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).

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Other Writing:

Academic Article

The Consequences of the Internet for Politics

Political scientists are only now beginning to come to terms with the importance of the Internet to politics. The most promising way to study the Internet is to look at the role that causal mechanisms such as the lowering of transaction costs, homophilous sorting, and preference falsification play in intermediating between specific aspects of the ...
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Academic Article

Introduction: Blogs, Politics and Power – with Daniel W. Drezner

There is good reason to believe that blogs are changing politics, but we don’t know exactly how. Nor do we know whether the normative consequences of blogs for poli- tics are likely to be good or bad. In this special issue, we and our co-authors undertake the first sustained effort to map the empirical and ...
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