US Monitoring of International Banking Data

To catch evil-doers, one must follow the money.

As part of the war on terror, American intelligence services have been monitoring European bank transactions since 2001. When the EU found out about it in 2006, they were outraged. But now it looks like the bloc will agree to a controversial deal that will allow the covert data transfer to continue.

The pressure from the Americans was "massive," say diplomats in Brussels. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently told her European counterparts that the fate of the West hung in the balance. And in the capital cities of Europe, American ambassadors stormed governments like door-to-door salespeople. As one EU foreign minister put it, "they pulled out all the moral and political stops."

Because what the Americans were selling was controversial indeed. Early next week, the European Parliament's Justice and Home Affairs Council will meet and decide upon a draft agreement between the EU and US, the so-called "SWIFT agreement." This agreement allows the US ongoing access to European banking data for the purposes of anti-terrorism investigations.

And, the Americans said, if Washington's security services were now refused access to the financial transactions of European citizens, then an essential element of the war on terror would be missing. Security levels would drop, the threat of new terrorist attacks would rise -- including in Europe.

The term SWIFT is an acronym for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication which is effectively a switchboard for money transfers. Of SWIFT's two major computer servers, one is in the U.S. which facilitates easy monitoring of the millions of transactions daily.

And then there's this.

Among the grateful users of the SWIFT data that the Americans were extracting were European security agencies. The services are not actually allowed to gather this kind of information themselves. Which is why European anti-terror experts and their political representatives made a point of staying on cozy terms with their American colleagues. As European Commission Vice-President Jacques Barrot has said, trans-Atlantic cooperation in this area is "indispensable" and the data gathered had proven "absolutely useful and effective" in the fight against terrorism.

Obviously, the Europeans remain nervous about loss of privacy but are going to continue to allow it.