EU wins US 'guarantees' on SWIFT data transfers
Franco Frattini
(BRUSSELS) - EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini expressed confidence Thursday that the United States would correctly use personal data from the interbank transfer service SWIFT in anti-terror probes.
"The EU will have now the necessary guarantees that the US Treasury processes data it receives from SWIFT's mirror server in USA in a way which takes account of EU data protection principles," he said.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), based near Brussels, deals with trillions of dollars in global transactions daily between nearly 8,000 financial institutions in 200-plus countries.
SWIFT admitted last year that it had provided US authorities with a "limited" amount of data in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001 but insisted it had done its utmost to protect privacy.
To carry out its transfers, the society uses a computer server in the Netherlands and a "mirror server" in the United States.
From July, SWIFT has committed to abiding by "safe harbour" principles which means that a US-based company can import data from EU countries because it would be respecting data standards equivalent to those in Europe.
The information, primarily account numbers involved in a transaction, could only be used by the US Treasury in anti-terror investigations and would be erased after five years unless they were used.
Under current EU data protection rules, information on money transfers can only be used for banking purposes and not for things like investigating financing of "terrorist" activities.
Washington insists the data is essential to fight extremists.
A Belgian commission found that the United States had obtained private information from SWIFT 63 times between September 2001 and June 2006, when the affair was revealed in the media, and six more times since then.
SWIFT is obliged to change its computer data base systems to ensure that, in five years, transactions between European countries will not pass through the server in the United States.
The EU is also set to name a person to draw up annual reports on whether the US Treasury is respecting its commitments.
The SWIFT case and the American Terrorist Finance Tracking Program
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