Fergie's Tech Blog

SWIFT: EU Panel Says Banks Broke Law by Giving Data to U.S.

Dan Bilefsky writes in The New York Times:

A European Union oversight body concluded today that an international banking-data consortium broke the law when it gave the Central Intelligence Agency and other American agencies access to its records of millions of private financial transactions. The body called on the consortium to stop providing the data.

The consortium, called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or Swift for short, has drawn widespread criticism and scrutiny since the data transfers became publicly known early this year. American agencies requested the data so that their analysts could search for possible terrorist financing activity among the millions of confidential financial transactions that Swift oversees.

In a draft of a statement that will be made final on Thursday, the European Union’s data-protection “watchdog,” a committee made up of data-protection officials from the union’s member governments, says that financial institutions throughout the union share responsibility with Swift for the data sharing, which it concluded had violated the civil liberties of European citizens.

posted by Fergie @ 11/22/2006 09:02:00 PM