Welcome to the tech policy podcast, your source for policy rants and raves from tech freedom,

your Washington, D.C. advocate for the freedom to tinker and innovate. I'm Evan Schwargerger

your host. On today's show, your hypocrisy. Is Europe's backlash against U.S. government surveillance hypocritical?

Should the European Union be looking at its own practices rather than focusing so much on ours?

Joining me in our DC studio to discuss this is Stuart Baker.

He's a partner at Steptoin Johnson, and before that he was the first assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security.

Stuart, thank you for joining me.

It's a pleasure to be here.

And you should check out Stewart's own podcast. It's called Stepto Cyber Law.

And you can find it on the iTunes store or your favorite podcast. Yes, you can.

So, Stuart, we've talked about this on the podcast before, but to bring

listeners up to speed, in October, the European Court of Justice, Europe's highest court

struck down an agreement known as Safe Harbor. And since the year 2000, that agreement

enabled tech companies to send data across the Atlantic. And that was arguably critical to their success.

And what led to the agreement being struck down was an Austrian law student named Max Schrems

brought a case against Facebook saying that Facebook could not assure him that the NSA and other

intelligence agencies in the United States were not accessing as information,

so that the United States' privacy protections were inadequate.

Now, you had an op-ed recently in The Washington Post called the Your Apocracy Prize,

coming soon, and you argue that this obsession, this data protection dogma in the United States,

is hypocritical. How so?

So it's pretty straightforward. European law was designed to say essentially we need to be

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