The United States and the United Kingdom have entered into a pioneering agreement allowing access to electronic data for criminal investigations between its law enforcement agencies (the agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom). We look at the last part of the data-sharing puzzle between the United States and the United Kingdom. Part of the purpose of these executive agreements is to enable partner states to conduct investigations within U.S. borders and remove barriers to U.S. prosecutions abroad. Such harmonisation of efforts is also taking place in Europe: the European Commission announced in February that it was describing the process of negotiating a cross-border system of access to electronic evidence at EU level, which it described as an “e-emptince framework”. The United States announced the launch of a similar negotiation process with the European Union in September and with Australia in October. With cross-border data exchanges on the agenda in both the US and the EU, the US and the UNITED Kingdom. Agreements can therefore serve as an early model for such agreements and serve as a model for the areas that the United States prioritizes in its negotiations. If you are a PSC, the agreement and any subsequent agreements made pursuant to the Production of Crime Act and the CLOUD Act will allow foreign law enforcement agencies to provide you with orders that require the transmission of electronic data directly to the law enforcement authority. The relative ease of their issuance and the reduction in time should increase the volume of these international requests and, therefore, increase the burden on State custodians in terms of their acceptance, coordination and response.
The agreement allows British law enforcement agencies to access data from U.S. communications providers without verification from U.S. authorities, and the U.S. enjoys reciprocal rights. Despite this reciprocity, not all things are the same. In practice, under current legislation, the UK earns more than the US – faster access to data from major US communications providers that can be used in UK surveys. For the United States, there is no new procedure for finding data abroad that is transposed into legislation.