Donald Trump has gotten the president of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to clarify what it is about the war in Iran. but this It won’t be the last thing you’ll get the North American power. What seemed like a routine travel pact between Washington and Brussels is on its way to becoming an international scandal.
The US and the European Union have already formally begun negotiations to extend the Partnership to Strengthen Border Security (EBSP). This is an agreement that regulates the possibility of travel without a visa for tourist purposesFor example. And the fine print that it will contain has already been leaked. Despite the fact that because they oppose Trump, it does not seem that the same forcefulness is maintained in the technical details.
These conversations have already started because the US already demanded in 2022 (still under the mandate of Joe Biden) to have access to more information about citizens who traveled there from the Old Continent. Biden conditioned receive more information in exchange for maintaining the visa exemption for European tourists.
The problem? The state of the negotiations already assumes that the countries of the European Union, including of course Spain, will allow US officials to access their bases with biometric data. In other words: at fingerprints of Europeansbut also to their possible faces in order to be the subject of automatic facial scans.
Does not close the door to automatic (and unfair) decisions
That doesn’t end there. According to a recent exclusive from Euractivgiven how the negotiations between Washington and Brussels evolve, the US Department of Homeland Security could receive “sensitive” information of European citizenssuch as political opinions, union affiliations, or sexual information.
Furthermore, the draft of the agreement, to which he has had access Euractiv, does not close the door for the US to use automatic models (such as artificial intelligence tools and all types of algorithms) to make relevant decisions about whether or not European citizens enter their territory.
The document to which the aforementioned media has had access is a draft of the framework agreement that Brussels is negotiating with Washington and that the Twenty-Seven will then have to accept. This document formally indicates that decisions with “significant” negative consequences on citizens should not be adopted “only through automated processes.”
Next, he clarifies: “Unless authorized by national law.” In other words: the text does not explicitly prohibit the US from automatically making decisions, without human supervision, about European visitors.
What do some experts think?
How these discussions progress is worrying experts. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), the Polish Wojciech Wiewiórowski, argued a couple of days ago in an interview also with Euractiv that while the biometric data obtained by the US is used “for the purposes established in the treaties agreed upon by both parties” he wouldn’t “worry.”
However, the US is the same country that has begun an intense smear campaign against Anthropicthe company that owns the Claude AI model, after the company refused to let the Pentagon use its technology for intelligence purposes. Trump responded by getting rid of Anthropic as a supplier to the federal Executive.
At the end of February, however, OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, announced a framework agreement also with the Pentagon in which it clarified that clauses had been incorporated into the document.
These clauses would explicitly prohibit US authorities from making use of popular artificial intelligence to monitor or spy on US citizens. The problem?
Wiewiórowski is not the only one who has highlighted the need for Brussels to have the greatest guarantees and certainties that the biometric information of European citizens is not used for other purposes. Also other specialists in Governance and Compliance have shown their concern.
“International cooperation is vital for security, but allowing foreign authorities direct and real-time access to national biometric databases is atypical and dangerous,” they warned.
