US to access Europeans' bank data

Source: Press TV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=133977§ionid=351020605



The European parliament has approved a new deal to allow US anti-terror investigators to access Europeans' bank data.

Top US officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, lobbied the EU over the data transfer deal, that gives the US access to bulk data from Swift, a firm that handles millions of bank transactions daily.

The program was "very important to the security of the United States and Europe," AFP quoted Michael Dodman, an official with the US mission to the EU as saying.

Under the five-year deal, Washington will have access to the banking transactions of some 8-thousand banks in Europe from August 1, 2010.

It will also allow the European police organization, Europol, to check the validity of US requests.

Furthermore, EU citizens will be able to contest the use of data before US courts.

The deal has raised privacy concerns in Europe, as lawmakers in the EU believe personal information including data from electronic bank payments would be used by the US, and would be held for too long and handed on to other governments.

"This agreement may be the best available, but it remains problematic," AFP quoted head of the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx as saying.

"The main problem is that Washington receives large chunks of data because it is technologically impossible to select bits of information," Hustinx said.

Such concerns have made the EU to think of setting up its own Terrorist Finance Tracking Program that enables it to select data on its own and decide what to send to Washington.