Europe Calls For Access to SWIFT Payment Data to Combat Terrorism - from TRUNEWS

(TRUNEWS) In the latest move to sacrifice civil liberties in exchange for security, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin has proclaimed that European authorities need unadulterated access to data from the SWIFT bank payments network, in order to effectively combat the financing of terrorist groups on their continent.

SWIFT, also known as the Society for the Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications,  is a belgian based organization considered to be the world’s largest electronic payments system, and they operate services transmitting letters of credit, payments and securities transactions among 9,700 banks in 209 countries.

Currently the processing is split between two computer servers, one in Europe and the other in the United States. However, according to Sapin, this has left Europe vulnerable, as they currently rely solely on the U.S. to detect security issues, as authorities collect and analyze the vast amounts of data flowing through the system.

“We Europeans don’t have the capacity to exploit our own data. I don’t think this can carry on this way, since we do not have the means to analyze the data located in Europe, we transfer all of this data to the Americans, who have the capacity to analyze it.” Sapin declared, at a news conference on the financing of militant groups in the aftermath of the Paris attacks by ISIS.

SWIFT confirms on their website that they are indeed subject to binding requests to provide the U.S. Treasury with data from its European server “for the purpose of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of terrorism or terrorist financing”.

The SWIFT network last made headlines after NSA contractor turned whistleblower, Edward Snowden, claimed that “the NSA’s Tracfin data bank also contained data from the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a network used by thousands of banks to send transaction information securely.”

Following Snowden’s revelations the SWIFT network’s security was investigated independantly by Belgian and Dutch data privacy authorities, but they made an announcement in May 2014 that there were no indications of unlawful access to SWIFT by third parties.

Sapin also announced that the French anti-fraud and money laundering agency Tracfin would soon have access to “S” (State Security) files, which are compiled by the police and intelligence agencies on people suspected of being a threat to national security.

The head of Tracfin also announced that prepaid payment cards, which were reportedly used by terrorists in the Paris attacks, will also face tighter regulation, and decrees on these changes can be expected before the end of this year.

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