The United States has warned that it may stop working with EU institutions on terrorist data exchange if the European parliament next week blocks a bilateral deal on the issue. "If the European parliament overturns the agreement," which allows Washington to access bank data from European citizens, "I am unsure whether Washington agencies would again decide to address this issue at EU level," US ambassador to the EU William Kennard warned in a letter seen by AFP.
The letter was sent to EU parliament president Jerzy Buzek and heads of the main political groups in the chamber. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also called Buzek and EU foreign affair chief Catherine Ashton to voice Washington's concern over the issue.
The parliament could reject the interim EU-US deal at a plenary session next week, after the body's civil rights committee on Thursday pronounced against it. In their eyes the deal allowing US authorities to access bank data through the SWIFT interbank system does not offer sufficient guarantees on the protection of private data.
In backing the deal with Washington the EU Commission and member states "have not respected the fundamental criticism about the lack of sufficient protections with regard to privacy and the rule of law," said the Green's home affairs expert Jan Phillips Albrecht.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), based near Brussels, deals with trillions of dollars in global transactions daily between nearly 8,000 financial institutions in 200-plus countries. In 2006, SWIFT admitted that it had provided US authorities with some personal data in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001 for the purpose of fighting extremists but insisted it had done its utmost to protect privacy.
European governments endorsed in November the nine-month interim agreement permitting US justice authorities to access data from SWIFT, but the deal needs EU parliamentary backing to have legal weight. An earlier agreement has ended so the EU has been trying to draw up the interim deal with the hope of thrashing out a more permanent arrangement by late this year.
If the EU reject the data deal it would be "an enormous disappointment" and "a potentially tragic mistake," ambassador Kennard said in his letter. He implied that Washington would negotiate bilateral deals with individual European nations so that the terror data system could continue. A spokesman for the Brussels-based SWIFT organisation said the flow of data had been suspended since January 1 pending a decision.
However a US government official told AFP that subpoenas for the information were only sent out once a month, the last one on December 31. That means that so far there has been no great security gap. However "if this agreement is voted down we are going to have a security gap and valuable lead info on terrorist activities is going to go uncollected," he said.
The official added that since the system was put in place in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States in 2001, the US had handed European officials 1,500 reports built from information gleaned from the data exchange system. The EU may not be always be aware of that as the source of the information is not routinely included, for security reasons, he said.