EU Realizing It Got The Short End Of The Stick In Agreeing To Let US Spy On Bank Data
from the whoops dept
A little over a year ago, the EU agreed to a deal with the US, called the SWIFT agreement, which said that the US could get access to EU citizens' financial transaction data. This was so that the US could (in theory) better track down terrorists. That's the story we're told, anyway. There are a variety of conditions imposed on the US, such as that they have to justify their requests, the requests must be specific rather than general, and that it is limited only to people with "links to terrorist activity." Oh yeah and any EU citizen is supposed to have the right to find out if the US accessed his or her financial data.Apparently, an EU Parliament member decided to test this last part out and got a major runaround, in order to keep him from finding out if his data was seen by the Americans. Meanwhile, the Europol Joint Supervisory Body (JSB) complained that the requests from the US to get this kind of data have been too vague (remember, they're required to be specific) to determine if they're valid.
Given all of this, it appears the EU is wondering why it's turning data over to the US at all. As the reporter Nick Farrell notes in that last link, what's kind of amazing here is that the US has been given access to financial data of citizens of other countries, and you'd think it would be bending over backwards to keep that sort of access. Basically ignoring the very rules it agreed to seems like a good way to completely lose that access.
