I welcome the fact that the US administration has adopted a course that involves reforming the intelligence services’ programmes and restricting the use of personal data. The report, which was published yesterday, shows once again that an intense debate on striking a balance between national security and the protection of digital privacy has been sparked in the US, too. In publishing this report, the US administration is demonstrating that it considers this debate to be important and that it is serious about the reforms.

Unfortunately, the reforms that have now been announced do not take Europeans’ concerns about the protection of their own data into account to the extent that we would have wished. I hope that the ongoing debates in the United States Congress will result in legislative proposals that will give EU citizens greater legal recourse, also in US courts, as regards defending themselves against the misuse of their data. I have already communicated this expectation to my colleagues in the United States Congress, and will continue to do so in all my talks in the future.