p2pnet - rss feed: ‘Swiss banks broke privacy laws’
p2pnet.net News:- Nothing is more sacrosanct than customer information guarded by Swiss banks, goes the theory.
But that went out the window when it was revealed that the Cheney / Bush administration has been mining private citizen information held by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, which links about 7,800 banks and brokerages.
And when Swiss banks passed customer bank details to US authorities, they broke the law, says Hanspeter Thür, the Federal Data Protection Commissioner of Switzerland, quoted by the Associated Press.
They should have told customers SWIFT was passing data to the US, he said, according to AP.
In June Human rights group Privacy International launched a campaign against the, “illegal actions of SWIFT in its transfer of financial transactional data to the U.S. Government”.
“The disclosures involve the mass transfer of data from the SWIFT centre in Belgium to the United States, and possibly direct access by US authorities both to data held within Belgium and data residing in SWIFT centres worldwide,” said PI, going on:
“The complaints allege that the activity was undertaken without regard to legal process under Data Protection law, and that the disclosures were made without any legal basis or authority whatever. The scale of the operation, involving millions of records, places this disclosure in the realm of a fishing exercise rather than legally authorised investigation.”
Neither the US government nor SWIFT, “was prepared to provide details of the extent of the disclosures,” the complaint went on, adding:
“However the office of the Belgium Prime Minister confirmed that: ‘the cooperative (SWIFT) had received broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records’.”
Now, “Just the possibility of the data being leaked should have been grounds enough to warn customers, he [Thür] said,” the story goes on.
“His statement was at odds with the views of the Swiss finance minister, Hans-Rudolf Merz, who said last month that giving the Central Intelligence Agency such access did not infringe on the country’s banking secrecy rules.
Thür, “urged that a solution be negotiated by which United States laws and European data-protection rules are standardized,” says AP, adding:
“Some European officials want the appointment of an independent, European-based auditor to guard against abuses, in place of a Washington consulting firm that now has that role.
Switzerland is not a member of the European Union, which separately has lashed out at Swift. European Union legislators criticized the consortium in early October; at the same time, one of Swift’s supervisors, the European Central Bank, acknowledged that it had known for years that the consortium was giving confidential banking records to the United States authorities.”
Also See:
Associated Press - Swiss Official Says Banks Broke Law by Supplying Data to U.S., October 14, 2006
illegal actions of SWIFT - Bush SWIFT piracy draws fire, June 29, 2006
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