A few months ago, the New York Times was criticised for revealing the trawl through SWIFT that allowed US authorities to link financial transactions to terrorist financing. It now appears that this programme also broke EU data protection laws, though SWIFT is not to be prosecuted.
The Belgian data protection registrar declared today that the Society
for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), which
handles financial transactions on behalf of banks and other financial
institutions in G10 countries, had violated Belgian data protection law
by complying with the US Treasury's secret investigation....
The US Treasury had demanded to examine SWIFT's records in a hunt for terrorist financiers after 9/11.
It had unlimited access to this data for an unspecified time. The
opinion said that in order to protect the privacy of its client's data,
SWIFT should have ensured that the US snooping of its records was
proportionate, that they were only retained for a limited examination,
that the investigation was transparent to the European authorities and
so on.
SWIFT found itself in a conflict situation. Was this because the US could not trust allowing certain European nations to have a transparent overview of its activities. Would you trust Belgium?
Another indication that we may not all be on the same side.
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