03 August 2009 News

 

EU-US discuss access to Swift messages as "the Swift system is changing"

The European Commission hopes to conclude a new temporary agreement within the next couple of months under which the US will gain access to financial messaging data that the US Treasury Department says is necessary for its terrorist finance tracking program.

Swift has said that "the agreement may apply to Swift message data located in Europe" and has asked the EU and US authorities to provide legal clarity and certainty regarding access by authorities to financial messaging data.

Dutch MEP Sophie in't Veld has said that she is "Mystified over why the EU wants to let the US have direct access to the data when the whole point of Swift moving its servers from the US back to Europe was to stop its security services getting unlimited access," however Swift says that the creation of the data centre in Switzerland was a decision based primarily on cost reduction and capacity expansion.

Intra-European Swift messages will remain in Europe and will be mirrored in the Swiss data centre by the end of the year where before they were mirrored in the US. US data will be mirrored in Europe until the end of the year.

The Swift Board said that it chose Switzerland for this because it meets all Swift's criteria: quality of the technical infrastructure, availability of skilled staff, and a location at least 500 km from the existing European Operating Centre in The Netherlands. The availability of a leased hosting site to reduce implementation time was another criterion. There were also legal considerations such as data protection. Switzerland is not part of the EU.

The EC has stated that the new agreement will include guarantees on the limits of access, on the use and retention of data, and on the sharing of the data.

Swift says that the authorities can currently only access limited sets of data stored in Swift Operating Centres and this applies to FIN traffic only. SWIFTNet FileAct traffic, including SEPA data, is not stored and therefore is not retrievable.

European Commission vice-president and justice, freedom and security commissioner Jacques Barrot told a Civil Liberties Committee MEPs meeting on 22 July the new agreement with Washington would be only an interim one, because "the Swift system is changing", and this justifies negotiating a new agreement, "under the aegis of Lisbon", he added.
 
The Commission "will request a negotiating mandate only after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty" by all Member States, "so that, in particular, Parliament can co-decide". Meanwhile, "for these few months, we consider it desirable to negotiate an interim agreement. For would it be wise to suspend a surveillance that judge Brugière told this committee had prevented a number of attacks?" he asked.

In reply, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert MEP asked that documents relating to the current negotiations be made public. Before negotiating any international agreement, the EU should itself establish an "acceptable" personal data protection system, added Sarah Ludford MEP.