EU Fails to Build on Data Privacy Success

ByLeonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg View

Back in October, a stubborn Austrian law student got the top European court to invalidate the European Union’s “safe harbor” agreement with the U.S., which allowed 4,700 American tech companies to transfer EU citizens’ private data to the U.S. without any safeguards. Now bureaucrats in Brussels are essentially rendering the judgment meaningless.

As Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistle-blower who alerted the world to the dangers of indiscriminate U.S. electronic surveillance put it in a tweet , “EU capitulates totally on safe harbor. Interesting, given that they held all the cards.”

The Austrian ...