ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the emergence of safeguards that are designed to protect non-US citizens against infringements of their privacy rights in the context of foreign surveillance. The chapter covers two safeguards specifically: Presidential Policy Directive 28 – Signals Intelligence Activities of 2014 and the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework Principles that the United States Department of Commerce concluded with the European Commission in 2016. We show that both safeguards can be traced back to the material sanctions variant of the coercion mechanism. In both instances, US technology companies, on whose data on foreign citizens the National Security Agency greatly relied and that had themselves come under fire following the Snowden revelations, credibly threatened that they would curtail National Security Agency access to their data if the government did not publicly commit to privacy protections for foreigners.
