European lawmakers approved a deal on Tuesday allowing the US government to obtain data on passengers flying to the United States from Europe, a shift in EU resistance to sharing citizens' information with US authorities. The European Parliament has been battling for more than five years to scale back agreements that allow the United States to access and store the data of air passengers, arguing that it is an invasion of privacy that can lead to false arrests.
Airlines flying to the United States cannot land unless officials there have access to passenger data, including the names, addresses, credit card details and seat numbers of the travellers, according to the European Parliament. The European Commission, the EU's executive, has negotiated for more than a year with US authorities on updating the agreement, before seeking the European Parliament's approval.
Tuesday's vote by parliament's civil liberties committee, won by a narrow margin, is the first step in the process of securing EU legislative approval. The next and final step is a full parliamentary vote expected in mid-April. Resistance to a deal has softened in recent months, since critics of the parliament's stance warned that airlines could be in breach of EU law if the lawmakers rejected the agreement and the United States continued to request the data.
Under the deal, the United States has agreed to mask out passengers' names and contact details after six months. The data will then be kept for up to five years, at which point it will be moved to a 'dormant' database for a further 10 years. One major frustration with the US agreement has been evidence that US authorities have been accessing passengers' data directly from airlines' IT systems, lawmakers say.
Sophie in 't Veld, a Dutch liberal lawmaker in the European Parliament, said data from major European carriers had been accessed thousands of times by US authorities in spite of commitments that it would happen only in exceptional cases. The European Commission said the United States agreed to limit its ability to access data directly unless airlines' IT infrastructure was undergoing technical problems.