The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the U.K. Home Office announced in a recent joint press release that the U.S. and U.K. have signed a data access agreement that will allow each country’s law enforcement agencies to request user Internet data from the other.
The agreement, enacted in 2019 as a CLOUD Act, allows each country to combat serious crimes including terrorism, child abuse and cybercrime, and will take effect on October 3, 2022.
The U.S. Department of Justice said, “The data access agreement will allow us faster access to service provider data in both countries, including information and evidence held in connection with the prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of serious crimes, among other things.”
The program was first proposed in 2017, with the U.K. Home Office saying at the time that its aim was to create a bilateral agreement that would remove some of those legal barriers and still “provide strict privacy protections for citizens,” and Australia joined the CLOUD bill late last year.
