Slashdot Mirror
MEPs Vote To Suspend Data Sharing With US
New submitter mrspoonsi writes with this news, excerpted from the BBC: "The European Parliament has voted to suspend the sharing of financial data with the U.S., following allegations that citizens' data was spied on....The European Parliament voted to suspend its Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) agreement with the US, in response to the alleged tapping of EU citizens' bank data held by the Belgian company SWIFT. The agreement granted the U.S. authorities access to bank data for terror-related investigations but leaked documents made public by whistleblower Edward Snowden allege that the global bank transfer network was the target of wider U.S. surveillance."
The TFTP was a pretty one-sided agreement, and it's therefore politically fragile and the first thing that's likely to be pulled when the trust in the USA's respect of EU data breaks down.
I think that's the issue (and why this sharing has been a bit controversial over here), is that those reciprocal agreements don't exist. The US have been given a view into EU data, and the same sharing doesn't come in the other direction. (whether it was sought... I don't know, but one-sided arrangements are troublesome in and of themselves)
They are talking about a specific program where the EU hands over financial data on suspected terrorists to the US. They will no longer be handing that data over willfully.
And more specifically, they're talking about a program that undermines SWIFT. As a reminder, in the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration concluded that it could find terrorists through financial transaction tracking. The problem - global wire transfers and other financial messaging is controlled by a Belgian company. The CIA apparently had to be almost restrained from just immediately hacking them outright. Instead the US Treasury got involved and SWIFT were forced to hand over data by virtue of them having a US based datacenter (as a backup for their EU datacenter).
SWIFT have said, several times and on the record, that they are not happy about being abused for political purposes and immediately began constructing a second backup datacenter also in the EU. The USA, seeing that their leverage over SWIFT was starting to disappear, decided to apply heavy pressure the EU in order to avoid losing access to this data source even after the US datacenter was decommissioned. The result was the EU data sharing agreement.
The EU parliament was never particularly happy about this arrangement and insisted on there being auditing, etc, which turned out to be a worthless rubber-stamping exercise in which the EU appointed inspectors tried to visit the US Treasury and get reliable documentation on what the data was being used for, but were told to go fuck themselves and that the information they needed was classified. So basically the EU folded under pressure and was then abused, to nobodies surprise at all.
Now that the TFTP data sharing agreement is suspended, and SWIFT no longer need their US datacenter, the only way back in is hacking. And I'm sure the people at SWIFT know that, and will do their best to stop it.
Anyway, this is a very good thing. Next up - airline passenger data!
It's non-binding because the EU Parliament is not a real Parliament. It's very weak and has limited influence, the real power at the EU level is in the European Commission which is sort of like an executive branch that is directed by national governments. The EU Commission may still decide to ignore the Parliament on this one, but I guess that wouldn't do a great deal for their legitimacy, which is at any rate already heavily weakened after years of sustained attacks on their decision making ...
You don't seem to get it. TFTP is one direction only - there is no reciprocal program which gives EU authorities access to transactions within USA (at least nobody heard about one). So USA gets great amount of data particularly useful for industrial espionage (I am sure Boeing would just love to know how much money Airbus is getting, from where, how much it is paying subcontractors,etc.) and Europe gets nothing.