Interview - Privacy Shield down with Cassandra Cooper

In Star Trek, it's always bad news when the Enterprise's shields go down in the middle of a conflict. You just have that feeling that the whole crew is one photon torpedo away from being blasted into space. Well, last week the E.U.-U.S. privacy shield went down. The European Court of Justice struck down the deal based on the challenge of a privacy advocate, Max Schrems. Now, I don't think anyone is at risk of being blown up here, but it is definitely a red alert situation. The privacy agreement involved more than 5,300 companies, most of them small businesses. It underpinned $7.1 trillion in trade. So why did this agreement suddenly get torpedoed? What did Ed Snowden have to do with it? And what should affected companies do next? Here to explain it to me is Cassandra Cooper, senior research analyst in security, risk, and compliance at Info-Tech Research Group.