No laws for Bush..International or ours...

From Privacy International. org:

PI launches campaign to suspend unlawful activities of finance giant
28/06/2006

Privacy International launched a campaign today against the illegal actions of SWIFT in its transfer of financial transactional data to the U.S. Government.

The privacy watchdog organisation Privacy International has today filed simultaneous complaints with Data Protection and Privacy regulators in 33 countries concerning recent revelations of secret disclosures of millions of records from the banking giant SWIFT to U.S. intelligence agencies.

This disclosure of data has been undertaken on the grounds of counter-terrorism. 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.

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.

The issue was first brought to light on Friday June 23rd 2006, when the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times published details of the private arrangement between SWIFT and the United States Government that involved the covert disclosure to the U.S. of financial data on customers' transactions. Neither the U.S. Government nor SWIFT was prepared to provide details of the extent of the disclosures. However the office of the Belgium Prime Minister confirmed that: "the cooperative (SWIFT) had received broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records".

The complaints also expressed concern that this data could be used by U.S. authorities for a range of unrelated activities, even espionage.

Each complaint was addressed to a specific privacy commissioner and official raising issues specific to that country. The general complaint text can be seen by clicking here.

Related:Pulling a Swift one? Bank transfer information sent to U.S. authorities

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