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 Swarchstrauber, your host. Joining me in our DC

studio is Donald Trump fanboy and president of Tech Freedom, Baron Soka. Baron, thank you for joining me.

Best one yet. Thanks, Evan. Thursday was a bad day for privacy as the Senate stalled on a key

opportunity to repair America's reputation in Europe.

The Judicial Redress Act failed to make it out of committee.

We'll have more on that later.

But ever since Edward Snowden's revelations about U.S. surveillance in 2013,

our government has done little to nothing to address the problems.

And in response, the ECJ, the European Court of Justice, which is like Europe's Supreme Court,

struck down the agreement that allowed U.S. Internet companies to serve European users and vice versa.

So this agreement known as Safe Harbor, why is it important?

Well, since 2000, the European Union had recognized the adequacy of U.S. privacy protections. And essentially it said that

U.S. companies had a safe harbor from prosecution by the European data protection authorities.

In other words, without the safe harbor agreement, any American company could be held

liable by any European privacy regulator for how it used the private data that it held

about European users.

And we're not just talking about advertising profiles and so on.

We're talking about really anything.

European privacy law has been

interpreted very, very expansively to the point where, just for example, someone who posted something

about someone in their church, having had a broken leg, was held to have violated European privacy law.

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