The U.S. and EU reached a new interim anti-terror deal Friday after months of wrangling, giving U.S. law enforcement agencies access to passenger data on U.S.-bound flights.
European and U.S. officials welcomed the deal as a sign that both sides are coordinating closer than ever to prevent attacks, despite divisions over how to go about hunting down terrorists.
Under the agreement, the U.S. and 25-nation EU will employ "comparable standards of data protection," EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini said.
"I'm glad to have an agreement that makes Americans safer today than they were yesterday," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "If planes blow up it's not just going to be Americans who die."
British Home Secretary John Reid called the interim agreement "another major step in the fight against terrorism (showing that) the common alliance against terrorism is, on both sides of the Atlantic, very strong."
French Justice Minister Pascal Clement said European travelers "got concrete guarantees with respect to civil liberties."
Arduous negotiations revealed how far apart both sides are in how to balance fighting terrorists with personal freedoms.
Privacy restrictions tend to be tougher in Europe than in the United States, and the Europeans wanted to deny U.S. officials the right to go into airline reservation systems.
The new interim deal - reached after a nine-hour, trans-Atlantic video conference that took place nearly a week after negotiators missed an Oct. 1 deadline - replaces a 2004 air passenger privacy agreement the EU's high court voided last May for purely technical reasons.
The agreement is valid until July, after which the EU and the U.S. plan to have a permanent accord. The deal is to come into immediate effect on a provisional basis, until all EU governments give their final approval, expected next week.
Frattini said the pact should defuse fears in the European Parliament of a loss of privacy for Europeans flying to the United States.
Under the agreement, the U.S. Homeland Security Department no longer will have an automatic right to pull data from European airlines' computer systems, but must ask for such information.
The deal allows the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency to disclose passenger data to other U.S. law enforcement agencies only if "they have comparable standards of data protection," Frattini said. He said it cannot give them direct electronic access to the data and limits the duration of its storage.
EU negotiator Jonathan Faull said the EU and the U.S. are aiming for a "broader" deal after July that would provide for sharing of more data than the 34 details listed under Friday's agreement.
Negotiations collapsed last week when the EU denied a request by Chertoff for a more routine sharing of passenger data among U.S. law enforcement agencies.
The new agreement lets airlines continue to legally submit 34 pieces of data - such as passenger names, addresses, seat numbers, credit card and travel details_ for transfer to U.S. authorities within 15 minutes of a flight's departure for the United States.
EU officials said they shared Washington's concerns about terrorism, but demanded strict data protection guarantees in return for a more routine sharing of personal details of air passengers among U.S. law enforcement officials.
Washington had warned that airlines failing to share passenger data would face fines of up to US$6,000 (euro4,700) per passenger and the loss of landing rights.
The agreement was also welcomed by the International Air Transport Association, which represents airlines.
"Today's agreement is a major step in the right direction," Giovanni Bisignani, IATA's Director General. "Now it is time for governments to move on to further harmonization and joint recognition of standards in other areas of security."
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AP Writer Leslie Miller in Washington contributed to this story.
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