SWIFT Monitoring Illegal in EU

So Belgium and the EU have decided that the SWIFT Monitoring program is illegal.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, reached an agreement with the United States Treasury Department, pursuant to U.S. subpoenas, to transfer information regarding financial transactions to the U.S. subject to certain limitations in order to protect the privacy of individuals. This made it easier for U.S. counterterrorism efforts to monitor the flow of money through terrorist networks without the knowledge of the suspected terrorists. This week the program was declared to be in violation of Belgian and European Union laws on privacy by the government-sponsored Commission for the Protection of Privacy. The Commission did not demand that the program end all activities immediately, but did demand that its operations be amended in order to be consistent with the Commission’s interpretation of the law.

The damage has already been done with the release of the information on the program, so I doubt that this finding will have much effect. Is anyone really surprised that the EU came out against it? You can be certain that the amendment of the program to allow it to continue is a political dodge in an attempt to continue getting intelligence from the US.

Threatwatch provides a translation of an interview with the SWIFT CEO.

La Libre also interviewed SWIFT CEO Leonard Schrank for a separate article (“Schrank: Plusiers attentats ont pu etre evites”). This is an excerpt (ThreatsWatch translation):

…The guarantees that we put in place in order to ensure that the information requested by Washington would not be used except for the fight against terrorism were extremely severe… this data would not be used to track financial fraud or for economic espionage… although the risk [of privacy violation] is close to zero, zero risk does not exist. One must minimize the risk without being able to eliminate it completely.

Bear in mind that this system has allowed us to save thousands of lives and perhaps more… It has been established that terrorist attacks, from both sides of the Atlantic, to the United States, to Canada and in Indonesia have been avoided thanks to the information provided by SWIFT…

What is left unclear now is whether the changes demanded by the Commission will undermine the program’s effectiveness. An examination of the brief summary of the decision and the full document suggests that changes to the program could well hinder its effectiveness in monitoring terrorists’ financial networks, or else Belgian and EU law will need to be changed.

Sounds to me as if SWIFT made a concerted effort to put controls on the data. Further controls, as defined by the EU, will likely stifle what little effectiveness the progam has left.