Europeans Can be Spied on by American Agencies

Thanks to American legislation

Europeans, take note: The U.S. government has granted itself authority to secretly snoop on you.

That's according to a new report produced for the European Parliament, which has warned that a U.S. spy law renewed late last year authorizes "purely political surveillance on foreigners' data" if it is stored using U.S. cloud services like those provided by Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

Europeans were previously alarmed by the fact that the PATRIOT Act could be used to obtain data on citizens outside the United States. But this time the focus is a different law—the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Amendments Act—which poses a "much graver risk to EU data sovereignty than other laws hitherto considered by EU policy-makers," according to the recently published report, Fighting Cyber Crime and Protecting Privacy in the Cloud, produced by the Centre for the Study of Conflicts, Liberty and Security.