EU to share consumers’ financial data with US

www.dw-world.de

US and European negotiators have completed a draft agreement that would give American law enforcement access to Europeans’ financial data to combat terrorism. The deal has consumer and privacy advocates up in arms.

According to a draft seen by Deutsche Welle, financial records stored by the SWIFT financial data system including “name, account number, address, national identification number, and other personal data”, can be shared with American authorities if there is a suspicion that the person is in any way involved with terrorist activity. The system manages international and sometimes domestic bank transfers in more than 200 countries

The draft’s contents were first reported late Wednesday by the Financial Times Deutschland and the Web site www.netzpolitik.org (see below for a link to the actual documents provided by netzpolitik). The draft agreement is intended to be an interim solution before a more substantive agreement is signed and would go into effect February 1, 2010 and expire January 31, 2011.

According to the Financial Times Deutschland, the Swedish presidency of the EU hopes to have the agreement signed before December 1, when the Lisbon Treaty comes into effect and stricter review by the European Parliament becomes necessary.

The proposed agreement has reportedly lead to disagreements among EU member states with Reuters reporting that the ambassadors to the EU from Germany, France, Austria and Finland objected to the draft. The agreement would require the unanimous consent of all 27 members.

SWIFT sparks a scandal

The issue of US access to European financial records has been controversial since 2006 when it was revealed that American intelligence agencies were secretly monitoring the SWIFT system. The organization held a so-called ‘mirror’ server in the US, logging all the activity on its European system, giving US authorities access to information, in a way that was deemed unlawful by the EU.

At the time, SWIFT said it was bound by US anti-terrorism laws to allow surveillance, though the organization now plans to move its servers to Europe to protect European users’ privacy.

The European Union and the US began talks in July on a new agreement intended to satisfy American demands for access to the data while taking into account European concerns about privacy and losing control of the information. Under the terms of the proposed deal, Europeans would also have access to financial data in the United States.

The draft says requests for information “shall be tailored as narrowly as possible” to prevent too much consumer data from being evaluated by law enforcement and intelligence authorities.

However, several paragraphs later, the draft stipulates that, if the provider of data “cannot identify the data that would respond to the request for technical reasons, all potentially relevant data shall be transmitted in bulk” to the state that requests it. States requesting data will be able to hold it for up to five years before being required to delete the information. Read more…

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