European Parliament: No More Bank Data Transfers To US For Anti-Terror Investigations

By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch

The European Parliament is showing some teeth again. Following the ongoing revelations of mass surveillance by US intelligence agencies, the Parliament plenary today passed a resolution calling on the EU Commission to temporarily suspend all data transfers according to the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) with the United States Treasury Department.

The agreement allowing transfers of banking information of European citizens in bulk to the Treasury under supervision of EU police body Europol came into effect in 2010, after earlier secret access by US authorities to the data held by Belgian finance institution SWIFT since 2001 were revealed in reports by the New York Times in 2006.

The European Parliament had grudgingly passed the TFTP agreement to to legalise transfers that were limited and supervised by Europol. Recent press reports about direct access to the IT systems banking data by the NSA resulted in harsh criticism during one of the regular inquiry hearings the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) has conducted since September on the mass surveillance affair.

With the resolution today, the plenary also requested a full onsite technical investigation into the allegations, including those on backdoors used by US authorities to illegally access the SWIFT servers.

The Conservative European People’s Party recommended to postpone the vote until after a visit by the EU LIBE Committee in the US next week, but S&D, Liberals, Green Party and the Left favored an immediate vote. The Left had originally even called for an immediate termination. A temporary or permanent stop to the TFTP has to be executed by the Commission and the member states who might be reluctant to make that step.

The LIBE Committee earlier this week also passed stricter data protection provisions that will extend to non EU-companies active on the EU market.