The Christian Science Monitor, February 3, 2016

By Jaikumar Vijayan

From the standpoint of many in the tech industry, the deal is both a victory and a relief.

Victoria Espinel, president the tech industry trade group The Software Alliance, said the deal is the outcome of intense, months-long negotiations between officials at the US Department of Commerce and the EC. She said it reflects a pragmatic understanding, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the need to find a mutually acceptable way to sustain the estimated half trillion dollars trade relationship that had been enabled by Safe Harbor.

"Both the US and EU negotiators were constantly aware of the concerns that were raised by the court," said Ms. Espinel, who was in Davos in the days before the agreement representing software industry interests.

"They very much bore those in mind throughout the last phase of the negotiations."

Espinel said the new pact would introduce some stability and predictability into a situation where US companies might otherwise have been subjected to varying privacy requirements from individual EU member nations, said Espinel. "One of the concerns we had was being in a situation where our member companies would have to deal with a patchwork of privacy regulations.”

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Original Posting: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2016/0203/Can-EU-US-data-pact-survive-without-surveillance-reform