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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."
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!