Case study: A SWIFT Affair
After 9/11, as part of the Bush administration War on Terrorism, the US established the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) to access financial transactions on the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network.
This was revealed by a series of articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times in June 2006.
On 27 June 2006, it was revealed by the media that Belgium’s central bank, the National Bank of Belgium, had known about the U.S. government’s access to the SWIFT databases since 2002.
Analyzing the facts, the Article 29 Working party, concluded that SWIFT was a controller and that its messaging network was subject to compliance with EU data protection laws.
The Belgian parliamentary committee that deals with the workings of the Belgian State Security Service (Comité I) reported that SWIFT was indeed in violation with Belgian and European privacy laws.
The European Union (EU) eventually formalized an agreement pursuant to which they were able to send an investigating magistrate as High Representative of the EU to the United States of America in order to monitor the TFTP activities.
This magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguière, had a permanent office in Washington, D.C., at the U.S. Department of Treasury.
