The United States-European Union high-level contact group for data sharing has begun converting shared data exchange principles into workable standards, said a Homeland Security Department official speaking March 2. But the collaboration effort has hit a roadblock in the area of privacy oversight.

Europeans argue that the United States lacks an independent agency that is equivalent to the EU authority over data privacy. 

"One thing that has been of debate or discussion with the Europeans is this issue of independence," said Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer at DHS, while speaking at an American Bar Association event in Washington, D.C.

"So what does the independence of the data protection commissioners get you? It gets you the ability to review something ex post in an objective fashion."

Callahan argues that there are plenty of bodies conducting ex post review in the U.S. federal government--the Government Accountability Office, inspector generals and Congress--and creating more bureaucracy is unnecessary.

"In my read of the Homeland Security Act--which created my office as the first privacy office, and the subsequent 9/11 Commission, which recommended them for the major agencies--the idea was: You've got plenty of oversight, you should continue to do oversight in your own department, but that other people can also pick this up."

One solution that could move the high-level contact group beyond this impasse would be for Congress to make the dormant Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board more independent and give it a full staff, said Abraham Newman, a foreign service professor at Georgetown University.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is an advisory body within the White House that was established in 2004 but "ceased functioning," according to the Bush White House, after 2008 and has remained vacant under the Obama administration.

Data collection and privacy principles are "basically the same fundamental principles" on both sides of the Atlantic said Callahan. The group is building upon 12 shared data principles it established in May 2008, existing passenger name records agreements and mutual legal assistance treaties. Speaking on the issue last summer, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano noted that there is an established history of information sharing between Europe and the United States, with no recorded misuse of data.

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