[Arstechnica] US government asks to join key EU Facebook privacy case brought by Schrems

The US government has asked to be joined as a party in the Irish High Court case between the Austrian privacy activist and lawyer Max Schrems, and the social network Facebook. In a press release, Schrems called this “an unusual move” […].

Schrems speculated that the US government has made this move because it wanted to defend its surveillance laws before the European Courts […]. Schrems told Ars that he hopes to use this unexpected opportunity to grill the US government to the maximum […].

However, as Schrems points out, “this shift in the legal basis does not remedy the fact that Facebook is still subject to US mass surveillance laws and programs, which the CJEU already found to be conflicting with EU law” […].

http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/06/eu-facebook-schrems-case-us-government-amicus-curiae/