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[Sheb]

Why is what Monsanto did in India unforgivable?

[martinuzz]

My biology professors weren't so much afraid of the genes getting out in the wild through normal hybridisation, which sterile hybrids do indeed prevent, as much they were of, and warned us about the danger of horizontal gene transfer through bacterial or viral vectors. Bacteria swap genes with other species of bacteria all the time, and our doctors even use virusses nowadays to deliver gene therapy. It is theorized (or maybe even observed, I forgot) that it might even be possible for certain bacteria to acquire genes from multicellular organisms, like plants.

Worse nightmare would be, if a pesticide resistance gene got into a the genepool of microbial soil life. Most plants live in intricate symbiosis networks with ground bacteria and fungi.

If such a bacteria would acquire such pesticide resistance gene, and pass on this protection to other, unwanted plants, either through transferring the gene to the plant directly, or granting it resistance through symbiosis, farmer's would have a very hard time to keep their fields from being overgrown with weed.

Monsanto (and to be fair, many others, it's just that everyone knows Monsanto) cannot guarantuee that this will not happen.

So I have to stick with my earlier statement. As long as we cannot absolutely make sure that there is no way for tailored genes to get out into the wild, GM crops should be strictly quarantained, and any field that is out in the open destroyed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_conjugation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectors_in_gene_therapy

[mainiac]

That is much more interesting then most of the stuff I've read, worthy of due consideration.

farmer's would have a very hard time to keep their fields from being overgrown with weed.

[Frumple]

Monsanto (and to be fair, many others, it's just that everyone knows Monsanto) cannot guarantuee that this will not happen.

... reality guarantees that guarantee cannot happen. It doesn't take GM products to have that sort of mutation occur. Makes it more likely and/or more rapid, I guess? But it's not like existent less!GM crops are some kind of weird indefinitely static... thing. They also change, the bacteria involve change, etc., etc., etc. Your profs appear to be complaining about a process that already exists and that GM is not introducing, which makes it kinda' weird to be focusing their tirade against GM.

... beyond that, again, there's a lot more to GM than the pesticide related stuff. If folks are really going to get in a panic about that, just legislate specifically against that and leave all the other good stuff be instead of just blanket condemning the lot of it.

[Sheb]

Horizontal gene transfer between two eukaryotes is very, very, very rare though. Herbicide resistance is an issue, as showcased by the hundreds of weeds who are now glyphosphate resistant, but those weeds didn't get their glyphosphate resistance from the genes introduced in Roundup Ready crops, they evolved it independently under the selection pressure from massive application of glyphosphate.

Sure, in a way you could argue that it's related to GMOs, because without RoundUp Ready crops, glyphosphate would never have been that popular. But it's more an issue of learning to ration pesticide the same way we are (kinda) learning to ration antibiotics that purely about GMO.*

*On a sidenote, it should be noted that the current patent system encourage companies to breed resistance by pushing their product really hard: the time it takes for resistance to become a serious problem is also about the time it takes for a patent to expire.

[martinuzz]

... reality guarantees that guarantee cannot happen. It doesn't take GM products to have that sort of mutation occur. Makes it more likely and/or more rapid, I guess? But it's not like existent less!GM crops are some kind of weird indefinitely static... thing. They also change, the bacteria involve change, etc., etc., etc. Your profs appear to be complaining about a process that already exists and that GM is not introducing, which makes it kinda' weird to be focusing their tirade against GM.

The difference between evolution and GM is that the former reacts, and the latter acts.
There is indeed no guarantuee that, in the example case of pesticides, resistant soil bacteria, or resistant weed species will evolve through process of random mutation and natural selection. Our tendency for monoculture (relative to natural biodiversity) and extensive use of (only a select few types of) pesticides probably have increased the probabilty of this happening by increasing selective pressure. Still, evolution is usually a process of 10s of thousands, if not millions of years, and seeing how very short our species has been using pesticides, on a evolutionary timescale, it is not very likely that we would see this happen within our, or our children's lifetimes, at least not on an uncontrollable scale.

However, if geneticists actively tailor genes, specifically deisgned to provide resistance against commonly used pesticides, knowing that there are already existing organisms in nature that can basically copy-paste genes, it is like handing it to said organisms on a gold platter, especially if you proceed to go about distributing your GM product to every niche on the globe were it can economically be grown. If evolution would throw us a similar mutation, it would probably start very local, and be more containable.

... beyond that, again, there's a lot more to GM than the pesticide related stuff. If folks are really going to get in a panic about that, just legislate specifically against that and leave all the other good stuff be instead of just blanket condemning the lot of it.

There probably are some modifications that I would be willing to agree on being harmless. I just feel that that classification should only be made by cynical and pessimistic biologists, who look at everything from a worst case scenario perspective. It should never be decided by economic interest.

Horizontal gene transfer between two eukaryotes is very, very, very rare though.

Knowledge of soil microbial life is only now starting to catch up from being a very undeveloped section of our scientific database of life on our planet.
Who knows, down there it might be less rare than we think.

[scrdest]

glyphosphate

Cannot resist being That Guy: it's glyphosate.

If evolution would throw us a similar mutation, it would probably start very local, and be more containable.

Err, where do you think the Roundup resistance gene, the most famous of those, came from? It wasn't designed from the ground up. It was nicked from a naturally evolved gene of a strain of Agrobacterium tumefaciens (CP4, specifically). A bacterium.

[Frumple]

There probably are some modifications that I would be willing to agree on being harmless. I just feel that that classification should only be made by cynical and pessimistic biologists, who look at everything from a worst case scenario perspective. It should never be decided by economic interest.

You definitely don't want the cynical pessimist biologists, then. They tend to be significantly easier to buy off, heh. Probably would rather have some variation of idealist, instead. Much less likely to have given up on ethical action or be easily swayed by moolah.

... though point of order on the evolution thing, it's not a matter of years, it's a matter of generations. And for species with shorter life cycles (like, say, bacteria, many plants, lots of insects, etc., etc., etc.) you can see pretty drastic changes in a human lifespan.* Gene dispersal in the geographic sense, on the other hand, is entirely variable based on the species in question. Plant and plant related stuff, though, are often really good at spreading around, so it can be very easy for a natural local mutation to become very not local in very short order. There's a reason we have close to unkillable kudzu terrorizing chunks of the US south-east, heh.

*This is pretty much the explicit reason a lot of our evolution research has been done with flies and whatnot, as you're probably aware.

[Culise]

He~ey.  I know everyone's talking about GM and Monsanto, but since this is now the general EU thread and all...some interesting new news just came out.

Europe's highest court rejects 'Safe Harbor' agreement used by American tech companies: Safe Harbor Now Invalidated

[Frumple]

... couldn't read that article (site in question is apparently nonfunctional without javascript, and bugger loading a news site with javascript running), but looking at the thing elsewhere, it... looks like there's at least two (seemingly wildly) different safe harbor concepts in regards to the internet? And this seems to primarily concern some legal stuff regarding data transfer across the atlantic (particularly in regards to the state's ongoing fornication of privacy concerns), not... what safe harbor normally means when talking about the internet. Which means if I'm reading this stuff right, I no longer have reason to reflexively throw invectives to the east

Also sounds a lot like the courts just delivered a fairly significant amount of economic pain to a lot of european tech reliant companies, from what I could parse, assuming it all sticks and whatnot. Which is kinda' interesting?

[mainiac]

Europe's highest court rejects 'Safe Harbor' agreement used by American tech companies: Safe Harbor Now Invalidated

I had turned my ad blocker and tracker blocker off when I clicked on that page.  There were 92 fucking trackers on that page.  WTF BI.

[Frumple]

... it's a business site. It's doing business.

[Culise]

Wow, I'm so used to my script blocker killing that sort of stuff that I didn't even notice all the stuff it was blocking until you mentioned it.  At any rate, here is the Court of Justice press release for the actual judgment.

Basically, the Safe Harbor being invalidated is the protocols for American tech companies to follow EU directives on data privacy.  Essentially, the assertion is that even if the Safe Harbor have adequate provisions for data privacy in and of themselves, they don't include US public authorities (read: NSA), which are "bound to disregard them without limitation," and prevents national supervisory organizations from also requiring additional data privacy measures where they legally are not blocked from do so; as such the Safe Harbor provisions themselves cannot be considered adequate or legal.  As a knock-on effect, this now means that American tech companies now effectively need to deal with each EU nation's provisions individually, rather than one coherent whole.

As for the linked article...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The European Court of Justice has just ruled that the transatlantic Safe Harbour agreement, which lets American companies use a single standard for consumer privacy and data storage in both the US and Europe, is invalid.

The ruling came after Edward Snowden's NSA leaks showed that European data stored by US companies was not safe from surveillance that would be illegal in Europe.

Companies such as Facebook and Twitter may now face scrutiny from individual European countries' data regulators — and could be forced to host European user data in Europe, rather than hosting it in the US and transferring it over.

That could be a bureaucratic nightmare: In theory, American companies with European customers could now end up trying to follow 20 or more different sets of national data-privacy regulations. Up to 4,500 US companies — not just tech firms — have relied on Safe Harbour.

The ruling says "the existence of a Commission decision finding that a third country ensures an adequate level of protection of the personal data transferred cannot eliminate or even reduce the powers available to the national supervisory authorities."

In short, the European Commission's Safe Harbour cannot usurp the powers of national authorities, the ruling says.

Here are the main points:

• Individual European countries can now set their own regulation for US companies' handling of citizens' data, vastly complicating the regulatory environment in Europe.
• Countries can choose to suspend the transfer of data to the US — forcing companies to host user data exclusively within the country.
• The Irish data regulator will now examine whether Facebook offered European users adequate data protections, and it may order the suspension of Facebook's transfer of data from Europe to the US if so.

Here's the news release from the European Court of Justice:

~IMGSNIP~

The ruling comes after privacy advocate Max Schrems brought a case against Facebook in Ireland. He said his privacy had been violated by the NSA's mass-surveillance programs, first revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Schrems is Austrian, but he brought the case against Facebook in Ireland because the Facebook's European headquarters are in Dublin.

He was jubilant Tuesday morning:

    *YAY* #CJEU on #SafeHarbor: SH invalid. DPC had to investigate. #EUdataP   
    — Max Schrems (@maxschrems) October 6, 2015

Here's Schrems at the European Court of Justice on Tuesday awaiting the ruling:

    Cuej: Max Schrems attend la décision sur #Facebook #SafeHarbor pic.twitter.com/wrcGaZQMwh   
    — Aurélie Mayembo (@aureliemayembo) October 6, 2015

Initially, Ireland's data regulator, the Data Protection Commissioner, rejected the case because it was bound by a legal pact called the Safe Harbour agreement (or Safe Harbor, depending on which spelling you adopt). Schrems subsequently appealed the decision, resulting in the European Court of Justice's ruling.

The ECJ ruling is final and cannot be appealed.

What are people saying?

In a statement, Schrems said: "I very much welcome the judgment of the Court, which will hopefully be a milestone when it comes to online privacy. This judgment draws a clear line. It clarifies that mass surveillance violates our fundamental rights. Reasonable legal redress must be possible ... This decision is a major blow for US global surveillance that heavily relies on private partners. The judgment makes it clear that US businesses cannot simply aid US espionage efforts in violation of European fundamental rights."

The court ruling obliquely touches upon US spying, saying "legislation permitting the public authorities to have access on a generalised basis to the content of electronic communications must be regarded as compromising the essence of the fundamental right to respect for private life."

Facebook said in a statement: "This case is not about Facebook. The Advocate General himself said that Facebook has done nothing wrong. What is at issue is one of the mechanisms that European law provides to enable essential transatlantic data flows. "

It continues: "Facebook, like many thousands of European companies, relies on a number of the methods prescribed by EU law to legally transfer data to the US from Europe, aside from Safe Harbour. It is imperative that EU and US governments ensure that they continue to provide reliable methods for lawful data transfers and resolve any issues relating to national security."

Helen Dixon, the Irish data-protection commissioner, said in a statement that she "welcome today's judgment," and that "in declaring the old 'safe harbour' rules invalid ... the significance of the judgment extends far beyond the case presently pending in Ireland. In that regard, my Office will immediately engage with our colleagues in other national supervisory authorities across Europe to determine how the judgment can be implemented in practice, quickly and effectively, particularly insofar as it impacts on EU/US data transfers."

So what now?

Previously, American companies could rely on Safe Harbour to ensure they could legally transfer data on Europeans from Europe to the US. Now, individual countries' data regulators could challenge this transfer — meaning companies like Google could face dozens of different regulatory environments in Europe. Countries could even demand that data on their citizens be stored within their own countries. Russia did this recently, introducing a new data law that demanded data on Russian citizens be stored within Russia.

The ECJ decision follows a legal opinion from Advocate General Yves Bots, an adviser to the court, arguing Safe Harbour should be struck down. "The surveillance carried out by the United States intelligence services is mass, indiscriminate surveillance," Bots said. "In those circumstances, a third country cannot in any event be regarded as ensuring an adequate level of protection."

He argued that agreements such as the 2000 Safe Harbour law could not supersede scrutiny at the national level. Such agreements "cannot eliminate or even reduce the national supervisory authorities' powers ... if the national supervisory authorities receive individual complaints, that does not in my view prevent them, by virtue of their investigative powers and their independence, from forming their own opinion on the general level of protection ensured by a third country and from drawing the appropriate conclusion when they determine individual cases."

There are other methods that companies can use to legitimise the transfer of data from Europe to America. Safe Harbour "is not the only way you can legitimise the transfer of personal information but it is probably the most important method," Dr. Susan Foster, a privacy lawyer at the law firm Mintz Levin, told Business Insider. One option is to directly seek the consent of the data subject, but it could be difficult to do so in cases in which companies have previously relied exclusively on Safe Harbour.

"Consent has to be explicit and freely given" — which causes a headache for another key use of Safe Harbour, the transfer of employee data. "In many countries in Europe you can't rely on consent from employees, because employees are understood not to have free choice." An employee may feel pressured into consenting, so such a consent would not be a valid basis for the transfer. "A lot of multinational companies with employees in Europe rely on Safe Harbour because they don't feel they can rely on consent, quite rightly." Foster says.

Even in instances in which consent can be freely given, there could be future hurdles as legal debate in Europe continues as to whether consent is an adequate mechanism (given how people tend to disregard terms and conditions). "At the moment we have consent as a valid basis of the transfer," Foster says. "I can foresee a world within the next 12 months where it's not."

Another option is "model clauses" — pre-approved clauses that can be slotted into contracts dealing with data protection.

[Arx]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The European Court of Justice has just ruled that the transatlantic Safe Harbour agreement, which lets American companies use a single standard for consumer privacy and data storage in both the US and Europe, is invalid.

The ruling came after Edward Snowden's NSA leaks showed that European data stored by US companies was not safe from surveillance that would be illegal in Europe.

Companies such as Facebook and Twitter may now face scrutiny from individual European countries' data regulators — and could be forced to host European user data in Europe, rather than hosting it in the US and transferring it over.

That could be a bureaucratic nightmare: In theory, American companies with European customers could now end up trying to follow 20 or more different sets of national data-privacy regulations. Up to 4,500 US companies — not just tech firms — have relied on Safe Harbour.

The ruling says "the existence of a Commission decision finding that a third country ensures an adequate level of protection of the personal data transferred cannot eliminate or even reduce the powers available to the national supervisory authorities."

In short, the European Commission's Safe Harbour cannot usurp the powers of national authorities, the ruling says.

Here are the main points:

• Individual European countries can now set their own regulation for US companies' handling of citizens' data, vastly complicating the regulatory environment in Europe.
• Countries can choose to suspend the transfer of data to the US — forcing companies to host user data exclusively within the country.
• The Irish data regulator will now examine whether Facebook offered European users adequate data protections, and it may order the suspension of Facebook's transfer of data from Europe to the US if so.

Here's the news release from the European Court of Justice:

~IMGSNIP~

The ruling comes after privacy advocate Max Schrems brought a case against Facebook in Ireland. He said his privacy had been violated by the NSA's mass-surveillance programs, first revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Schrems is Austrian, but he brought the case against Facebook in Ireland because the Facebook's European headquarters are in Dublin.

He was jubilant Tuesday morning:

    *YAY* #CJEU on #SafeHarbor: SH invalid. DPC had to investigate. #EUdataP   
    — Max Schrems (@maxschrems) October 6, 2015

Here's Schrems at the European Court of Justice on Tuesday awaiting the ruling:

    Cuej: Max Schrems attend la décision sur #Facebook #SafeHarbor pic.twitter.com/wrcGaZQMwh   
    — Aurélie Mayembo (@aureliemayembo) October 6, 2015

Initially, Ireland's data regulator, the Data Protection Commissioner, rejected the case because it was bound by a legal pact called the Safe Harbour agreement (or Safe Harbor, depending on which spelling you adopt). Schrems subsequently appealed the decision, resulting in the European Court of Justice's ruling.

The ECJ ruling is final and cannot be appealed.

What are people saying?

In a statement, Schrems said: "I very much welcome the judgment of the Court, which will hopefully be a milestone when it comes to online privacy. This judgment draws a clear line. It clarifies that mass surveillance violates our fundamental rights. Reasonable legal redress must be possible ... This decision is a major blow for US global surveillance that heavily relies on private partners. The judgment makes it clear that US businesses cannot simply aid US espionage efforts in violation of European fundamental rights."

The court ruling obliquely touches upon US spying, saying "legislation permitting the public authorities to have access on a generalised basis to the content of electronic communications must be regarded as compromising the essence of the fundamental right to respect for private life."

Facebook said in a statement: "This case is not about Facebook. The Advocate General himself said that Facebook has done nothing wrong. What is at issue is one of the mechanisms that European law provides to enable essential transatlantic data flows. "

It continues: "Facebook, like many thousands of European companies, relies on a number of the methods prescribed by EU law to legally transfer data to the US from Europe, aside from Safe Harbour. It is imperative that EU and US governments ensure that they continue to provide reliable methods for lawful data transfers and resolve any issues relating to national security."

Helen Dixon, the Irish data-protection commissioner, said in a statement that she "welcome[s] today's judgment," and that "in declaring the old 'safe harbour' rules invalid ... the significance of the judgment extends far beyond the case presently pending in Ireland. In that regard, my Office will immediately engage with our colleagues in other national supervisory authorities across Europe to determine how the judgment can be implemented in practice, quickly and effectively, particularly insofar as it impacts on EU/US data transfers."

So what now?

Previously, American companies could rely on Safe Harbour to ensure they could legally transfer data on Europeans from Europe to the US. Now, individual countries' data regulators could challenge this transfer — meaning companies like Google could face dozens of different regulatory environments in Europe. Countries could even demand that data on their citizens be stored within their own countries. Russia did this recently, introducing a new data law that demanded data on Russian citizens be stored within Russia.

The ECJ decision follows a legal opinion from Advocate General Yves Bots, an adviser to the court, arguing Safe Harbour should be struck down. "The surveillance carried out by the United States intelligence services is mass, indiscriminate surveillance," Bots said. "In those circumstances, a third country cannot in any event be regarded as ensuring an adequate level of protection."

He argued that agreements such as the 2000 Safe Harbour law could not supersede scrutiny at the national level. Such agreements "cannot eliminate or even reduce the national supervisory authorities' powers ... if the national supervisory authorities receive individual complaints, that does not in my view prevent them, by virtue of their investigative powers and their independence, from forming their own opinion on the general level of protection ensured by a third country and from drawing the appropriate conclusion when they determine individual cases."

There are other methods that companies can use to legitimise the transfer of data from Europe to America. Safe Harbour "is not the only way you can legitimise the transfer of personal information but it is probably the most important method," Dr. Susan Foster, a privacy lawyer at the law firm Mintz Levin, told Business Insider. One option is to directly seek the consent of the data subject, but it could be difficult to do so in cases in which companies have previously relied exclusively on Safe Harbour.

"Consent has to be explicit and freely given" — which causes a headache for another key use of Safe Harbour, the transfer of employee data. "In many countries in Europe you can't rely on consent from employees, because employees are understood not to have free choice." An employee may feel pressured into consenting, so such a consent would not be a valid basis for the transfer. "A lot of multinational companies with employees in Europe rely on Safe Harbour because they don't feel they can rely on consent, quite rightly." Foster says.

Even in instances in which consent can be freely given, there could be future hurdles as legal debate in Europe continues as to whether consent is an adequate mechanism (given how people tend to disregard terms and conditions). "At the moment we have consent as a valid basis of the transfer," Foster says. "I can foresee a world within the next 12 months where it's not."

Another option is "model clauses" — pre-approved clauses that can be slotted into contracts dealing with data protection.

Fixed the accidental strike in the quoted text.

[scriver]

I thought Safe Harbour was the custom that if you manage to get home after having committed a crime you can't be arrested.