting for, or predicting, change. However, the original Polya urn model from which pathdependence theory draws predicts that alternative paths will be possible. It can then be argued that actors will ...
Read Article
Browse the Archives