A fundamental step in US anti-terrorism plans  concern the possibility to monitor international financial transactions. This constant snooping annoyed European Privacy guardians that started a negotiation with US authorities, but according to them , not much can be done to stop US snooping undisturbed on EU data..

 As the Register  reported last Friday, “this could also be as much a test for international business as international law, with Swift, the Belgian firm that has been caught in the middle, feared to be just the first case of many in which a firm has had its privacy trounced by zealous US anti-terrorist investigators”. The “test” is nothing but  a control to check whether or not European law has competence over US claims to data held by European firms. 

Swift   - that has suffered a number of subpoenas from the US Treasury's secret terrorism finance investigation-  is a peculiar case that European regulators are trying to shoehorn into EU jurisdiction, but it is just a drop in a deep ocean because many further similar cases have been registered . 

That’s why the EU is trying  to set up an agreement that will grant European oversight of its privacy law on European firms’ data,  in order to protect them  from arbitrary actions by US authorities.Not only Transportation firms, internet service providers, email providers - anybody that holds European data in a US jurisdiction - are on the minds of European regulators, indeed they are also concerned about  US firms such as Google and Hotmail that hold data about European people. 

But according top international laws, security matters seems to be outside of European regulators competence, so they may have no right to interfere with US measures against European firms, when their purpose is national security.

The problem is that the lack of EU supervision on European firms data storage could bring about a situation where  individual member countries might be tempted to enter bilateral agreements for the unrestricted transfer of corporate data to US investigators.  

Any idea about what THIS could bring about?

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