EIF Dinner Debate: “Open Data”

by Andrew Griffin

The EIF (European Internet Foundation) hosted a dinner debate on Open Data, also known as the Public Sector Information (PSI), at the  European Parliament, Brussels on Tuesday 24^th January 2012. Attendees came from a broad range of commerce (including Microsoft, Facebook and Google), education, NGOs, national and regional government departments, and the European Commission and European Parliament.  The event was hosted by MEP and EIF governor Marietje Schaake, and led by three speakers: Marcus Dapp who drove an innovative open data project for the City of Munich, Richard Swetenham who heads the Access to Information unit of DG Information Society at the European Commission, and Willem van Valkenburg who is director of Delft University’s OpenCourseWare project. A link to the EIF event site and speaker podcast is here and we have added further reference links at the bottom of this article.

Summary

Such an “obviously” good idea

Just about everyone agrees open data  is a good idea, but some public bodies are resistant to change, or perhaps to the release of data whose quality would be put in question if viewed by a wider audience. Talking to a group of delegates after the dinner it was pointed out that opening up data would mean that mistakes would be spotted more quickly. Half the group thought this a good thing, half thought it bad! This, it seems, is the main barrier to opening up of public data.

But need evidence to persuade reluctant public bodies

Public sector attendees’ main plea was for examples and case studies that they could take back to persuade their departments to release data. The private sector, especially the start-up space, is well aware of apps and businesses that have sprung up on the back of publicly available data, but it seems these have not been collated anywhere for public servants to peruse. PolicyBloggers has done some digging and come up with a starter-resource for anyone needing examples, at the end of this article.

Copyright probably a non-issue except in education

The issue of copyright was often raised during the evening, but it seems this worry is misplaced. Data, as opposed to human-created content, is not copyrightable. Time is wasted issuing data under a creative commons license that has no standing in law. Departments can charge a reasonable fee for provision of data, especially if its collection into publishable form adds to their costs, or if it is requested at a faster pace than needed by the department. In education, there is an opportunity to open up publicly funded research. Existing research publications fund just 2% of their content and often take copyright of their articles in exchange for them being published in a prestigious journal. Coincident to the event, we see academics beginning to boycott some research publications.

Open data, or Public Sector Information (PSI)

Open Data refers to the release of public sector data, often called Public Sector Information (PSI), by public departments or public funded bodies.  Open data means any data collected by, or whose creation is funded by, public institutions. Examples mentioned during the debate include the release of weather information in the Netherlands spurring mobile apps telling you if it is safe to go shopping without your raincoat; data on Netherlands’ schools mashed up with a social network allowing parents to compare notes; land registry data in the UK and Spain; live bus and metro information in London and New York City and the creation of “open data” cities such as Munich. It could also mean the opening up of research data from universities that is funded by public money, or of digital art collections, or of aggregated demographic or financial or tax data held by public institutions.

What the European Commission is doing

The re-use of PSI has become a high priority for the EU, having garnered little attention at first. As Richard Swetenham noted, “open data is so obviously a good idea, how can you be against it?”. Swetenham  outlined the commisson’s work to date. The November 2003 PSI directive outlined fair commercial reuse policies. Some public data is by nature a monopoly, so this has to be commercialised in a fair, non-discriminatory way. The directive worked, well, but not well enough and so a new proposal to amend and reinforce is being worked on.

The scope of the directive is being extended to cultural heritage including libraries, museums and archives. Publicly funded academic research will also be addressed.

Open Data in Munich

Marcus Dapp, whose background included research on open source software, led the first city open data project in Germany. He identified pride at being the first city to open up as being one of the drivers behind the decision. The project was a success but had some interesting learning points.

He emphasised the need to reach out to the community on what it wanted well before the project started. Talking to him afterwards, he noted that the release of individual house sale price information, which is now freely available online in the UK, would not be tolerated by German citizens.

His main issue with the process was measurement of success and the difficulty in persuading public sector management to release data. Tangible and also intangible (social return on investment, SROI) measures should be proposed up front. One group of citizens demanded the city’s financial accounts in digital form. The City pointed out that it published an online 500 page PDF of its accounts, but this wasn’t acceptable to the group and in the end the high level accounts data were published.

Opening up Education

Willem van Valkenburg made the point that much more could be addressed in the directive on the subject of education. Each narrow sub-sector of academic research has its preferred publications, and the publishers make use of the exclusivity and reputation enhancement of being cited to charge for inclusion and, surprisingly, retain copyright on published articles. He estimates that only 2% of research publication content is actually funded by those publications, with the bulk of the cost coming from public purses. In an online age this seems ripe for disruption. True, publications have rigorous selection processes, but even these are driven by groups of often unpaid academics, also funded by the public. A few days before the event, mathematician Timothy Gowers sparked a heated debate in the press by blogging about his boycott of one academic publisher.

But there is a less tangible angle to open data in education, and that is the opening up of coursework materials. OpenCourseWare at Delft University has 20,000 courses freely available and often used outside the EU. An example is Delft’s water management course, used in Indonesia and Africa, which in turn fed back local case studies that now enrich the course content. Stanford University in the US opened up an Artifical Intelligence course and saw 160,000 students sign up.

There are drawbacks – course texts are copyright protected and cannot be changed. And there is a lack of direct tutor contact. However in the US OpenStudy set up a feedback site and found that 70% of posted student questions were answered within 5 minutes. Willem felt that European open course work is lagging behind the US and Asia.

Barriers and issues

Richard Swetenham opened the debate on this question by noting that the behaviour of “Data Huggers” had already been described by Andrew Stott, the UK cabinet office’s Director of Digital Engagement. His 11 data hugging excuses were not listed at the event but for referenence are:

• It’s held separately by n different organisations and we can’t join it up
• It will make people angry and scared without helping them
• It is technically impossible
• We do not own the data
• The data is just too large to be published and used
• Our website cannot hold files this large
• We know the data is wrong
• We know the data is wrong, and people will tell us when it’s wrong
• We know the data is wrong, and we will waste valuable resources inputting the corrections people send us
• People will draw superficial conclusions from the data without understanding the wider picture
• People will construct league tables from it
• It will generate more Freedom of Information requests
• It might be combined with other data to identify individuals/sensitive information
• It will cost too much to put it into a standard format
• Our IT suppliers will charge us a fortune to do an ad hoc extract

Cost

The question of the cost of digitising analog (print or image) data was raised. 20 million digital items of cultural heritage have already been digitised by Europeana, funded by European money. It is true that the cost of digitisation is difficult to justify especially today, but it is important to remember this is an investment, not an expense with no future payback. It is also possible to post meta-data, meaning information about an object, much more cheaply..

Data privacy

The directive does not apply to personal data, but to aggregate data. This raises a question on how far this can lead. In the UK, individual house sale data is published, which is effectively personal data for privately owned properties. The data comes from the collection of stamp-duty tax. It is widely used by real estate agent and house-buyer websites in the UK. As Marcus Dapp noted above – this level of openness that could be traceable back to individual transactions might not go down so well in other countries.

There is a fundamental difference between the European and US’s approach to privacy and this led to a discussion on informed consent. The US,  in the eyes of European legislators, is a curious situation where there is opposition to government stored private data, yet it is fine for private citizens or corporations from obtaining private information, such as credit status, that is not available in Europe. Europe is more in line with the spirit of OECD rules which centre on “informed consent”.

But the concept of informed consent is not working in the world of mobile apps and social networking. Very few bother to read the 10 pages on privacy before putting their personal information on Facebook. Yet hitting the “I agree” button is informed consent. Policybloggers notes that the situation is the same with iPhone or Android apps where it is easy to skip over the privacy warnings, which might include full access to your contact lists or to your location, and hit the “I agree button”. These are cases of un-informed consent.

Marcus Dapp thinks a simple icon based approach, similar to that used by creative commons to describe copyright, would simplify the consent process. This is off the PSI topic but is an interesting point and merges the questions of governments and citizens opening up their data.

Quality of data

One question concerned the usefulness of data, how quickly it would age, and work needed to keep it current.  Here the connection between open-government and e-government (being the digitisation of government processes, move to electronic invoicing etc) becomes important. Marcus Dapp noted that making publication of data part of the process, rather than an added process, helps solve this problem. If commercial interests request data on a more timely basis than the public body needs, then this is a reason to charge for this ungraded service. The directive does not say that data has to be free.

Allied to the quality question is ease of access. A delegate from Microsoft (who offer cloud hosting) noted the much higher than expected traffic generated when London opened up its live tube and bus data.

The Open Source experience

Marcus Dapp cited work earlier in his career on open source software. The drivers of free open source software generation have interesting parallels for open data. He found 16 drivers that encouraged people to contribute to open source projects, and only two of them were financial – being the ability to use the product in business, or direct enhancement of career prospects by being associated with a project. Others included reputation, identification with a philosophy of openness, being seen as a first mover. He noted that arguments on a psychological level can be just as important as rational.

PolicyBloggersNetwork examples of Open Data in action

The European Commission’s own information portal will go live in June, and the directorate is discussing national and pan European portals for data, ideally all with a common link. Eurostatalready provides 4000 free data sets through its website, but the aim is to tie disparate sets of data together in one searchable place.

The visually arresting http://energy.publicdata.eu/ee/vis.html graphically demonstrates energy consumption reduction commitments in Europe, based on Eurostat and other agency data.

www.votewatch.eu/ and www.itsyourparliament.eu track MEP activity and voting patterns.

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/scoreboard/index_en.htm is an excellent site consolidating European use of digital services by country.

www.data.gov.uk/apps/uk-pharmacy describes a mobile app in the UK for people to find their nearest pharmacy via their smartphone.

Transport for London has opened up live busand tube information at its own sites and also for third party internet and mobile applications. PolicyBloggers can report first hand at the time saving benefits of this information.

www.opencorporates.com is a database of over 32 million companies drawn from the data community. It includes PSI information such as government department payments to a company where available (Somerset County Council in the UK appears to be the Munich of the UK in terms of Open Data!).

Simon Judge, a UK based Android developer wrote up a useful  and honest summary on data driven mobile apps here http://mobilephonedevelopment.com/archives/1427 noting some of the pitfalls and barriers to using public sector information from a developer point of view.

http://kasabi.com/ is an online market place connecting data providers (including free data sets) to application developers. It has many examples of data-driven applications in the private and public sector.

http://www.opencities.net/ describes other open data websites, apps, and projects.

References

EIF dinner information, EC directive

Eventinformationandpodcast

Pressrelease: Commission‘sOpenDataStrategy, Questions & answers (11 December 2011)

PSIDirectiveECinformationpageandfurtherlinks

Projects referenced in the dinner discussion

MunichOpenGovernmentDay – MOGDy (German)

PEP-NET is a EC funded network for eParticipation. It has articles on the Munich Open Data project hereand here.

TUDelftOpenCourseWare

StanfordopenAIclass

Europeana – Europe’sculturalcollection, digitised

AsampleofDataHuggingexcuses

OpenKnowledgeConference – implementing Open Data in government

TimothyGower’sblog a couple of days before the dinner sparked a debate in the press including thisarticleintheEconomist on the boycott of research publications by academics. At time of writing the blog had been retweeted over 700 times, and shared on Facebook over 500 times.

By - @Victor de Pous

The international economic crisis and the Euro crisis has forced governments to focus on doing more with less and – in words of former CIO of the White House Vivek Kundra– create a new sense of how to spend taxpayer’s money. We all know his answer – cloud computing – and he is probably right in most instances. However, one of the dangers of the currents times is that under pressure of budget cuts public administrations are not looking at cloud computing, but at open source software as an easy measure of just saving money on IT. For various reasons this concerns an unfortunate way to proceed with public sector IT policy in general and procurement policy more in particular.

The Court of Audit in the Netherlands, as a notable but authoritative outsider in the complex world of digital technology and its high-paced industries, found last year surprisingly clear outcomes in the area of open technology. Open source software offers only limited potential savings to the government. There is indeed no license fee involved, but the implementation, operation and maintenance of open technology also involve costs. And software-licensing fees constitute only a very small part of the consolidated IT costs. All very down–to–earth conclusions.

But for me the most important conclusion of that study is probably that, although cost saving for public sector organizations is important, an approach to IT solely on the wish to cut costs is too restrictive. Strategic government goals should determine the use of IT, states the Court.

Open standards for digital technology are often associated or even confused with open source software, but we should realize that open standards and open source remain two completely different technology domains. However, they share the assumption of various frequently quoted benefits, such as better quality, cost saving, and more vendor independence. The Court of Audit did not find any evidence for the general validity of these potential advantages.

In my view every public sector organization must understand the concept of open source software and its advantages and disadvantages before policy making – a principle which is also valid for individual procurement decisions. Easier said than done. Firstly, because almost everything one can say about open source in a specific case may very well be true, but has by default no general validation. Secondly – and at the same time – the many misunderstandings about open source computing captivate strongly, for examples in regard with licensing, liabilities and more.

To address both circumstances, I analyzed last year open source software within the framework of public policies and the law in a new report Open Source Computing and Public Sector Policy (free download). One headline reads that proactive attention to the legal framework of public sector information systems and digital infrastructures creates economic value, optimizes assets and manages risks. Strategically viewing and leveraging open source software to the benefit of any public sector organization must therefore not only include the qualifying technology itself, its roadmap and the scale and maturity of its ecosystem but also all financial and legal aspects in regard with the life-cycle of that computer program.

Victor de Pous is an Amsterdam-based corporate lawyer and industry analyst working internationally in the domain of legal aspects of digital technology and the information society since 1983. His blog is technologierecht  

The month stars with a lot of activity and already the Christmas celebrations seem far off. The month was dominated by one key issues – SOPA – but now even SOPA seems far off with more tales of censorship – first from the Google privacy policy (Google seeks to clarify new privacy policy) . The trend of censorship continues with Twitter as (Twitter Announces Micro-Censorship Policy)  described by many as social suicide(Twitter Commits Social Suicide) and with memories of SOPA not far away – here comes ACTA(The EU and 22 member states sign the controversial ACTA ‘Internet surveillance’ treaty)

Social media continues to also evolve and impact us in more ways (Google+ Welcomes Teens) and we discuss should your social media presence live on after your death (Facebook After Death: What Should the Law Say?) and social music comes of age(Facebook launches ‘Listen With’ feature, lets you enjoy music with your friends). Both the United Nations(How Nations Can Be United With Social Media – the United Nation’s social media policy) and the CIA(Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community — Central Intelligence Agency) provide excellent insights on their social media policy

The Cloud is always in focus. Rackspace – nasa spawanned opensource cloud initiative open stack gets the support of AT&T (AT&T Joins OpenStack, Floats Cloud Architect) and a (UK Study Says That Cloud Computing Has Positive Impact On Businesses) and Web economy ‘to double by 2016‘ says the Boston Consulting Group. However, that does not prevent governments like Iran who continue to prosecute bloggers(Iran arrests wave of bloggers, writers and programmers | Sci-Tech | Deutsche Welle) and (the EU Commission proposes a comprehensive reform of the data protection rules) which affects cloud computing

Following the last EIF event on the (challenges of publishing news in the Digital era we see innovation from journalism( How Journalists Are Using FrontlineSMS to Innovate Around the World) and and academia (American University to Offer Master’s in News Entrepreneurship) and Clay Shirky offers his insights(Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users « Clay Shirky)

The world of media also continues to evolve with the rise and rise of ebooks (E-Books Outsell Print For Majority Of Titles On USA Today Bestseller List) and traditional journal publishers struggle(Blog blast births boffin boycott of publisher Elsevier) and Netflix continues to clarify(Netflix Streaming Margins Are 11 Percent, DVD Margins Are 52 Percent)

The world of mobile also shows that old is gold?(Nokia celebrates 1.5bn S40 phones) but the old is changing(Yes, Apple’s iMessage is killing the text message, and I love it) and the iPhone continues to dominate(IPhone accounts for more than 80 percent of AT&T smartphone sales) and we all continue to learn(UK mobile operator O2 sends your phone number to every website you visit)

Finally, two great book reviews: Reid Hoffman(linkedin founder’s book) (The real way to build a social network) and Rebecca MacKinnon’s book(Book Review: Consent of the Networked by Rebecca MacKinnon)

I attended the EURIM meeting about Driving the Digital Single Market  through the kind invitation of MEP Malcolm Harbour to the EIF – European Internet Foundation .  I was wearing my Policy bloggers network hat.  Andrew Griffin also attended the event on behalf of the Policy bloggers network. The meeting was organised at the House of Lords

The event Driving the Digital Single Market organised by The Information Society Alliance (EURIM)  aimed to discuss how to join up the many and varied initiatives and directives intended to foster the creation of a globally competitive Digital Single Market into a co-ordinated policy approach at European and Member State level. This meeting was a part of a series of roundtable meetings with key players, with the objective of producing agreed recommendations on policy priorities.

The main objectives on 23rd January were to identify:

-          the initiatives that need to be subjected to joined-up scrutiny;

-          who is interested in working with who to help achieve this;

-          who is willing to help organise such co-operation.

Some of the ideas discussed were:

-          Cross cutting topic – enforcement of ecommerce directive for the Digital single market

-          Competition law

-          Cross border management of VAT

-          Cross border management of Taxation

-          Consumer rights

-          Going for growth

-          Digital agenda (in context of the Digital single market)

-          Impact on retail and Suppliers

-          Radio spectrum release(cross border harmonization and pricing)

-          Data protection for the Digital single market

-          Identity for the Digital single market

-          Cross border Payments and Security for the Digital single market

-          Internal v.s. external market – How does internal market work helping global competiveness(external markets)

-          Consumer rights and support of business – getting balance right

-          Vat on digital books

-          Standards for EU market

-          Open standards for the Digital single market

-          Superfast broadband (as an enabler to the Digital single market)

-          Ecommerce of directive – status of and relation to Digital single market

-          Hargreaves report

-          Digital Certificate management, Electronic invoicing for the Digital single market

There are also a number of papers, which have been used as a basis for the discussion at you can find them HERE and also more resources below. I see this as the start of a discussion and we look forward to participating more in this discussion

Links to relevant resources:

Taking a Global Approach to Information and identity Governance
Identity Challenges in a Single Market (includes attempts to summarise the relevant initiatives)
Review and analyses of current and future European e-ID Schemes
Information and Identity Governance Topics for Masters Students (attempts to list the issues that need study)

Invitation to join the Policy bloggers network

Hello! Hope you had a good break over the holiday season.

After some initial analysis and insights over the pilot period(sep 2010 to dec 2010) – we now proceed to the next phase of the policy bloggers network

The Digital Policy bloggers network is an open community which creates conversations around digital policy issues amongst bloggers, policy makers and influencers. In doing so, it expands the conversation to a wider, non-traditional audience who are interested in policy. Such a conversation is needed today because many digital policy discussions now span traditional boundaries – ex Cloud, Green IT, Smart Grid etc.

The goal of the policy bloggers network is:

-   Provide a voice for influencers and thought leaders in the blogosphere (including twitter) who have specific views on niche

themes i.e. cover niche topics/perspectives in detail

- Create a wider conversation on Digital policy issues through a combination of editorial content, curated content(human

selection of content) and events

-  To provide multiple viewpoints for digital tech policy issues(

So, if you are interested, we invite you to join the network:

Benefits are:

a)  We provide a viewpoint to your views – received through email feedback and also inclusion of blogs and tweets etc

b) Opportunity to speak/attend events

c)  Share and gain insights

d)  Potential to engage viewpoints with policy makers and the industry

It works very simply

Once you sign up to the mailing list, we send you articles and views for your comments which we include where possible in our viewpoints on the site. We also publish/retweet any interesting posts from your blog/feed

If you are interested, please contact ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com

In the last EIF meeting on innovation, I had the pleasure of listening to a brief talk by Prof. Sergei K. Turitsyn who spoke of a capacity crunch for current fiber optic technology in the near future. Mostly, discussions of capacity crunch center around available spectrum. In contrast, this talk was about capacity crunch  at the fiber optic level due to nonlinear properties of optical fiber

It has been while since I looked at fiber optic technology(since college) and the domain is not directly related to my PhD research, but the talk highlights an interesting scenario which I suspect needs to be discussed more.

Thus, since I am not an expert in this domain, I am using this blog to create a discussion on a topic which I suspect needs to be highlighted to policy makers. Sergei referred to a paper by David J Richardson and David was kind enough to send me a copy of this paper for this analysis.

The issue:

In October 2010 David J. Richardson, from the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, published an article called “Filling the  Light Pipe”. According to David’s analysis, we face a “possible capacity crunch” in 2020 for optic fiber technology. This indicates an urgent need for research and development into higher bandwidth fibre optic cables. David Richardson claims improvements must be made to the key physical properties of fibre cables and optical amplifiers, which are used to transmit data across long distances.

 He made further comments when he spoke to BBC News (here) :

“The thought that the current fibre technology has infinite capacity is not true – we are beginning to hit the fundamental limits of the current technology”

“We need to be looking at the next big breakthrough to allow us to continue to scale as we have traditionally done.”

“It’s likely we’re going to have to go right back to the fundamentals of the optics, the actual light pipes. And if you want to develop the next generation of cable, you want to be doing that 10 years in advance, not for tomorrow.

Background

An optical fiber (or optical fibre) is a flexible, transparent fiber made of a pure glass (silica) not much wider than a human hair. It functions as a waveguide, or “light pipe”, to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber. Optical fibers are widely used in fiber-optic communications, which permits transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data rates) than other forms of communication. Fibers are used instead of metal wires because signals travel along them with less loss and are also immune to electromagnetic interference.

 Fiber-optic communication   is a method of transmitting information from one place to another by sending pulses of light through an optical fiber. The light forms an electromagnetic carrier wave that is modulated to carry information. While fiber optic communications have taken on a lot of usage, they are not new. In 1880 Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter created a very early precursor to fiber-optic communications, the Photophone, at Bell’s newly established Volta Laboratory inWashington, D.C. Bell considered it his most important invention. The device allowed for the transmission of sound on a beam of light.

However, the promise of infinite capacity in Alexander graham bell’s time now appears to have hit a limit based on current and projected usage at a fiber optic level

In information theory, the Shannon–Hartley theorem tells the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over a communications channel of a specified bandwidth in the presence of noise.

Considering all possible multi-level and multi-phase encoding techniques, the Shannon–Hartley theorem states the channel capacity C, meaning the theoretical tightest upper bound on the information rate (excluding error correcting codes) of clean (or arbitrarily low bit error rate) data that can be sent with a given average signal power S through an analog communication channel subject to additive white Gaussian noise of power N, is:

where

C is the channel capacity in bits per second;

B is the bandwidth of the channel in hertz (passband bandwidth in case of a modulated signal);

S is the total received signal power over the bandwidth (in case of a modulated signal, often denoted C, i.e. modulated carrier), measured in watt or volt2;

N is the total noise or interference power over the bandwidth, measured in watt or volt2; and

S/N is the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the communication signal to the Gaussian noise interference expressed as a linear power ratio (not as logarithmicdecibels).

Now , based on David Richardson’s paper –  Shannon’s law applies also to optic fiber communication because the data-carrying capacity of a single optical fiber is determined by the spectral bandwidth over which suitably low-loss signal transmission can be achieved.

Recent developments have led to an impressive demonstration of within a factor of ~2 of the nonlinear Shannon limit for the current fiber technology. Although these are still experimental (ie not commercially deployed), the results in experimental setting provide room to grow current usage for a few years. However, beyond that, the path is unknown because once the capacity of conventional single-mode fiber-based systems is exhausted, the only option will be to add additional parallel, which is expensive

Hence, the paper argues that further innovation/breakthroughs are needed and that since we are already stretching the limits of Shannon’s law, that need is urgent for the near term time frame.

 Conclusions:  

I am using this blog to articulate the problem and create some discussion. While not being an expert in this exact domain, based on the analysis above, I think a discussion is needed at a policy level.

Optic fiber image – wikipedia

We are now trying out episodes in a visual format. click on the image above to see this (click on the labels to get detail)

In future, we may also use paper.li

Fostering trust in the Cloud in the face of law enforcement access to data

By  Andrew Griffin

The USA PATRIOT Act was signed into law on October 21, 2001 in response to the September 11 attacks.  PATRIOT stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. It law enforcement authorities in the US more power to collect information in cases that involve national security.

The issue

The concern raised by many is that this allows the US authorities to access the personal data of non-US citizens stored on US owned data centres. However what many informed sources show is that much of this was happening already. In particular the conclusions from legal based websites backed up this view, while technology based blogs and web articles tend to be more sensational. Interception of data has been on the statute book in the UK since 1663. Many countries have laws similar to the Patriot Act allowing them to do the same. So perhaps the discussion boils down to the long-running personal-privacy vs. civil protection debate.

Ironically the physical security of cloud data centres is likely much better than private enterprise data centres. As one observer put it, security for cloud providers (for which read Amazon, Google, Microsoft, RackSpace, and others) is as much a business priority as safety is for an airline. So the likelihood of criminal theft of data is probably lower using the cloud. Surely that should be the first priority for an enterprise IT system?

One law firm we spoke to noted a concern amongst enterprise IT officers that ranked above government intervention and data security. The regulatory need of many companies to know exactly where their data was stored, and conviction that it could be extracted efficiently on exit, is perceived to be the main risk of using a large public cloud by enterprise IT officers today in this firm’s opinion.

What the Patriot Act changed

According to law firm Olswang LLP the Patriot Act updated existing organised crime interception legislation to include terrorism. It also extended powers to defeat cross border money laundering and terrorism funding. The legislation was more re-brand than new regulation and provided no novel powers. It has checks, balances, and oversight as to when and why data is accessed.

Similar UK legislation passed in 2000 (the RIP (regulation of investigatory powers) Act) was also not novel. Interception had been on the British statute book since 1663. What is changing is the medium – the cloud. UK based cloud systems are within the RIP Act’s as are the Royal Mail and every mobile phone network.

In France, Act No 2001-1062 was enacted on November 15^th 2001, significantly strengthening the powers of French law enforcement agencies. Similar EU legislation includes Act 12/2003 on March 21 2003 in Spain. [Linklaters].

How is legislation used?

In 2010 UK enforcement authorities issued almost 2000 intercept warrants. The same year UK public authorities submitted over half a million requests for communications data, two thirds of which were for subscriber data (usually to determine who owns a mobile phone).

View from the lawyers

IT Law Community /SCL – In Defence of the Cloud

http://www.scl.org/site.aspx?i=ed22541

First published in Data Protection Law & Policy in September 2011

Eduardo Ustaran writing for the UK IT law community SCL notes that European data protection law already allows justifiable disclosure of data across jurisdictions. It is not true that complying with a legal obligation to hand over data in a non-EU country will automatically breach EU data protection law. While cloud providers are unlikely to want to negotiate contract terms with all but the largest customers, a well drafted set of terms indicating the service boundary and level of security is likely to be acceptable to most European data controllers.

The tricky issue for European cloud users is the legal restriction on overseas transfer of personal data. The EC’s model clauses for data transfer are very inflexible and so who can blame a cloud vendor refusing to include them in a contract? This issue badly needs addressing and hopes rest on the forthcoming EU data protection legal framework, though this could take years to materialise. And don’t forget that is it the actual level of security in place is the most important factor for customers. Like safety for airlines, security for cloud providers is their top business priority.

Olswang – UK Cloud Computing Interception, Nothing New

http://www.olswang.com/pdfs/CloudComputingInterception_CQG.pdf

2011

The US, UK and most other EU countries have strong legislation allowing the state to intercept electronic communications including that stored in the cloud though the terminology differs. The US Patriot Act 2001 and UK RIP Act 2000 both aim at intercepting, across every system, the plotting and evidence of serious offences. These include interception of traffic passing through the territory, and the prevention of criminals hiding behind the firewalls of enterprise or cloud hosted computing services. Businesses have to accept (as mobile telecom companies already have: Editor) that criminals might want to squat on their systems and so law enforcement must have rights to intercept.

Looking at the UK RIP Act in particular, businesses must understand that shifting from a US Patriot Act regulated US cloud provider to a UK (or other EU) one will not escape law enforcement interception.

Linklaters – Law Enforcement and Cloud Computing, October 2011

http://www.linklaters.com/Publications/law-enforcement-cloud-computing/Pages/Index.aspx

Dutch MEP Sophie in ’t Veld has voiced her concern over the reach of the Patriot Act. Her worry is section 215 permitting the FBI to obtain an order for any “tangible thing” relevant to an authorised terrorism investigation and that this would allow US authorities access to personal data in the EU stored by US headquartered companies.

These concerns are based on the assumption that EU legislation is more protective of personal data than US legislation. However the EU’s Data Protection Directive enables member states to bypass privacy protections that would otherwise apply for a series of reasons including public security and state security. Linklaters compares similar UK, French and Spanish legislation to the US.

Another area of concern with the US Patriot Act is that requests for information can be accompanied by subpoenas, meaning the requestee has to pay a fine in the event of not providing the information. Linklaters notes this is not unique to the US, citing similar legislation in Belgium.

The ability of the US to extract data from the EU has reverse precedent. In 2009 Yahoo! was fined by a Belgian Criminal Court for failing to identify users of a number of email accounts. Yahoo! argued that that the prosecution should have used formal international treaty procedures to request the data. But the court considered Yahoo! to be and electronic communications services provider (ESP) which meant it had to cooperate like any other ESP in Belgian territory regardless of where it was established. The judgement was overturned in 2010 on the basis that email uses the internet, not telephony, but then in 2011 the Belgian Supreme court reversed that appeal decision.

So in both the US and EU cloud providers may have to disclose data to law enforcement agencies without the data owner being aware. Both can be sanctioned with criminal procedures if they fail to do so. These issues have existed in the context of computer data for several decades, since the outsourcing and off-shoring of IT services have existed.

Bird & Bird – Response to the EC consultation on Cloud Computing

http://www.twobirds.com/English/Documents/CloudComputingResponse_000347-01.pdf

This 4 page response to the EC consultation in August 2011 summarises the lack of legal harmony amongst EU member states on data issues, noting the impracticable German law seems to make cloud computing services hosted outside the EU/EEA illegal. Bird & Bird notes that the perception that data in the cloud can be anywhere leads to confusion on what legal jurisdiction it is in. Bird & Bird suggests the domicile of the service provider should be the jurisdiction, but nowhere mentions any concern about the Patriot Act or other country equivalents. Their list of key issues to address are:

Data protection (harmonisation of standards for access, location security, backup encryption, physical security)

• Interoperability
• Consumer protection
• Enforcement
• Export controls (knowing where data resides)

View from IT industry

V3 – Patriot Act Poses Major Obstacle to European Cloud Adoption

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2112325/cloud-summit-patriot-act-poses-major-obstacle-european-cloud-adoption

September 27, 2011

CA Technologies cloud solutions president Chris Rae says the US Patriot Act is preventing many European businesses from adopting external cloud services. By forcing US cloud providers to share data with US authorities, European data protection regulations are over-ridden. Issues between the Data Protection Act and the Patriot Act need to be overcome. The Netherlands is considering preventing US cloud providers working on government contracts. Rae believes the US will modify the Patriot Act. Even if European cloud providers are chosen to avoid data protection issues, those cloud providers could end up being acquired by US companies, such as the UK’s Savvis, which was acquired by CenturyLink.

Editor: also ironically Netherlands data centre provider Interxion chose to list in the US rather than in the Netherlands.

ZDnet – 3 articles by British Criminologist Zack Whittaker

 USA Patriot Act and the controversy in Canada

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/usa-patriot-act-and-the-controversy-of-canada/8803?tag=content;siu-container

After a 10 week investigation into the Patriot Act, a Canadian commissioner came up with 16 recommended changes to the [Canadian] law including making it an offence to send personal information abroad in response to a foreign court order or equivalent.  However others argue that the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act 2001 is similar to the Patriot Act.

Why EU data needs protecting from US law

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/safe-harbor-why-eu-data-needs-protecting-from-us-law/8801?tag=content;siu-container

Is there an inequality between US and European data protection? The 1995 European Data Protection Directive sought to allow data the same rights of movement across borders as goods and citizens across the EEA while maintaining appropriate secure and safe data storage.

With many US companies operating in Europe, legislation was required to allow data to flow across the Atlantic. The US did not accept the same principles as agreed in the EEA but instead the EEA and US worked on a common set of “Safe Harbor” principles such that without changing US law, companies that signed up to the Safe Harbor list would adhere to the EU rules. In the US, Safe Harbor is administered by the FTC which has taken legal action in the case of breaches by US corporates.

 How the USA Patriot act can be used to access EU data 

The article looks in detail at the provision of email, calendar, and other educational apps to UK universities by Google and Microsoft. Contract disclosure by these institutions is mixed, but there is evidence of some institutions contracting with US companies directly, and some with their UK subsidiaries. With the latter it was assumed by the institutions that this would mean UK law would apply, and in some cases the data was required to be held in the EU.

Some universities noted that post graduate research often required that data was not held in a cloud-provider system, but on internal networks (Editor – ironically this might mean the Patriot Act could not reach that data directly, but it might be less secure to theft).

The article also raised the question of geo-redundancy, the common practise of storing copies of data on sites around the word. Cloud providers were unwilling to discuss how or where data was stored in their various sites.

The article also raised the role of “data controller” vs. “data processor” and that according to UK ICO (information commissioner’s office) guidelines, it is the data controller that is responsible for data and answerable to any requests to provide that data. Cloud contracts do define who in the customer-provider relationship is controller or processor.

PCWorld – European Distrust of US Data Security

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/245335/european_distrust_of_us_data_security_creates_market_for_local_cloud_service.html

December 2, 2011

Swedish providers Severalnines and City Network have begun promoting their services as a safe haven from the reaches of the US Patriot Act. Other European providers such as DNS Europe, Colt and MESH are following suit.

Contrary to other sources, PC World says the Safe Harbor legislation is seen to have failed, with little evidence of enforcement.

Conclusions and Observations

Based on the above discussion, here are some conclusions and observations:

1)      Irrespective of regulation, by virtue of being in the Cloud, data is more secure.

2)      There is a difference in reporting between legal sites and technical sites. The tech sites are more sensationalist

3)      Governments have always had access to data for various law enforcement reasons. The patriot act formalises this access especially for terrorism related issues. In that sense, the patriot act does not bring anything new to the table

4)      Various governments have also had similar regulations. While Governments want industry to be transparent, governments themselves are rarely transparent. Hence, an air of ambiguity will remain on all such data access regulations.

5)      The two issues of privacy and national security are often mixed up.

6)      Economies of scale are the foundation of Cloud computing and hence the discussion is important – but it is also important for governments to be more transparent on their objectives

7)      There is a need for a rational discussion on the subject.

Toward a strategic vision for the transatlantic market – A synopsis of the fourth report from the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN)

By

Maggie Baldry

The Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN)  published a 36 page report entitled –  Toward a Strategic Vision for the Transatlantic Market. The full report is available, in pdf format, here.

This article summaries the key points below:

The report’s recommendations recognise the urgent need for closer economic cooperation between Europe and the United States at a time when both urgently need to stimulate jobs and growth. Given the interlocking nature of our current problems, the size of our shared market and the scale of transatlantic direct investment, a determined effort to remove remaining barriers to transatlantic trade and investment by 2020 can make a major contribution to jobs and growth on both sides of the Atlantic.

In order to fully realize this untapped potential for new jobs and growth, the report calls for a comprehensive Transatlantic Jobs and Growth Initiative, including a road-map for the removal of remaining non-tariff barriers and steps towards zero tariff levels on transatlantic trade. It recommends that such an initiative should be launched at the next US-EU Summit in late November in Washington DC.

Report Structure

• Executive Summary
• Strategic Challenges
• Economic Challenges
• The Political Opportunity
• Transatlantic Market Integration
• Toward the Future including Issue Roadmaps for 2012-2015 and 2016 to 2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The 2011 US-EU summit should encourage the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC) to be restructured, streamlined and strengthened in the following key areas.

• Forum in which Europe and the United States implement a jobs and growth agenda and coordinate their response to systemic consequences of the euro crisis and America’s ongoing economic woes.
• Provide broad policy guidance on both bilateral and global issues;
• Be more deeply involved in agenda setting for the annual US-EU summit;
• Monitor the technical work that is the substance of the transatlantic agenda, while the principals should focus their efforts at their annual meeting on broader strategic concerns;
• Narrow its immediate agenda to focus more on jobs and growth, financial reform, energy and green technologies, protection of intellectual property, the digital agenda, and innovation.

Procedurally, the TEC should:

• Make its work more transparent and accountable to the various stakeholders in the transatlantic relationship;
• Involve leaders from both the European Parliament and the US Congress;
• Issue a public report about the results of each TEC meeting and its plans and goals for the future;
• Create a small US-EU Transatlantic Market Implementation Group comprised of elected and appointed officials in the executive and legislative branches to oversee the implementation of the roadmap;

STRATEGIC CHALLENGES

• 2025 world production will almost have doubled in relation to 2005.
• US and European markets will no longer dominate the world.
• The center of gravity of world production and world trade will have moved to Asia.
• The gap between the rich and poor will have grown, exacerbating social and political tensions.
• World’s population will grow to 8 billion, and three-fifths of those people will be Asian.
• Europe will become the region with the oldest population and both Europe and the United States will face an even larger budgetary burden thanks to the pension and health care needs of their ageing populations.

ECONOMIC CHALLENGES

• 2009, in the wake of the Great Recession, the Euro Area contracted by 4.3 per cent. The US economy shrank by 3.5 per cent.
• 2010, both economies rebounded, giving rise to hopes of renewed prosperity.
• 2011, the Euro Area is expected to expand by only 1.6 per cent and the United States by only 1.5 per cent, giving rise to fears that transatlantic growth is stalling out, raising the spectre of a double-dip recession.
• European growth prospects are haunted by the sovereign debt crisis that began in Greece, has spread to Ireland and Portugal and now threatens to engulf Spain and Italy.
• Joblessness in the European Union is 9.5 per cent, including 21 per cent in Spain and 14 per cent in Ireland. A whole generation of European youth risk never having a job: unemployment among those under age 24 is 46 per cent in Spain, 40 per cent in Greece and 28 per cent in Italy.
• In the United States, unemployment remains high at 9.1 per cent, home-owner mortgage indebtedness, restraining consumer spending.

The cost of transatlantic contagion from these economic maladies would be high.

• American banks have $1.3 trillion dollars in outstanding loans in Europe.
• Europe is America’s largest trading partner, the largest destination for US foreign direct investment and generates more than half the earnings of the overseas operations of US companies.
• With China expected to grow six times faster than either Europe or the United States in 2011, with India likely to expand five times faster and South-east Asia three times faster, the transatlantic market risks losing its pivotal role in the global economy.

THE POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY

• European and American public opinion polls show that people want growth, they want jobs and, above all, they want a reason to hope. What they lack is a sense of direction and purpose from their leaders.
• A majority of Europeans believe that the United States should exert strong leadership in world affairs.
• An even larger majority of Americans look to the European Union to show such leadership.
• Overwhelming majorities of elites in both Brussels and Washington agree that the US and the EU should lead on the world stage.
• A plurality of both Europeans and Americans want the relationship between the European Union and the United States to become closer.
• The political environment in the transatlantic space is ripe for a joint European and American effort to spur growth and jobs.
• Convergence of common economic challenges on both sides of the Atlantic are an opportunity for a transatlantic growth and jobs agenda.
• Europe and the United States have long demonstrated their shared commitment to market liberalization through multilateral trade negotiations.
• TPN is strongly committed to successful completion of the Doha Development Round at a high level of ambition as a means to spur trade and fuel economic development.
• The Doha Development Round, which was launched in 2001, has yet to produce meaningful, tangible results. Differences over agriculture and market access for manufactured products and services have stymied progress.

TRANSATLANTIC MARKET INTEGRATION

• In 2010, trade across the Atlantic in goods alone exceeded $600 billion.
• Europeans bought three times as many American merchandise exports as did the Chinese and 15 times more than that bought by the Indians.
• Similarly, the European Union sold the United States nearly two times the goods it sold China and nearly seven times what it sold India.
• Foreign investment is the driving force in the transatlantic economic relationship. It dwarfs the trade relationship and is thus essential for American and European job creation and prosperity.
• The United States is the recipient of nearly three-quarters of European foreign direct investment and Europe more than half of US overseas investment.
• Three and a half million Europeans now work for American companies in Europe and a similar number of Americans work for European firms in the United States. Such investment drives trade, with a third of US exports to the EU and three-fifths of its imports from the EU accounted for by intra-company trade.
• The services economies of the United States and Europe represent the sleeping giant in the transatlantic economic space, with European countries accounting for five of the top ten export markets for US services providers.
• Sales of services by European affiliates in the United States more than double US services imports from Europe.
• Creation of a Transatlantic Market, rather than a traditional transatlantic free trade agreement, is a  more ambitious undertaking, because it would explicitly deal with regulatory obstacles to economic integration.
• The EU already has a free trade agreement with Mexico, one with South Korea, and it will, by next year, have a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, as well as a framework agreement, with Canada, and may start negotiating a deal with Japan.
• The United States already has free trade accords with Canada, Mexico and one soon with South Korea.
• A joint effort to better integrate the transatlantic market with those to its south could reap great economic benefits for all involved.

TOWARD THE FUTURE

• In 2007, US president George W. Bush and German chancellor Angela Merkel, agreed to create a Transatlantic Economic Council as a permanent, high-level group tasked with “rationalizing, reforming, and, where appropriate, reducing regulations”, “achieving more effective, systemic and transparent regulatory cooperation” and “removing unnecessary differences between our regulations to foster economic integration.”
• The 2009 European Commission study, Non-Tariff Measures in US-EU Trade and Investment, found that for the EU, removing all actionable non-tariff measures would increase the GDP by €122 billion per year and improve exports by 2.1%.
• For the United States, the benefits of removing actionable non-tariff barriers would add €41 billion per year to the economy and boost exports by 6.1%.
• For the Transatlantic Market project to succeed, it is essential to have a shared strategic vision among all concerned and a sense of urgency, especially given the increasing competitiveness of Asian countries in the global system.
• Priority needs to be given to initiatives that can boost jobs and growth in the short term, such as removal of all tariffs on goods traded across the Atlantic.
• Once the TEC has been able to establish a rolling four-year programme, based on a shared vision, it will be essential to bring all the major actors onto the same stage. Currently the Transatlantic Business Dialogue, the Transatlantic Legislators’ Dialogue and the other dialogues set their own agendas, priorities and meeting places, with no coordination between them for the subjects they discuss.

The immediate TEC agenda should be narrowed to a few mutually supported, high priority issues:

• Jobs and Growth: Identify immediate initiatives that Europe and the United States can take together or in parallel in the short run to spur job creation and revive growth.

• Financial Reform: Focus on the leadership Europe and the United States can provide in strengthening global financial markets, avoiding protectionism, minimizing regulatory overreach in the wake of the global financial crisis and dealing with shared strategic issues.
• Energy and Green Technologies: Enhance R&D cooperation, coordinate technical standards and testing for emerging products such as the electric car to ensure that the transatlantic market sets the global standard for these new technologies.
• Intellectual Property: Coordinate protection of intellectual property rights for emerging technologies; align US and EU policy on counterfeit goods and protecting intellectual property rights in third countries; and encourage cooperation between regulators and legislators on patent reform.
• Digital Agenda: The new US administration and the renewed EU institutions are moving rapidly to establish strategic policy agendas intended to exploit the transformational power of digital tools and technologies. On the EU side, a major focus will be the European “digital single market”. These initiatives must be pursued wherever possible with a full focus on transatlantic market challenges and opportunities.
• Innovation: Transform the current transatlantic innovation dialogue into an innovation action council with a detailed agenda to encourage entrepreneurship, enhance education and promote research and development.

The Issues Roadmap 2012-2015

The 2012 roadmap should include the following goals for 2012-2015:

Jobs and Growth

•     In the face of the economic crisis, both Europe and the United States need a number of short-term deliverables that have a quick and substantial impact on jobs and on market confidence.

Financial markets

•      The United States and the European Union should establish a transatlantic working group that involves both members of the relevant bureaucracies and relevant members of the European Parliament and the US Congress to share experiences and insights and to coordinate responses to the ongoing euro crisis.

Energy and the Environment

•      Make energy and climate change a priority issue for the TEC to speed the transition to a greener, cleaner and low-carbon transatlantic economy.

Intellectual Property

•      Make progress toward patent harmonization, including facilitating an EU patent, and enhanced cooperation between patent offices and greater coordination in extension of patent life.

•      Develop a joint agenda for dealing with counterfeiting and piracy around the world and bring joint legal action against such abuses at the World Trade Organization.

Digital Agenda

•      Converge policy and regulation affecting digital market access and participation across the Atlantic (and where possible beyond), notably in the areas of intellectual property, consumer protection, network access, network security and internet governance, and standards (for example, for e-health).

Innovation

•      Focusing on the building blocs of an innovative transatlantic economy—education, research and development, entrepreneurship—lay out and implement a short-term action plan to boost innovation on both sides of the Atlantic.

In addition, the TEC should continue its work in the following areas:

The Regulatory Dialogue

•      In pursuit of their G20 commitment to build a more sustainable financial system, Europeans and Americans should closely coordinate their initiatives to strengthen investment rules, revise bank capital requirements, supervise credit agencies and consolidate financial sector supervision.

•      The TEC should redouble its efforts to mobilize departments and agencies on both sides of the Atlantic to search for areas where regulatory friction can be reduced or avoided.

•      The EU and US should agree to a framework for resolving reinsurance issues involving the EU Solvency II directive, the state-based approach to insurance regulation in the United States and any new American regulation of insurance.

•      The American administration and the EU Commission ought to come up with a framework for developing compatible rules affecting new technologies that are not yet regulated in Europe and the United States.

•      Develop a common, open, technology-neutral standard on eAccessibility for the blind, deaf and infirm.

•      Pursue standardization, digitization and interoperability of patient health care records, with appropriate privacy protections, to reduce medical errors, to facilitate real-time transatlantic sharing of information on contagious diseases and to improve health care productivity and cost-containment.

•      Resolve the dispute over supplier’s declaration of conformity for electrical products.

Investment

•      Agree, in light of recent global financial market turmoil, on a framework for deeper, ongoing coordination between European and American financial regulatory agencies.

•      European and American leaders should agree on a comparable code of conduct and best practices governing Sovereign Wealth Fund investment in the transatlantic market, following up on efforts by the International Monetary Fund to develop a code of conduct for Sovereign Wealth Fund investors and by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to come up with best practices for investment receiving countries.

•      Europe and the United States should finally resolve remaining transatlantic differences over accounting standards, promoting investment and the efficient allocation of capital within the transatlantic market.

•      Complete the third phase of the Open Skies agreement removing investment restrictions for European and American air carriers in the transatlantic market to demonstrate the practical benefits of an eventual transatlantic investment accord.

Secure Trade

•      Commit to the creation of smart ports to ensure the security of cargo container traffic.

Security Technology Cooperation

•      Collaborate on joint defense and homeland security technology initiatives to maximize the economies of scale inherent in a $1 trillion transatlantic defense market at a time when defense budgets on both sides of the Atlantic are under growing pressure and the cost of research and development continues to rise.

The Legislators’ Dialogue

•      Engage Members of the European Parliament and the US Congress more directly in joint consideration of pressing transatlantic concerns by focusing on shared challenges such as jobs and growth, climate change, internet policy, agriculture, financial issues and China.

•      Lay the groundwork for eventual creation of a Transatlantic Assembly of legislators from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss mutual regulatory and economic concerns and to hold to account the executive on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Issues Roadmap 2016-2020

In the 2016-2020 timeframe, the United States and the European Union should include:

The Regulatory Dialogue

•      Commit to develop comparable regulatory decision-making processes, with, at minimum, agreement on underlying principles and regulatory objectives, mutually compatible transparency, including an early warning system for new regulations under development, similar timeframes, appeal procedures and post-regulatory monitoring.

•      Develop a framework for resolving differences in international standards setting bodies so that there can be collaboration in these forums whenever possible.

•      Establish a system of mutual recognition of automotive products with functional equivalence to ensure comparable automotive test procedures, emissions and safety regulations.

•      Agree to a framework for establishing a parallel process for granting approval for pharmaceuticals.

•      Build on the experience gained by the FDA and the EMEA in the medical product equipment regulatory area by embedding a senior-level agency representative or expert within each other’s offices in a range of regulatory agencies to share ideas and to gain insights into each other’s regulatory cultures and procedures.

Investment

•      Establish a date certain for creating a transatlantic capital market.

•      Negotiate an investment agreement that opens most sectors of the transatlantic economy to reciprocal capital flows.

•      To that end, achieve mutual recognition of securities regulation.

Manufacturing

•      Reaffirm their commitment to multilateral trade liberalization by pursuing tariff-free trade worldwide in key manufacturing sectors of importance to the transatlantic economy.

Environment

•      Agree to a transatlantic market for green products, including zero tariffs and the mutual recognition and certification of products.

Multilateral Trading System

•      Using lessons learned from the Doha Round improve the functioning of the World Trade Organization, with special emphasis on mutual rules of the road for negotiating bilateral trade agreements and what more the United States and the European can do to foster growth in the least developed economies through trade and investment.

People and Commerce

•      Commit to the freer movement of people for work, study, residence and tourism through a smart visa program.

NOTE :

This is a condensed extract of 36 page PDF document Toward a Strategic Vision for the Transatlantic Market.

The full document is available for download  here.