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The New York Transatlantic

This Weekend: Polish films and German literature

For film and literature buffs, this weekend is chock full. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is screening film after Polish film for Kino Polska: New Polish Cinema. Meanwhile, Festival Neue Literatur has events scattered across Manhattan and Brooklyn. I’m looking forward to a panel on Saturday about literature in translation put on by Festival Neue Literatur at the Bowery Poetry…

The Polish public media gets a “national mission”

Just what we need—a state media arm dedicated to promoting nationalism. The Columbia Journalism review has an article about recent moves by Poland’s governing Law and Justice party to consolidate its control of Poland’s public institutions. Charges of rising nativism in Poland’s press come just two months after the country’s rightist Law and Justice party, which took power in a…

US needs to provide “essentially equivalent” data protection for transfers from EU

On Monday I summarized the reasons that the European Court of Justice struck down the European Commission decision that permitted the transfer of personal data from the European Union to the United States. And yesterday I heard the plaintiff in that case, Maximilian Schrems, speak at NYU’s journalism school. He and Professor Ira Rubinstein (NYU Law) highlighted a critical portion of the ECJ’s judgment, but came to conflicting conclusions. The court decided that the protection of EU citizens’ privacy rights, as laid out in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, could not be compromised. Merely “adequate” protection of personal data, as required by the Data Protection Directive, is not enough; the level of protection must be “essentially equivalent” to that provided by EU law.