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Europe to give US access to bank data for terror probes
AFP - Friday, July 9
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Europe to give US access to bank data for terror probes
BRUSSELS (AFP) - – Europe agreed Thursday to let the United States tap into banking data for terrorism probes again, reviving a programme which officials said would save lives and protect the privacy of Europeans.
The United States will again have access to the banking information from August 1 after European MPs voted 484-109 in favour of a new five-year deal they say provides privacy safeguards.
The new agreement is a victory for the parliament, which used powers it gained under the European Union's Lisbon Treaty to block an initial deal in February because of fears over privacy.
Washington was subsequently barred from seeing the bank data until a new deal was agreed.
European Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Maelstrom, who negotiated the new deal, said any failure to conclude an agreement "could have had negative repercussions for EU-US cooperation in the security area and more broadly."
US President Barack Obama welcomed the deal.
"The threat of terrorism faced by the United States and the European Union continues and, with this agreement, all of our citizens will be safer," he said in a statement.
"This new, legally binding agreement reflects significant additional data privacy safeguards but still retains the effectiveness and integrity of this indispensable counterterrorism program," he added.
European lawmakers dropped their opposition to the programme after the EU and the United States agreed a set of measures to prevent intrusions into the privacy of Europeans.
European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said the deal "respects the right balance between the need to guarantee the security of citizens against the threat of terrorism and the need to guarantee their fundamental rights and civil liberties."
Alexander Alvaro, a German Liberal European lawmaker, said it "will ensure that terrorist financing can be traced back to its sources but it will not affect day-to-day bank transfers of EU citizens."
The system was introduced in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, to help tackle the financing of terrorism.
The Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme allowed US access to information from the Brussels-based interbank money transfer system SWIFT.
But US officials said the delay over a new deal had left a "security gap" for the past five months. They said the programme had helped major investigations, such as for the 2004 Madrid train bombings.
A senior US Treasury official said TFTP data from late 2009 had contributed to a Norwegian probe that led to the arrest Thursday of three men accused of links to Al-Qaeda and foiled attacks in the United States and Britain.
"I can tell you that the TFTP provided support to the Norwegian investigation of that Al-Qaeda threat," Stuart Levey, US Treasury's under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a teleconference.
"Today's arrests remind us that Europe remains a target for terrorist attacks," he said.
European lawmakers' main concern was that personal information, including data from electronic bank payments, would be used by US authorities, held for too long and handed on to other governments.
Under the new deal, Europol, the European police organisation, will check the validity of US requests.
The United States agreed to allow the presence of an EU official in Washington who will be able to block the extraction of data if necessary.
EU citizens will also be able to contest the use of their data before US courts.
But Peter Hustinx, head of privacy watchdog the European Data Protection Supervisory, said that while the agreement "may be the best available ... it remains problematic."
The main problem was that Washington received large chunks of data because it is technologically impossible to select bits of information, Hustinx told AFP.
"We are presently accepting an arrangement which allows for much more information than is necessary because we simply cannot focus better," he said.
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