Hands off our bank data, Europe tells US

Found on The Register on Wednesday, 22 November 2006
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The European Commission is set to call for an immediate halt on the illegal transfer of financial information to the United States Treasury.

"The hidden, systematic, massive and long-term transfer of personal data by SWIFT to the UST in a confidential, non-transparent and systematic manner for years without effective legal grounds and without the possibility of independent control by public data protection supervisory authorities constitutes a violation of the fundamental European principles as regards data protection and is not in accordance with Belgian and European law," says the EC opinion.

SWIFT has already been found to be in breach of data protection law by Belgian authorities, but no action has been taken. However, complaints filed by campaign group Privacy international in 33 European countries were put on ice while the A29 group formed a consensus opinion.

There shouldn't be need for any calls; handing out private data to other countries, especially without any monitoring and legal grounds should never have happened in the first place. If you're caught stealing, nobody will form a comission and tell shop owners to stop giving you access; you simply end up at the next police station.