Tensions between the world's two largest economies have been on the rise again this week after the United States ordered the closure of China's Houston consulate, alleging it was a nest of Chinese spies who tried to steal data from facilities in Texas.

In a retaliatory move, China then ordered the US to close its consulate in Chengdu, accusing its staff of meddling in its internal affairs.

But espionage experts say the gathering of intelligence is a key part of what diplomatic missions do, and that often includes not only legal means but also the use of spies to gather "secret information".

"They do it, we do it. We just hope to catch them at it, and hope they don't catch us," said Anthony Glees, an internationally published expert on security and intelligence and professor of politics at the University of Buckingham.

"This is all part of the 'great game'."

To a certain extent, states chose to "turn a blind eye" to much of this activity because "it's in their mutual interests to do so", Professor Glees told the ABC.

The plethora of secrets revealed by Edward Snowden in 2014 included detailed information about how the US uses its own diplomatic missions to spy on countries across the globe, but no US consulates were shuttered as a result.

But this accepted spying culture does have limits, and crossing that line can, albeit rarely, result in diplomatic expulsion.

Here we look at past examples, and why China's Houston consulate one of five Chinese consulates in the US, along with the embassy in Washington DC was singled out.

Senior US officials said that espionage activity by China's diplomatic missions was occurring all over the country, but its activity out of the Houston consulate went well over the line of what was acceptable.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the consulate "a hub of spying and intellectual property theft", an allegation China rejected as "malicious slander".

Beijing is spending billions training up foreign journalists, buying up space in overseas media, and expanding its state-owned networks on an unprecedented scale.

A senior State Department official also linked espionage activity from that consulate to China's pursuit of research into a vaccine for the new coronavirus.

Professor Glees said Houston was currently a hotspot of information due to its aerospace and pharmaceutical research facilities, in particular in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I'd have no doubt that the Chinese in Houston were hoovering up intelligence. It's one of just a few Chinese consulates, but in terms of leading-edge research probably the best place to be," he told the ABC.

But Professor Glees went on to pose two important questions.

"Was China trying to do this secretly and therefore unlawfully? One would guess it was, but it does not necessarily have to be so," he said.

"Does the USA, the UK, Australia do the same thing? Of course."

China's countermove to close the US consulate in Chengdu may have also been a choice based on strategic location.

"That is where the US gathers information about Tibet and China's development of strategic weapons in neighbouring regions," said Wu Xinbo, a professor and American studies expert at Fudan University in Shanghai.

The closure of embassies amid espionage allegations is rare, but diplomats accused of spying have been expelled in the past.

In 2018, 153 Russian diplomats were expelled by the United Kingdom and allied countries following the attempted poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the British town of Salisbury.

Russia responded by expelling 23 British diplomats and ordered the closure of the UK'sconsulate in St Petersburgand theBritish Counciloffice in Moscow.

At the height of the Cold War, Britain expelled 25 Soviet diplomats after the defection of Oleg Gordievsky, a former head of KGB operations in London, who had named KGB personnel operating in the Soviet embassy in London.

In Canberra, the Soviet embassy was closed down in 1954 when an intelligence officer based in the capital defected, offering to provide information about Soviet espionage activity against Australia and the West. The embassy reopened in 1959.

While the expulsion of diplomats and, even more so, the closing of an embassy is rare outside of war, Professor Glees said forced entry into the consulate of another state was "an absolute no-no".

But shortly after the closure of the Houston consulate, a group of men who appeared to be American officials were seen forcing open a back door of the building.

After the men went inside, two uniformed members of the US State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security arrived to guard the door.

China condemned the break-in saying it was in breach of both the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and the China-US consular treaty.

"The US action right now is almost certainly unlawful," Professor Glees said.

"But they'll get away with it because Trump is up for re-election and having a go at China right now makes political sense even if there's no particular reason, to be honest."

Professor Glees said consular staff who were formally listed and known to host countries can operate as "legal spies", but they are required by law to abide by certain rules.

This intelligence gathering, whether secret or overt, can be done in many ways such as through meetings, conferences and visiting universities, businesses or research centres.

The uniform, the spy novels and a secret life. The breadcrumbs that suggest Australian citizen Yang Hengjun, detained in China for more than a year, was once a Chinese intelligence officer.

"Then you have the 'illegals' officers and agents who are not listed in any embassy rosters assuming an identity or simply using an existing reason for being in the receiving country to undertake espionage on the side," he said.

But even "legal spies" sometimes engage in illegal espionage, most often by recruiting agents to act on their behalf.

Chen Yonglin, a formerChinesediplomat who defected toAustraliain 2005, said "espionage is normal for all governments".

He said while Chinese diplomats collect information openly "to avoid being accused of being involved in secret intelligence work", they may also be providing key assistance to covert operations.

"But most operatives are run independently by various [government] departments," he told the ABC, adding that in many cases Chinese state-run companies can provide a better safe house.

Mr Chen said most infiltration can be carried out more effectively through migration especially of skilled workers and experts.

Rather than using embassies or consulates, they may communicate directly with Chinese officials or meet in a third country, making these operations very difficult to detect.

Diplomats most commonly work to create connections and place students and experts within key research departments in order to openly obtain information on new technology and developments that can then be used by China, he said, adding that such activities are particularly extensive in Australia where the response to intellectual property theft has been "weak".

In contrast, the Trump administration has taken a particularly hard line against China in both trade and political dealings.

Issues ranging from trade to the coronavirus pandemic, China's territorial claims in the South China Sea and its clampdown on Hong Kong, have plunged relations between Washington and Beijing to what experts said is their lowest level in decades.

It's almost inconceivable that the immediate future of the global economy hangs on the erratic whims of Donald Trump, writes Ian Verrender.

Following the break-in at the now-closed Houston site, China threatened repercussions, and the White House has not ruled out the possibility of closing more Chinese diplomatic missions.

While in a related incident, a researcher who took refuge in the Chinese consulate in San Francisco after allegedly lying to investigators about her Chinese military service has also been arrested by US officials.

"As far as closing additional embassies, it's always possible," US President Donald Trump told reporters earlier in the week.

But Mr Chen said while the US seemed to be distancing itself from China, any further response from Beijing was likely to be restrained.

"China benefits extensively from globalisation," he said.

"China's economy is reliant on international trade and shared technologies and they do not want to risk a break with either the US or Australia."

Original post:
Why is the US accusing China's Houston consulate of spying? - ABC News

Now that the Homeland series finale has come and gone, co-creator, Alex Gansa, revealed a few behind-the-scenes secrets. There are some things dedicated viewers may not even know. Fans likely know that Homeland utilized experts to advise, but theres one asset thats proven an MVP.

RELATED: Homeland: Why Claire Danes Blew Up at Damian Lewis While Shooting the Cabin Scene

The Showtime hit series, Homeland, wrapped after eight seasons. When creators first began, Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon had a few absolute ideas for the story. Most of which, revolved around Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis).

We had decided that we wanted to tell the last story in Afghanistan, and we already knew two big things, Gansa told the New York Times. He added that they knew the conclusion would ultimately put Carrie Mathison in Nicholas Brodys shoes.

That said, everything between the first and final seasons became affected by criticism, according to Gansa.

First and foremost, I think both the praise and the criticism were overblown. We were taking shots from the left for beingIslamophobicand shots from the right for being soft on terrorism, he said.

At the beginning of Season 5, Peter Quinn is sitting in a C.I.A. briefing room and telling people what it looks likeon the ground in Syria. Our intention in that scene was to portray Quinn as somebody who had seen too much battle and whose judgment was impaired.

The media outlets, he said, took one side or the other and ran with it.

There was a moment toward the end of Season 5 where we all just looked at ourselves in the mirror. We were telling a story about an impending attack in Berlin, and four days before we shot the scene, the Paris attacks happened, he said.

We found ourselves on the set saying, What are we doing? What is the value of telling these stories in a world that felt like it had gone a little crazy? That definitely affected Homeland in Seasons 6, 7, and 8.

Those changes came due to a larger vow. The team would no longer dramatize threats that didnt exist in the real world.

We were very careful in these remaining seasons that we were not going to be sensational. We were trying to not make it worse, he said.

RELATED: Homeland: Peter Quinns Death Really Rankled Some of the Shows Fans

With a show that focuses on fictionalized real-world events, experts are a necessity. In Homelands case, Gansa said they had something called Spy Camp. This was a series of brainstorming sessions the cast and creative staff did each season with intelligence and national security experts.

The experts included a former C.I.A. director and a rather infamous whistle-blower: Edward Snowden.

Thats why Season 5 was all about the surveillance state, hacking and civil liberties. Bart Gellman, a former Washington Post reporter, told me he was bringing a special guest to Spy Camp, and the next thing you know, were Skyping with Snowden in Moscow, Gansa said.

This was about six months before Snowden was Skyping with other people, so all of the intelligence consultants we had in the room sat up in their seats, like, Oh my God!'

He continued: We had a two- or three-hour conversation with him. He was an interesting cat, for sure. When somebody constantly refers to themselves in the third person, its always odd. But he made a compelling case that if he had gone through the normal channels, none of this would have become public.

RELATED: Why Homeland Lost So Much Momentum in Season 3

With Homeland over, the team has time to mull over the finished product.

After Brody was falsely implicated in the C.I.A. bombing, I wish that we had found a better way to dramatize the impact of that upon his family in Season 3, he said.

I just think that if we had been thinking more clearly, we could have devised a better story around how that affected and impacted their lives.

Another change theyd make had to do with travel. A lot of the show was filmed overseas in places like Berlin and South Africa. Gansa said the actors were tired of the travel.

That said, star, Claire Danes (who played Carrie Mathison), wouldnt change a thing in the final season.

I was really happy with the shape of the final season, she said via DeadlinesContendersTelevision virtual event. I thought it was really smart to have Carrie so directly aligned with Brody in this final season for her to be unsure of herself if she is a traitor or not.

However fans felt about any of Homelands eight seasons, not many can say theyve had Snowden or Spy Camp to thank. The show is a multi-award winner and nominee in nearly every category for good reason. It told stories similar to what viewers already know, both satisfying and terrifying all at once.

Read more from the original source:
'Homeland' Showrunner Reveals Their Most Valuable Asset in Constructing the Series - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

The controversy over the UKs use of Huawei equipment in its 5G network has not abated, despite the governments announcement that the Chinese manufacturers equipment will be stripped from the network by 2027. Conservative MPs continue to be unsatisfied by this half-way house, claiming that Britain will remain vulnerable to back-door espionage by the Chinese state. They carry on threatening the government with an embarrassing, albeit symbolic,rebellion.

But it is no secret that the real pressure to abandon Huawei equipment comes principally, and forcefully, from the UKs Five Eyes partners. The Five Eyes network dates back to the Second World War and comprises the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It is the most sophisticated signals intelligence network in the world and allows Britain via the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to seriously punch above its weight in intelligence gathering and analysis. Given the level of integration of Five Eyes, any breach of one could potentially compromise all. Hence pressure from within the exclusive club for Britain to conform with other members.

Of course, the compromise of removing Huawei by 2027 and not allowing it to install technology close to sensitive sites, was an attempt to assuage Five Eyes partners without upsetting the Chinese state for commercial reasons. Also GCHQ thought it had sufficient expertise to ensure that the 35 per cent of Huawei infrastructure built into UK 5G could be technically controlled up to 2027 to reduce risk.

Interestingly, France the state with a similar international profile and world role to the UK has this week confirmed a similar position to the British compromise of allowing Huawei to build some of its network, away from sensitive sites, until the late 2020s. Indeed it is almost as if the two consulted on how best to finesse the question. France, of course, is not a member of Five Eyes, but it is a member of Nine Eyes, which includes the famous 5 plus France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway. This club is by no means as integrated as the first, but it does place Paris in the second most important circle of western signals intelligence. It may be here that Britain and France aligned their first response to Huawei.

The French Gaullist tradition teaches that foreign policy, once charted, is not easily deviated from especially under Anglo-Saxon pressure. President Macron has consistently stated that France will not be beholden to either contemporary superpower USA or China and that he will work with both, but under no illusions about their predatory tendencies. He believes that Europe is the instrument for dealing with the Big Two as equals and is therefore going ahead with Huawei.

But that may be naive, for China has France in its sights as something of a softer touch than the Anglo-Saxons, as well as a power traditionally more independent of the US. In 2018, following the beginning of Donald Trumps commercial war with China, Chinese investment in North America and the UK declined significantly, while increasing in France by 86 per cent. Recently, the French have become anxious about this investment, which is not only snapping up French infrastructure such as Toulouse airport, where Airbus headquarters are based but also large tracts of agricultural land and, more importantly, high tech companies. Huawei already has three French research centres and is scheduled to begin work on a new factory in France, as a pay-off for its role in the new French 5G network. To boot, two former members of Frances foreign intelligence organisation, the DGSE, including the former head of station in Beijing, were this month found guilty of treason and spying on behalf of China, albeit several years ago.

France is a special prize for China because among continental European states, it is by far the most international in terms of foreign policy, defence and intelligence in a similar way to Britain, but without the US looking over its shoulder. That is where France is a softer touch. And she has a very impressive array of intelligence tools to attract Chinese attention if they could find a back-door access.

Beyond the Nine Eyes intelligence network, France is at the centre of a global top secret strategic electronic network of spy stations known as Frenchelon. Run by the DGSE, it was nicknamed after its Five Eyes big brother ECHELON as revealed by Edward Snowden. Both have satellite and land-based infrastructure tracking stations and signals interception posts in the four corners of the world, Frances located on confetti remnants of her overseas empire from Saint Barthlemy in the Caribbean to New Caledonia in the South Pacific. In the Gaullist national independence tradition, having largely built this themselves, the French manage it alone albeit cooperating with western allies. But unlike the Five Eyes partnership, they have no team member able to scrutinise and warn of security weaknesses.

The same goes for Frances extensive submarine cable network originally from empire, like Britains which, like Britains, carries a very high percentage of world communications. The French state, once controlling the networks operators such as France Telecom, now Orange continues to use the system for intelligence gathering. And of course, the French, with their mathematical prowess, have since the early twentieth century been international leaders in deciphering encoded diplomatic, industrial and civilian traffic making their cable network precious.

So when the French say that they can finesse Huaweis involvement in French 5G, as the UK does, they are playing with fire. In many ways, back-door access to French intelligence infrastructure would be a greater prize than Britains where there is the potential for security breaches to be detected by Five Eyes partners. Britain may do the sensible thing and drop Huawei altogether, but then critical observers will claim that the Huawei affair shows both states reverting to stereotype: Britain acting as Americas poodle; France, with Gaullist egotistical independence, going its own way.

This article originally was first published inPoliteia

Read more here:
Has France been naive in its handling of Huawei? - Spectator.co.uk

A viral Facebook post claimed that the address found on Nickelodeon cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants driver license is the same address as a building on Jeffrey Epsteins private island, citing this as evidence that all of these cartoons are tainted by pedophiles. our kids are not safe.

Jeffrey Epstein owned Little Saint James, an island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, before his death last year. It is alleged that many of the sex crimes Epstein committed took place on the island, leading the FBI to search the island after Epsteins death.

The address in question appears if a Google search is done for Little St James theme park. The listing has been claimed on Google, but it has not been verified. Satellite imagery of the location showed that initially, the theme park is actually what was formerly Epsteins main compound on the island. As of the publication of this article, a second location has been added with the exact same address and business name, this one for a building on an unnamed road on the island of St. Thomas. The theme park on Little St. James has nine reviews, all from within the last week, and the listed phone number is for SpongeBob and the Find Gary hotline. (Gary is SpongeBobs pet snail in the television show.) The number was created as part of a promotion for a SpongeBob film.

Google has lax standards in allowing people to list businesses on Google Maps that have led to the platform being overrun with millions of false business addresses and fake names, according to advertisers, search experts and current and former Google employees as pointed out in a 2019 Wall Street Journal article. Some of these fake businesses are deliberately intended to deceive Google users, while others are done as jokes. For example, in 2015 one prankster claimed the White House was the location of their fake snowboarding shop named "Edwards Snow Den," a joking reference to the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. All evidence seems to point toward SpongeBobs address being found on Epsteins island as being another one of these practical jokes. Theres nothing to indicate an actual connection between SpongeBob Squarepants and Little St. James exists124 Conch Street, Bikini Bottom is the address of a pineapple under the sea, not a theme park on Jeffrey Epsteins island.

If you have a claim you would like to see us fact check, please send us an email atfactcheck@thedispatch.com. If you would like to suggest a correction to this piece or any other Dispatch article, please emailcorrections@thedispatch.com.

See the rest here:
Is There a Connection Between Jeffrey Epstein and SpongeBob SquarePants? - The Dispatch

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"Don't make this just a political interview, would you, please," Oliver Stone begs me towards the end of an engrossing 45-minute chat over Skype. "They always lead with that: 'Oliver Stone says George W. Bush was the worst President ever'. But that's not what this interview is about. Lead with the book."

The book in question is Chasing the Light, a memoir that ends in 1987 with the triple Oscar-winning filmmaker at the top of his game, basking in the sheer unadulterated pleasure of receiving the best director Oscar (for Platoon) from Elizabeth Taylor "my dream girl of the 1950s and 1960s," he writes, "still so glamorous, the heart of the movies". He's enjoying critical raves for back-to-back films, Salvador and Platoon, is happily married, has his sometimes raging cocaine habit under control, and has even learnt (kind of) how to avoid shooting himself in the foot in public appearances and the media.

"Perhaps that was the golden moment," he tells me when asked if, in writing this book, a single time in his life crystallised for him as a zenith. "It was me realising I was making money, my film was a commercial and critical hit, and I'm still in health and under 40, thank God. It was quite good. And I think I knew it was quite good. 'This is special'. I wasn't stupid. 'This is not gonna happen that easy again'."

Despite the occasional glimpse of feistiness, Stone is a generous interview subject, offering long and thoughtful responses from his large, tree-lined attic office. He's as willing to reflect on his own failings ("I always registered zero practically in the young women market," he says at one point) as he is to rail at the world's failure to see things through his eyes ("I just don't think people want to know").

And he has much to reflect upon. In the 33 years since he accepted that Oscar from Liz Taylor, Stone has had more hits Wall Street and its sequel Money Never Sleeps, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK some failures, a second divorce, a third marriage and plenty of controversy. He's been labelled a conspiracy theorist, an apologist for America's antagonists including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin and a defender of an official enemy of the state, Edward Snowden. It's been a hell of a life.

So sure, let's lead with the book, which is a rollicking tale full of highs and lows, a little gossip (Al Pacino is a bit of a slippery customer; Midnight Express director Alan Parker a cold fish), and lots of "do what I say, not what I did" advice for aspiring filmmakers. But let's also acknowledge that trying to separate the book and its author from politics might ultimately prove a futile exercise.

Stone was the only child of a French Catholic mother and an American Jewish father (of Polish extraction) who met in Paris at the end of the war, sailed back to New York when peace was declared and attempted to make a life of it despite their vast differences in temperament.

His father, Louis, was a stockbroker, and pretty good at it, though he never owned anything because, Stone writes, doing so "involved Pride, which came before the Fall". He liked to write, too both poetry and the investor newsletter he maintained until near the end of his life and encouraged young Oliver to do likewise, paying him 25 cents a piece when he was just seven to write "about anything you want".

"Make it two pages, three," he would tell him. "Just tell a story."

If it is Louis that Stone credits with making him a writer, it is his mother, Jacqueline, who gave rise to the director. She was vivacious, outgoing, loved to party. She made things happen.

Late at night, Jacqueline would crawl into bed with her young son for a cuddle. "Yes, it's true, her 'sexy' manner may have given me a hidden desire for my mother," Stone writes in one of the book's frequent passages of self-analysis. "Possibly I adored her too much, but I'd prefer this fate to the cold, queer dislike or distrust of women I see in some men."

Stone with second wife Liz on their wedding day in 1981. Full of drugs at the time, Stone writes, 'I don't even remember the moment we exchanged vows'.Credit:Courtesy Oliver Stone

His childhood was charmed, at least on the surface. Prep school, summers in France with his grandparents, the prospect of a gilded life in East Coast society. But when his parents divorced at 15, it all fell apart.

"Everything I'd believed up till then about my life that there could be security, love and happiness between people turned out to be a lie," he writes. "The pain of it is still palpable almost 60 years on.''

Given the centrality of deceit in Stone's work over the years, it is hard not to see this as the defining moment of his life. There have been others of course, most notably his experience as a GI in Vietnam in 1967-68, which opened his eyes to the insanity of war. The making of Salvador almost 20 years later inspired him to join the dots between America's involvement in south-east Asia and its misadventures in Central America, and to find the corrupting influence of the military-industrial complex behind both.

But psychologically speaking, these were arguably echoes of that first monumental betrayal.

"I was a child of divorce, and the split between my parents deeply affected me," Stone tells me. "No brothers, no sisters, any sense of family dissolved. We were all in different spheres. So I was on my own at 15. It was a strange feeling."

He spent the rest of his teens drifting, lost, and after failed stabs at college and at novel-writing, he enlisted for Vietnam, aged 20. He was driven, he writes, by "very dark thoughts if I didn't have the courage to take my own life, perhaps God, in whom I was raised to believe, would take it for me".

There's some self-dramatisation in this, for sure. Stone says his memoir "is also a novel", a belated successor in some respects to A Child's Night Dream, written when he was 19, published in 1997, and ostensibly to be adapted for the screen by his son, Sean. "I mean, you've got to keep it moving, you've got to keep it relevant. You've got to keep it entertaining."

But it also acknowledges the general reality that for young men, that phase of life is often, as he writes, "a dangerous time".

Stone on the Philippines set of Platoon.Credit:Ricky Francisco

Stone's Vietnam reality included one all-night firefight that left hundreds dead, but which he processed in his mind "as a stunningly beautiful night full of fireworks a dream through which I'd walked unharmed, grateful of course, but numb and puzzled by it all".

Emerging from the war, he began writing screenplays about it, trying to make sense of what he'd seen and of its strange and lingering after-effects. He enrolled in film school and made a short film called Last Year in Vietnam, which his tutor, a young former student named Martin Scorsese, hailed as proof that here was a real filmmaker. "Why?" Scorsese asked rhetorically. "Because it's personal. You feel like the person who's making it is living it."

In 1976, Stone began working on another Vietnam story, The Platoon. A decade later, he would get to film this mythic tale of a good sergeant (Willem Dafoe) and a bad sergeant (Tom Berenger) and the naive young GI (Charlie Sheen) caught between them. Along the way, he would also direct two feature films that few saw and that most who did would write off as failures (Seizure, The Hand), win an Oscar for screenwriting (Midnight Express) and enjoy soaring highs and crashing lows.

If there's a moral to his tale, I suggest, it surely has something to do with persistence, with never giving up no matter how many times you crash to the floor.

Yes, he agrees, "but what else could I do?"

By that, he means he didn't have his father's gift for numbers, nor a taste for the "respectable" life that briefly beckoned during his first marriage, when the possibility of going into business and "making an accommodation" hovered on the horizon.

He was driven to write and, later, to direct, and from the moment his eyes were opened in Vietnam and he began his long, slow emergence from "being a conservative, like my father, Republican", he was driven to put what he'd learnt in front of his fellow Americans whether they liked it or not.

"I'm certainly attacking nerve centres," Stone says of his body of work. "And I enjoy it. I think we need films like that."

Increasingly, he's doing it in the documentary format because making features has become too much of a struggle. "It's very hard to do a film; it takes so much energy, and I'm 73 going on 74," he says. "It's nice to have a little joy in life, not to have to worry, tension and all that and being judged all the time, questioned."

He's working on a film about JFK, and another on energy. His most recent release, screened on Showtime in 2017, was the four-part sitdown interview with Vladimir Putin, a man he feels has been entirely misrepresented by Western media.

He's proud of the film, as well as earlier documentaries on Venezuela's late socialist president Hugo Chavez and Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul.

"Those films are so well done," he says. "I mean, they're real. Those guys expose themselves, they feel they're telling their truth, and that's very important. One day somebody serious, a historian, will look at them with a different light, not as [framed by] America's Cold War policy, you know.

"The fight against Castro and Chavez and Putin has been uncredible and has distorted the values of this country enormously."

He heaps equal Shakespearean-infused disdain upon Hillary Clinton "Lady Macbeth, the killer; she's a war hawk, man" as he does Donald Trump, whom he dismisses as a "mad King Lear, 'which daughter loves me more', that kind of thing''.

"The guy doesn't sleep, he doesn't exercise, he keeps the strangest schedule I've ever seen," he adds of the President. "He just needs to fuel the flames. I don't think he has time to think. He seems to have a very hard-wired redneck policy on immigration, plus the environment, plus Iran. I don't see anything progressive. And the thugs he appoints to be around him!"

But no one has done more to undermine democratic values than the younger George Bush, he insists. "He totally overreacted to 9/11. We became another country. I mean, we always loved to kick ass, but we became seriously aggressive, doubting of ourselves and suspicious of dissent."

Stone doesn't have another narrative feature in development right now. But what he does have is another volume of memoir, maybe two.

Stone with Vladimir Putin. 'One day somebody serious, a historian, will look at it', he says of his four-hour interview with the Russian leader.Credit:AP

"Why not," he says with a chuckle. "Doctor Faustus is three volumes, isn't it? It's my deal with the devil."

He's been keeping detailed journals since around 1982, and he has "1000 pages of notes" towards the second book. But he won't start writing it until he's finished with those two documentaries and can dedicate himself fully to the task.

"Frankly, I am really looking forward to tearing apart those diaries from 1986 on, because there's so much that happened so fast so many films, so many awards, so much success and failure," he says.

"I can't remember that much of it, and I'm going to be shocked to death, which makes it fun. 'Shit, man. I did this. I did that.' It's like rediscovering your country."

Chasing The Light is released on July 28. Hachette Australia, $35.Follow the author on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin

Karl Quinn is a senior culture writer at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Excerpt from:
'Please don't make this about politics': Oliver Stone gets personal - Sydney Morning Herald

A stop sign is in front of the sign of the Court of Justice of the European Union. (REUTERS)

In a sweeping judgment on July 16, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) summarily demolished the fragile legal peace that has prevailed for the last four years on the subject of transatlantic data transfers. The ruling has major geopolitical implications not only for the EUs commercial relations with the United States, but also for unrestricted European data flows to other countries with serious surveillance capacities, from the United Kingdom and Israel in the European neighborhood to authoritarian states farther afield such as Russia and China.

The case, known as Schrems II, marks the second time in five years that the CJEU has effectively invalidated a major US-EU agreement used by thousands of companiesEuropean as well as American, small as well as largefor transferring personal data in the commercial context from the European Union to the United States. The Court did so after finding a series of deficiencies in privacy protections for non-Americans under US surveillance law.

The European Union and the United States had agreed upon the Privacy Shield in 2016, and the European Commission duly found that it provided an adequate level of protection for data transferred from Europe to participating companies in the United States. But the CJEU, which insists that foreign privacy safeguards be essentially equivalent to those provided under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), saw otherwise.

The Court concentrated its attention on the two main US legal authorities for conducting surveillance of foreign personsSection 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and Executive Order 12333. Neither of these offer surveilled foreign persons a mechanism to seek judicial redress or review in US courts, the CJEU pointed out. A substitute mechanism included in the Privacy Shield to provide administrative redress (the Ombudsperson) also failed to pass muster with the Court because it was not independent of the US executive and had not been granted the power to order the intelligence community to remedy a foreigners complaint.

The Courts unstated message to the United States was readily apparent: any future agreement to replace Privacy Shield must provide actionable rights of redress for Europeans, or it will be similarly struck down. In the meantime, companies participating in the Privacy Shield must scurry to find alternative legal means for their transatlantic data flows.

Oddly, the Schrems II case was not even supposed to be about the Privacy Shield. Max Schrems, the young Austrian privacy activist who brought the action against Facebook, had asked the CJEU only to determine whether standard contract clauses, the other principal transfer mechanism for commercial data, were consistent with EU privacy law. Another privacy activist, La Quadrature du Net, separately had filed a challenge to Privacy Shield that was pending at the CJEUs lower instance, the General Court. The CJEU decided to decide the two matters together, however, because of the shared underlying questions relating to US surveillance.

Standard clauses, which are widely used on a global basis, oblige companies embarking on an international transfer to accord the data in question privacy protections that have been deemed sufficient by European privacy authorities. But, like Privacy Shield, these contractual protections do not prevent the receiving state from demanding access to transferred data for national security reasons.

The only good news to emerge for companies from Schrems II was that the CJEU did not simultaneously invalidate the use of standard contract clauses in transatlantic commerce. Instead, it heldrather improbablythat individual companies are in a position to impose additional safeguards to ensure adequate protection against surveillance for data they transfer. European national data protection authorities (DPAs), who have jurisdiction over the implementation of standard clauses, are to exercise their powers to suspend or prohibit specific data transfers not meeting this standard.

This theoretical prospect runs squarely into the Courts holding on Privacy Shield, however: US surveillance laws were conclusively found in that context not to afford judicial remedies for Europeans who believe they may have been surveilled by the National Security Agency (NSA). We now can expect to see a steady stream of challenges by European DPAs to standard clauses, beginning in Ireland with Facebooks data transfers to the United States that Max Schrems had challenged. The results will be piecemeal and take some time to arrive, but the ultimate conclusion is already obviousmany transfers pursuant to standard clauses will be blocked because of US surveillance law.

The GDPRs architecture for international data transfers do not offer companies good alternatives to standard clauses. The Court suggests they obtain consent from individuals for every data transfer, but that plainly is unworkable for big companies like cloud service providers that engage in systematic transfers to the United States. Many companies may decide simply to keep European-origin data in Europe; cloud providers, for example, already have invested enormous sums in building server farms on the Continent. At a minimum, data localization will add costs and technical complexity. Max Schrems himself has already suggested that localization is the answer, and the European cloud industry doubtless will trumpet the same message.

Companies now will have to rapidly assess how vulnerable data they send across the Atlantic under standard clauses is to US surveillance. Some categories, such as human resources data, are probably inherently not of much interest to the NSA, but communications records are presumably in a different category. Encrypting data also could frustrate the NSA, at least in certain circumstances.

For the time being, data transfers from Europe to the United States likely will continue unaffected under standard clauses. The EUs Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has pledged to quickly develop guidance for companies on the changed legal environment. National DPAs could launch investigations against prominent US companies, but, if past practice holds, may forbear from definitive enforcement action until the US government and the EU can jointly figure out a way forward. US companies will need steady nerves during this uncertain interim period, since DPAs possess the eye-popping power to impose fines of up to 4 percent of a companys global revenue for violations of the GDPR.

Its not the first time that companies find themselves in this spot: something similar occurred in 2015 after the CJEU overturned the US-EU Safe Harbor Framework, the predecessor to Privacy Shield. Being caught between expansive US surveillance laws and expansive EU privacy norms is, in any event, not a comfortable spot for companies. They also have reason to feel aggrieved that the CJEU essentially has commanded them to undertake private reconciliation of these conflicting legal requirements.

The US government and the European Union face a hard road ahead in responding to the Schrems II judgment. Transatlantic commerce, already reeling from the pandemic, now faces another potential severe challenge. US industry and Congress will press the administration hard to seek yet another negotiated solution, but the COVID-19 pandemic will impede face-to-face discussions with Brussels. More fundamentally, the administration may balk at complying with what amounts to a foreign judicial demand to change US surveillance law. National security hawks may see an opportunity, in an election season, to call for an aggressive US response. The domestic timing could hardly be worse.

The view from other states with robust surveillance apparatus is also ominous. The United Kingdom urgently needs a data transfer deal with the EU before the Brexit transition period expires at the end of the year. Its surveillance authorities surpass those of the United States in some respects, andunlike in most of continental Europethey are transparently written into law. EU negotiators now have additional ammunition to demand that the UK change its law to improve redress possibilities for surveilled EU citizens.

Israel already enjoys an EU adequacy finding, conferred at a time when the European Commission did not look closely into foreign surveillance laws. At some point, the Commission will have to revisit that decision in light of Schrems II. Data transfers to Israel under standard clauses could be challenged before DPAs at any time.

The hardest case for the EU will be China. Commercial data flows from the EU to China are already large, with annual exports of more than 200 billion. Chinese cloud providers and social media are deepening their European presence, and European manufacturers are constantly exchanging data with their Chinese facilities. Yet Chinas privacy protections are not at Western level, and its surveillance authorities enjoy wide-ranging powers. Can a German car manufacturer really be expected to assess Chinas surveillance laws and interrupt data flowing there under standard contract clauses? Is a German state data protection authority any better placed to make that decision? Clearly, Brussels ultimately will have to balance the CJEUs strict privacy jurisprudence against the economic and diplomatic costs.

If there is a silver lining, it is that the European Union eventually will have to refashion an accommodation between privacy and surveillance that does not impede commerceand do so on a global basis. In 2013, Edward Snowden turned the spotlight on US surveillance, and Washington and Brussels since have struggled to find a privacy equilibrium. Chinas economic dominance, together with its newly-assertive foreign policy, means that the EU cannot any longer consider data transfers to be just a transatlantic quarrel. The global geopolitical consequences of the Schrems II judgment are just beginning.

Kenneth Propp is a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Councils Future Europe Initiative.

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Return of the transatlantic privacy war - Atlantic Council

A series of recently-released emails show that officials with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) once suggested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) might care to talk about NPRs use of encryption to accept news tips to public radio reporters.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the suggestion to ask law enforcement about public radios newsgathering practices was made to one of NPRs rivals in the media industry: the far-right One America News Network (OANN).

Emails obtained by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) journalist Jason Leopold show the order of events.

Can you find out if DOJ is cool with NPR running a Tor-enabled tip email? OANN reporter Neil McCabe asked DOJs Office of Public Affairs (OPA) Director Lauren Ehrsam Gorey in April 2018.

Ehrsam did not personally field the question, per the email released under FOIA, but added OPAs then-principal deputy director Ian Prior because he handles national security questions.

You should reach out to FBI for this, Prior wrote.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports internet privacy rights and civil liberties, Tor is a network and a software package that helps you anonymously use the Internet. Specifically Tor hides the source and destination of your Internet traffic, this prevents anyone from knowing both who you are and what you are looking at (though they may know one or the other). Tor also hides the destination of your traffic, which can circumvent some forms of censorship.

The software-network combination has, for years, been widely used by journalists and news organizations to keep digital information and identities secureparticularly when dealing with sources who have apprehensions about sharing their information. Whistleblower and dissident Edward Snowden famously used Tor to send information to various media outlets in 2013.

The privacy tool is generally not in disfavor with the U.S. government. In fact, Tors development was largely funded and developed by U.S. government agencies and research grants.

Whats more bizarre about the emails is that OANNs McCabe attempted to link the rules which he says govern military public affairs officers to NPRs news-gathering efforts.

McCabe offered the following information on background:

In Army public affairs, the reason public affairs soldiers do not break stories about crimes or corruption is that the Army actually has its own police force and detectives, the MPs [sic]. That makes it absurd that some reporter at an Army newspaper would be running down crimesrather, as soon as a public affairs soldier becomes aware of wrongdoing, he is supposed to report it to the authorities.

How is it then, that federal government employees could be running their own private silo for information about crimes or national security risks? his email continues.

The OANN reporter was apparently operating under the misapprehension that NPR employees are federal government employees. Though NPR was created by an act of Congress and is subsidized in small part by the government, the vast majority of its funding comes from membership fees. The organization itself is structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation under the tax code, and its employees, therefore, do not work for the government and certainly not for the military.

Is DOJ synched [sic] up with NPR for reports of crimes or national security risks? McCabe asked. Does NPR enjoy any of the journalistic privileges that would protect sources or methods?

This is hack journalism of the highest order, Leopold, of Buzzfeed News, said on Twitter.

That characterization got McCabes attention.

Wait, he tweeted back. What is the problem with this inquiry? How did I become a hack over this? Not every inquiry is a gold mine, I was being pro-active and curious. Can I have my card back?

A smallish vanguard of information-armed individuals quickly chimed in by criticizing McCabe for his suggestion that NPRs employees are somehow likable to agents of federal law enforcement.

To which McCabe responded:

No. It doesnt.

Law&Crime reached out to NPR for a reaction. No response was forthcoming at the time of publication. If a response is received, it will be included here.

[Image via SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images.]

Have a tip we should know? [emailprotected]

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Emails Show Dept. of Justice Suggested OANN Should Call the FBI About Software Used by NPR to Accept News Tips - Law & Crime

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Re Amid Multiple Crises, Weakened Liberals Face An Uncertain Future (July 21): To columnist John Ibbitsons witty Lady Bracknell reference from The Importance of Being Ernest might we also add Algernons comment, which nearly sums up the WE Charity mess? The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Michael Kaczorowski Ottawa

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Re Abandoned And Coerced (Opinion, July 18): Contributor Wesley Warks views on a Huawei ban, along with the latest numbers from Globe pollster Nik Nanos on Meng Wanzhou and the imprisoned Canadians (Canada Is Stuck Between Its Former Rock And An Increasingly Hard Place Opinion, July 18), will hopefully lead to an urgent review of government policy on Canada-China relations and an immediate solution to freeing Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, no matter how embarrassing.

Mr. Wark also strongly demonstrates the limits of Canadian sovereignty in regards to foreign policy. On practically every important international issue, predominance seems almost exclusively given to narrow national security considerations, and how decisions will affect our membership in the Five Eyes network. This should not go on indefinitely.

I find it urgent that we create a national foreign policy framework. Otherwise, national security considerations, often fallacious as Mr. Wark mentions, will invariably prevail.

Marc Faguy Former Canadian ambassador; Ottawa

Re Why Is It Even A Question Whether To Let Huawei Into Our 5G Networks? (Opinion, July 18): Columnist Andrew Coyne refers to experts who believe that Huawei technology would pose a serious threat to Canadas national security. But as far as I know, there has been no public evidence of this.

Elsewhere, columnist Eric Reguly points out that the United States has offered no evidence that Huawei is a spy for the Chinese government (Shutting Huawei Out Of Big Western Markets Will Spur Innovation Report on Business, July 18). On the other hand, we have abundant evidence from Edward Snowden that U.S. companies such as Microsoft have collaborated closely with the U.S. National Security Agency to intercept customer communications.

Government officials should provide the public with credible evidence that Huaweis equipment would be used for spying. Unless that happens, its going to be hard to shake the feeling that this uproar is all about helping the U.S. damage a company that has been called an indispensable telecoms company.

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Bill Rupert Toronto

Re Why Do Bad Police So Rarely Lose Their Jobs? (Editorial, July 20): The hallmark of professions is that they are often self-regulated and self-governing until trust is broken. I would not call police service a profession in the traditional meaning of the word, but they are self-regulating in that police oversight and discipline seems to be managed by other police.

This rather cozy arrangement leads to numerous examples of police protecting police, even when egregious examples of behaviour take place. Time for it to stop.

David Collins Victoria

The issue of police accountability brings to mind the conduct of the Catholic Church in regards to priests who abused children. In many cases, confronted by complaints, the Church reassigned delinquent priests rather than defrock them. This continued for decades until accountability finally caught up with the practice.

Perhaps when victims of police misconduct achieve civil and monetary redress in the courts, governments might be encouraged to change our various Police Acts to prevent the shielding of rogue police officers. Shannon Phillips might be a good test case, since evidence that her rights were violated by police officers who were demoted but not dismissed is now public.

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Manuel Buchwald Toronto

Re Police Policing (July 20): How about giving independent, municipally elected civilian boards control of investigations into complaints against police? This would ensure that victimized communities can elect publicly accountable representatives to protect them, and finally allow accusers the opportunity to confront alleged police offenders.

Harry Kopyto Toronto

Re Calls Grow For TPS To Drop Charges Against Protesters (July 20): I recognize Black Lives Matter as a timely and important protest movement, but we should not allow it to result in vandalism and other illegal actions. We should support police when they enforce laws which are designed to protect us.

If certain statues or other memorials are now offensive to many people, we should follow a thoughtful process to determine whether or not they should be removed. I certainly have my own views, as do others, and we should be entitled to express those views to determine an appropriate course of action.

Over the years, we have found ways to resolve difficult social issues with mutual respect and consideration. Lets give our institutions, and ourselves, time to properly consider the best course of action, then lets all support it.

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Thankfully, we live in Canada and not anywhere else.

Eric Slavens Toronto

Re Toronto Mayor Urges Ontario To Add More Restrictions In Reopening Citys Bars, Restaurants (July 20): Say what you will about Canadians, one of our defining national traits is that we are generally quite good at following the rules. Tell us to line up and we do, ask that we stay at home and we will, require us to wear masks indoors and most of us comply without hesitation.

So it is, or should be, with the reopening of bars and restaurants across the land. The problem is, in Ontario at least, that we are not getting clear and precise guidance. Judging from my conversations with owners and operators, they are being fed a patchwork of directives from provincial and municipal sources, with one sometimes contradicting the other, while we patrons are not told anything at all.

We would like to have dinner out or meet friends for a (safe) drink, but we have to be told what to expect and how we should comply. Communication and clarity are, as ever, critical to the safe and secure reopening of our hospitality sector.

Stephen Beaumont Author and hospitality consultant, Toronto

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Re A Steep Climb To COVID Recovery and A Virus Of Many Symptoms: Survivors Share Their Stories (July 21): Its easy to find data on COVID-19, but theres nothing like first-person accounts to bring the horrors of this disease to the fore. The survival stories of these young people show that being sideswiped by COVID-19 is far from a cakewalk. We should continue to double-down on distancing, mask-wearing and hand-washing.

I wish Becca, Dwayne, Heather, Kevin and Carrie full recoveries.

Nancy Hill Hamilton

Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Try to keep letters to fewer than 150 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com

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July 22: The issue of police accountability brings to mind the conduct of the Catholic Church. Readers debate police oversight in Canada, plus other...

In my last column, I wrote that the European Union (EU) has been leading the way in data privacy, China in censoring and surveilling citizens, and America in having legislative hearings to determine how much US Big Tech can get away with.

Last week, Mint reported that the European Unions top court struck down a key method called Privacy Shield, used by Facebook Inc. and other companies to transfer data across the Atlantic, amid fears over potential surveillance by the United States. With impeccable comedic timing, news simultaneously leaked out that US President Donald Trump has secretly given the Central Intelligence Agency more powers to launch cyberattacks against countries like China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. This could include other nations as well, at least according to a former US government official quoted in the news report here.

The scrapping of Privacy Shield means that over 5,000 businesses that ship useful European data to the US will have their activities in disarray. They will have to structure a new arrangement for such data to continue to flow. It is worthwhile to note that Privacy Shield was itself put together after the earlier arrangement called Safe Harbor was struck down by the same court for the same reasons in 2015.

As long as computing clouds" were small, such free data transfers by companies between nation states they operated in did not pose a threat. No one noticed until leaks by Edward Snowden revealed widespread cyber spying by Americas spooks. It was only after those 2013 leaks did individual governments start to understand the relevance of such data infrastructure to their security and data economies. The original Safe Harbor for trade in EU-US data was itself a result of increased EU activism after Snowdens revelations.

Enough has been written and said about Indias decision to ban 59 Chinese apps that were collecting data from Indians to train Chinese Big Techs algorithms. People have poked fun at this decision on social media platforms. Yet, the truth is that the Indian governments decision is brilliant. If the ban stands, it will have a significant negative impact on the speed at which Chinese Big Tech is catching up with US Big Tech. Indian digital data is very valuable to both US and Chinese Big Techand, of course, to home-grown data giants such as Reliances Jio Platforms.

Speaking of data generation and collection, the fact that many builders of data algorithms are still very dependent on manual labour is not something that Big Tech likes to admit. I have written before of the tribulations faced by human beings who act as filters and have to pore over horrific videos to keep them off social media sites such as Facebook.

But manual labour in the digital space does not stop with real-time censors. All sorts of artificial intelligence algorithms, such as those needed for self-driving cars, need to be trained by humans who can exercise judgement to label pictures. Manual processes are also needed for, say, exceptional cases of mundane matters such as invoices that automation vendors offerings are unable to deal with. The Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, which should by now have been automated out of existence, is still alive due to this. In fact, BPO still thrives because it has used the automation of lesser tasks to pivot into tasks that are less repetitive and therefore less amenable to automation.

Countries such as those of the European bloc, the US, Russia, China, India and several others are all likely to respond with uncoordinated national moves around data protection. This has not escaped the attention of international associations. For instance, last July, the Osaka track" was formed after the G-20 met in Osaka, Japan, to thrash out global rules that could govern data traffic in a way that would allow the free flow of data with trust"whatever that means.

In my opinion, it is unlikely that in the post-covid scenario, nations will arrive at a coordinated plan on how to handle data. It is even less likely that they would follow the rules, even allowing for a fairy-tale scenario that they could actually create a coordinated set of data tenets to live by.

It is more likely that we will see a greater wave of nationalism over each countrys data throw-off" from its citizens. Data is now synonymous with national interest, and we will see a protectionist environment in the short to medium term. This does not bode well for global trade. The 5,000-plus firms that are dependent on the shipping of data from the EU to the United States might find a workable solution to the problem that the EU courts 16 July decision has created for them. But there is nothing to stop the same court from dismantling the new agreement in future.

Meanwhile, China began censoring what its citizens can read, see and hear on the web and shut down data flows from that country long before Snowdens 2013 expose. In hindsight, Chinas censors now look like expert long-range economic planners. After some years of protracted negotiations between data trading blocs and nations, we might see the equivalent of the World Trade Organization, which was set up for the trade of goods, come into being for the information age. Until then, we may have to live with the lowest common denominator of tit for tat.

Siddharth Pai is founder of Siana Capital, a venture fund management company focused on deep science and tech in India

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Opinion | Data nationalism could hobble the worlds progress - Livemint

In December, a nonbinding opinion from an advocate general at the court upheld the legality of the SCCs. But the opinion, which will not necessarily be followed by the court, was much more critical about Privacy Shield, which came into force in 2016 and gave Europeans a greater say over how their digital information was used by American authorities once it had been moved to the U.S.

Europeans have long complained that U.S. surveillance means their data is not safe from snooping when it's transferred across the Atlantic. A blow against Privacy Shield would ratchet up tensions between Brussels and Washington at a time when Donald Trump's administration is already lashing out against the EU's privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, and threatening to hit EU countries with billions of dollars in tariffs over digital taxes.

But it's not just relations with the U.S. that could take a hit on Thursday. EU privacy hawks are increasingly turning their attention to the perceived risk of snooping from Beijing, with several privacy probes targeting ByteDance-owned social media app TikTok, and a court battle in Germany shining an unflattering light on 5G-vendor Huawei's data protection practices.

Underscoring Europe's increasing preoccupation with the world's most populous country, top EU privacy watchdog Wojciech Wiewirowski told POLITICO last week that he feared more for data that was destined for China than the U.S. which he said was "much closer" to the EU in terms of values.

Even with all the years of cooperation with the U.S., [data transfers] can be a problem in the courts How to comment about countries that dont observe the same values? he said, in a nod to the case that will be decided upon on Thursday.

The case being decided this week in Luxembourg stems back to a complaint by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems filed in 2013 against Facebook. He argued that revelations of widespread American snooping by whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that EU data hoovered up by the social media company was not safe in the U.S.

The complaint led to the EU's top court in 2015 nixing a data transfer agreement between the U.S. and the EU known as Safe Harbor, later replaced by the Privacy Shield.

However, Schrems complained that fundamental issues with America's surveillance regime remained even under Privacy Shield, urging regulators to veto Facebook's use of SCCs to transfer data across the Atlantic.

The case ended up in the Luxembourg court again after Ireland's Data Protection Commission the privacy regulator in charge of overseeing Facebook in Europe refused to nix the social media company's data transfers.

Instead, the Irish regulator called for judges to invalidate SCCs in general, broadening out the case far beyond Facebook. Both Schrems and Facebook maintain that SCCs are valid.

Privacy Shield is an updated version of the illegal Safe Harbor. Nothing in U.S. surveillance law was changed or fixed," he said last December.

The European Commission and U.S. officials maintain the Privacy Shield improves privacy protections.

The rest is here:
The E.U. court ruling that could blow up digital trade and U.S. surveillance - Politico