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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

"Trittin said that in response to the latest revelations, the EU should suspend exchanging banking and flight data with the United States."

I wasn't aware the US actually "exchanges" any passenger data with the EU. I thought it's just EU giving them the data. So he probably means "EU needs to stop giving data to US".

Usually, these deals are one-sided, in that they only serve US.

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> Usually, these deals are one-sided, in that they only serve US.

Then why would the EU enter into them?

So that the US can do the "dirty work".

We give the data to the US and, of course, the US only uses the data to fight terrorism.

I think our politicians knew that the US was doing more with the data than they said. But since this kind of data usage is not really aceptable in large parts of the EU we simply gave the data to the US to get the job done.

Then the politicians could say "we are not using your data and the US is only using it to fight terrorism" but in fact there was much more going on and everybody knew that.

Not sure what you're implying here. The EU gives data to the US about Europeans flying to the US. Then the US does the EU's dirt work? And after this "dirty work" is processed does the US play the data back to the EU?

Yes. That is what I am saying. It is not only the data about europeans flying to the US. The US also knows almost every bank transaction made via SWIFT...

Same thing with the US and "enhanced interrogation". We can say: "oh, we just gave that prisoner to the Saudis and they promised they would treat him appropriately and really, really not torture him, Scout's honor... They did seem to get some information from him that we weren't able to get, though, not sure how. Maybe something was lost in translation..."

Do you have a source for your last two statements?

The idea that European intelligence agencies aren't interested in any data that the US could give them seems absurd.

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