PRIVACY ORIENTED | From the age of BIG BROTHER – greetings!

Published 10 February, 2010, 08:38
Edited 11 February, 2010, 11:16

Russia Today

The European Parliament is debating an agreement that allows the banking data of its citizens to be scrutinized by American officials.

Washington says this measure is vital to counter terrorism, but many in Europe see it as an invasion of privacy.

In a deal that came into force temporarily last Monday, the EU and the US are sharing banking data conducted through the SWIFT money transferring system. For supporters, including the US government, it seems a key part of the fight against the financing of international terrorism

But a large body of members of the European Parliament sees it as an infringement of the basic rights of EU citizens. They are worried about how much banking information is going to be revealed, how long it is to be stored and the potential for information to be misused or transferred to a third country.

The members of the European Parliament are due to debate the deal on Wednesday and take a final vote on Thursday. Some of the parliamentarians are already dissatisfied with the fact they have not been given the eight weeks they are supposed to have to consider such a deal.

Member of European Parliament Jan Philipp Albrecht claims that the principals of protection of fundamental rights, especially data protection, are not fully considered in the agreement about the SWIFT-data with the US.

“The breaking point regarded what the Council is doing now is about the access of the EU citizens to the US court, it’s about implementing an independent data protecting supervisor’s right to review and so on,” Albrecht told RT. “It’s really important for us to be implemented, so, we think there has to be a general debate before deciding, therefore, we can’t decide at this moment. We want a debate about the fundamental principles in the security cooperation and at the moment the parliament is united about saying this.”

A Dutch member of the European Parliament Sophia in ‘t Veld has said the EU parliament in large majority has very serious concerns whether this agreement is fully in line with the rules on data protection and fundamental rights.

“This parliament expressed concerns on various occasions in recent years. And we are not pleased with the way that the council – that is the European member state governments – are trying to push this through,” Sophia in ‘t Veld noted. “They are trying to sideline the EU parliament and since the 1st of December, in a procedure under the new Lisbon Treaty, where the EU parliament has to give its consent to such an agreement. We feel that the European Council should be much more forthcoming and give us access to all the relevant information that we need in order to take a well-founded decision.”

Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) — Air passengers should be made aware of the health risks of airport body screenings and governments must explain any decision to expose the public to higher levels of cancer-causing radiation, an inter-agency report said.

Pregnant women and children should not be subject to scanning, even though the radiation dose from body scanners is “extremely small,” said the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety report, which is restricted to the agencies concerned and not meant for public circulation. The group includes the European Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Energy Agency and the World Health Organization.

A more accurate assessment about the health risks of the screening won’t be possible until governments decide whether all passengers will be systematically scanned or randomly selected, the report said. Governments must justify the additional risk posed to passengers, and should consider “other techniques to achieve the same end without the use of ionizing radiation.”

President Barack Obama has pledged $734 million to deploy airport scanners that use x-rays and other technology to detect explosives, guns and other contraband. The U.S. and European countries including the U.K. have been deploying more scanners at airports after the attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound Northwest airline flight.

“There is little doubt that the doses from the backscatter x-ray systems being proposed for airport security purposes are very low,” Health Protection Agency doctor Michael Clark said by phone from Didcot, England. “The issue raised by the report is that even though doses from the systems are very low, they feel there is still a need for countries to justify exposures.”

3-D Imaging

A backscatter x-ray is a machine that can render a three- dimensional image of people by scanning them for as long as 8 seconds, the report says. The technology has also raised privacy issues in countries including Germany because it yields images of the naked body.

The Committee cited the IAEA’s 1996 Basic Safety Standards agreement, drafted over three decades, that protects people from radiation. Frequent exposure to low doses of radiation can lead to cancer and birth defects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Most of the scanners deliver less radiation than a passenger is likely to receive from cosmic rays while airborne, the report said. Scanned passengers may absorb from 0.1 to 5 microsieverts of radiation compared with 5 microsieverts on a flight from Dublin to Paris and 30 microsieverts between Frankfurt and Bangkok, the report said. A sievert is a unit of measure for radiation.

European Union regulators plan to finish a study in April on the effects of scanning technology on travelers’ privacy and health. Amsterdam, Heathrow and Manchester are among European airports that have installed the devices or plan to do so.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has said that it ordered 150 scanners from OSI Systems Inc.’s Rapiscan unit and will buy an additional 300 imaging devices this year. The agency currently uses 40 machines, which cost $130,000 to $170,000 each, produced by L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. at 19 airports including San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington D.C.

Last Updated: February 5, 2010 04:31 EST

The European Court of Human Rights is going to love this

By John Ozimek • The Register

Posted in Government, 27th January 2010 14:25 GMT

This threat brought to you by RFID

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • The Register

Posted in Security, 26th January 2010 22:07 GMT

VALENTINA POP / EUObserver
18.01.2010 @ 09:28 CET

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The European Parliament is threatening to derail an interim agreement allowing US authorities to track European bank transactions in terrorism investigations unless certain concessions are made.

The president of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek at the end of last week sent a second letter to the Spanish EU presidency asking for more information on the so-called Swift agreement.

“We have not received any answers to the first letter, sent in December to both the [outgoing] Swedish and the [incoming] Spanish EU presidencies,” a spokesman for Mr Buzek said.

A plenary debate on the matter is scheduled for Wednesday in Strasbourg, during which the Spanish presidency is expected to give more answers on the technicalities of the deal.

The agreement would allow US prosecutors and investigators to tap into intra-European bank transactions as part of anti-terrorist enquiries – something EU lawmakers say raises privacy concerns.

The parliament can still scrap the agreement, even after it comes into force on 1 February, pending the lawmakers’ “consent.” A final deal should be negotiated by the end of the year, together with the EU parliament.

“In order for Parliament to be in a position to give its consent or not, it had laid down two clear conditions, namely that Parliament is granted full access to information related to this interim agreement and that its concerns are fully reflected in the negotiating mandate for the longer term agreement required once the interim agreement expires at the end of October,” a press release by the Liberal group in the EU legislature reads.

The Liberals have spearheaded the issue, with their leader, Guy Verhofstadt, indicating that he has the support of other groups to “reject the agreement altogether” if the Spanish EU presidency does not come forward with some concession.

The interim deal was sealed by EU justice ministers on 30 November last year, just one day before the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty – rules granting the EU legislature more powers in the field of justice and home affairs.

At the time lawmakers criticised the “rush” to sign the deal, while the US pointed to the fact that the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) was about to stop storing data on European transactions on US soil by the end of 2009.

If parliament took the controversial step of refusing to give its consent, the US would no longer have access to intra-EU transactions – something that would strain relations between Brussels and Washington, especially in the wake of the Christmas Day bomb plot in Detroit.

Swift in 2006 was thrust into the centre of an EU-US dispute after it emerged that the American authorities had been secretly using information on European transactions as part of their so-called War on Terror.

A Belgium-based company, Swift, kept a database on US territory, giving Washington a legal handle on its global activities.

The company records international transactions worth trillions of dollars daily, between nearly 8,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries.

“From 1 January, we have changed the architecture of the Swift network, keeping intra-European traffic in Europe – one database in the Netherlands and a mirror database in Switzerland,” Euan Sellar, a spokesman for the company told EUobserver.

He said Swift is “currently waiting” to hear the legal details of the agreement, noting that the US authorities had no mandate to ask for European transactions. “We’ll have to see once the deal comes into force, if it’s legally binding, we will comply,” he said.

Meanwhile, US officials, asking not to be named, told this website that the EU parliament had been regularly informed of the importance of having such data made available to anti-terrorist investigators.

“We prefer to use the ‘Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme’ label instead of Swift, because there are several other companies involved as well,” one US official said.

As to the final agreement, Washington is hoping the EU parliament will “move swiftly” so that the deal is in force by the end of October when the interim agreement expires.

Published on January 18, 2010 by EU News Network (EUNewsNet.com and OfficialWire) BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

A interim deal allowing U.S. authorities to access data on European bank transactions requires adjustments, a European Parliamentary group said.

The Liberal caucus of the European Parliament said in a press release that “two clear conditions,” must be met for legislators to give final consent to the Swift agreement, which is named after the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a firm that tracks trillions of dollars of transactions each day involving 8,000 financial firms around the world, the EUobserver reported Monday.

It was discovered in 2006 that U.S. authorities had secretly used Swift information in the war on terror, taking advantage of a Swift data bank that was set up on U.S. soil in Washington, D.C.

Swift has since sequestered its data, keeping European data in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

The European Parliament still needs to give final consent to the agreement struck in November that gives U.S. authorities access to Swift data.

The Liberal caucus said, “Parliament (needed ) … full access to information related to this interim agreement” and an agreement in advance that its concerns are carried over to the long term Swift treaty.

PanamaLaw.org
January 20, 2010

Executive Summary – This is absolutely amazing in a bad way. The Brussels agreement which has gone into law lets the USA access any and all bank records of any bank account in any EU country. This law comes into force in two months time.

The 27 EU countries have to grant this access to the US under the terrorist finance-tracking program contained in the Brussels Agreement and this is a done deal. The USA is allowed to keep the bank records for five years. The privacy invasive scheme uses the SWIFT system to scan for transactions they deem suspicious and then they request individual bank records. They can request general data sets, which are commonly referred to as a fishing expedition.

Here is a list of the 27 EU countries affected:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Bulgaria
• Cyprus
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Estonia
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Italy
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• Malta
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Portugal
• Romania
• Slovakia
• Slovenia
• Spain
• Sweden
• United Kingdom

Discussion – First thing to remember that this treaty is between the 27 EU states and the USA. The USA has greater power to access bank records than the police authorities in each of the given countries. No probable cause is neither needed, nor judicial review. Any country friendly with the EU can request the USA to get the bank records for them in return for favors. So the EU has now bowed to the USA. Doom and gloom for the EU.

Banking Implications – Of the 27 countries mostly Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, UK, Sweden, and Cypress are being used for offshore banking. If people using these jurisdictions wish to maintain any privacy they need to leave there for friendlier jurisdictions. Their window of opportunity is two months. It sounds like bank records pre-dating the effective date of the Brussels Agreement would not be covered.

Mark Nestmann / Sovereign Soceity
(December 30, 2009)