This is a hugely important decision that got very little attention when it happened:
Legal and labor experts say Trump v Slaughter decision upends settled constitutional law in favor of ‘loyalty test’
www.theguardian.com
"On Monday, the US supreme court
handed him – and all future presidents – the power to fire leaders of independent agencies or commissions, overturning 90 years of court precedent curbing executive power."
This captures why this could be an absolutely huge deal:
The Supreme Court held that President of the United States can remove members of public offices at will.
www.openrightsgroup.org
"Personal data transfers between the EU and the US are made possible by the
EU-US Data Privacy Framework (EU-US DPF), under which the US committed to protect personal data transferred to the US from its mass surveillance programmes. Data flows between the UK and the US depend on this scheme as well. The oversight of the framework rested on a number of US federal agencies, whose independence has now been gutted by the Supreme Court ruling.
...
US federal agencies have become structurally unable to act as meaningful legal guardians, making any future agreement with the US unworkable. Short-term fixes that were relied on in previous crises, such as Standard Contractual Clauses, would now prove ineffective: contracts are no solution against arbitrary State power, and there is no realistic prospect of a structural agreement being reached.
Likewise, the UK has recently reformed its data protection law to, potentially, allow personal data transfers to take place even if such protections are missing. If the UK were to pursue this path, however, it would lose adequacy status with the EU, and the consequences would be dramatic.
...
Tech companies who are based or operate in the US are now exposed to a new reality, where their legal obligations can be manipulated arbitrarily by the US administration.
...
In 2022,
the Biden administration signed an Executive Order that established a mechanism to protect personal data transfers to the US, and restrictions to the President’s authority to conduct surveillance programmes. This was the culmination of a long political process, started with the
Data Free Flow with Trust initiative and the
OECD declaration on government access to data, which sought to create baseline rule of law safeguards for the secure transfer of personal data among democratic countries.
On the basis of these commitments, the European Commission adopted the an adequacy decision for the so-called
EU-US Data Privacy Framework (EU-US DPF), which legalises transfers of personal data between the EU and the US. However, the oversight of this framework rested on the FTC, the PCLOB, and the Data Protection Review Court. Article 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU requires oversight to be independent, to protect the overseers’ ability to enforce legal standards. By empowering the Trump administration to remove their members at will, the US Supreme Court undermined oversight, and thus the workability of the framework as a whole."
The TL
R is that the Trump administration can do what they want now with the FTC. It was politically independent, which kept the EU happy-ish that if the US government or organisations tried to carry out surveillance or abuse of personal data, tthe FTC might stop that happening.
The EU has been deeply unhappy about that fiction, but it has held to date.
This supreme court ruling means it is now gone and with it the pretence that European data has any protection guarantees when it comes to US organisations.
Which is fun.
There's a rake of things this administration is doing that mean the long term willingness of EU organisations to work with US IT and software companies is in serious trouble, ranging from the actions against the ICC, Microsoft's statements in the French senate hearings, the imposition of export controls on Anthropic's latest model and now this ruling.
If you're a non-US government looking to build AI systems, you'd want to have a screw loose to sign up to build production systems with US AI
www.bbc.com
www.bbc.com
