Europeans Assured NSA Didn't Scoop Up Their Data in 'Bulk'

Reassuring-ish? Maybe?

Europe pressed the US for greater detail on the Prism surveillance scandal on Friday for the first time and was told that data collection on Europeans was not conducted in "bulk" but only in cases of strong suspicion of individual or group involvement in terrorism, cybercrime or nuclear proliferation.

At a meeting of US and EU justice and law enforcement officials in Dublin, Viviane Reding, the EU commissioner for justice, said she was satisfied that US collection of metadata via the Verizon mobile phone network was "mainly an American question".

The much bigger issues, raised by Edward Snowden's leaks to the Guardian, concerned the NSA hoovering up data from social media and internet servers across Europe in flagrant breach of EU data protection regulations.