Swift Program takes a hit - from the European Union
Tracking terrorists and the scum that supports them is tough work. Dangerous for the agents and dangerous for innocents. Especially when Islamic jihad tradition approves of women with small children as targets. Leaving little exploding surprises in cars, buses, subways, railroads and planes is the plan de guerre for terrorists. Stopping the carnage they desire to inflict on the free world is the job of security groups everywhere.
Except for the European Union, that area of the globe where most terrorists incidents have launched from recently. Jonathan Winer writes in The Counterterrorism Blog that the European Union’s “Privacy Czar” thinks the United States cannot use EU financial information to track the people who would kill him as quickly as any of us:
In a sweeping assertion of his institutional power to decide whether or not the U.S. has the right to see EU financial data, Europe’s Data Protection Supervisor, Peter Hustinx announced today that he and Europe’s other privacy czars had the authority to exercise “independent scrutiny” of the SWIFT system and all other aspects of the EU’s payments system to decide whether privacy laws are being violated.
The opinion was taken with the goal of stopping forever the ability of the U.S. Treasury to trace terrorist transactions through the SWIFT payment system based in Belgium. The breathtaking EU opinion takes the position that Europe’s privacy czars have the legal obligation to ensure that information in the payments system is used only to make payments, not as leads in terrorism or other law enforcement cases. It also says that those holding the data have the obligation immediately to provide the data subjects with information concerning everyone who has received the data, such as any law enforcement or intelligence agency that obtains access to particular records.
Thank you Peter. We can all sleep a little more comfortably since you have opined that our lives are less dangerous while your intellect is comfortable with choices - as are the terrorists. And to be sure, we at least have to let the terrorists know that we are watching - as the italics above suggest. That’s fair - we may be able to get the data (with a monumental diplomatic effort) but we have to tell the terrorists we did so. I’m almost sure they won’t be able to figure that out.
It’s not a done deal, as Winer points out, but intense diplomacy will be the rule here:
In response, the European Central Bank immediately punted the issue back to the EU’s politicians, saying it was not up to it to decide on the balance between privacy and fighting terrorism. Accordingly, it is not certain what will happen next.
And Winer quickly points out why the European Central Bank pushed back:
Needless to say, Europe’s privacy czars have no competence, institutional or substantive, to combat terrorism. Moreover, national security is a fundamental exception to the privacy laws cited in the opinion, a legal reality that the opinion simply ignores. (The basic position of the EU data protection authorities is that yes, national security is a defense against a violation of the privacy laws, but only if the national security is that of an EU country, not a foreign country like the U.S.)
But to have to fight an uphill battle for information in the free world against people whose daily lives are spent planning to kill others and themselves is troubling. Why should it be this hard? What is it that leaders and politicians don’t get when they can simply sweep the floor of dead bodies and still claim that terrorists deserve the same rights and freedom as the rest of the world?
The UK gets it - the guys at Brussels seem to have their night vision goggles on while staring at a bright light.
In the UK, intelligence agencies continue to uncover serious terrorist plots, and issue warnings about more terrorist attacks to come. In Brussels, the warnings that are issued continue to focus on the risks of cooperation with the U.S. Someday soon, something’s got to give.
I predict that the European Union will crumble on this policy once the UK exposes their idiotic approach to useful data.
