14 DAY TRIAL // The European Parliament gave a green light to the SWIFT II anti-terrorist agreement concerning the sharing of European bank transaction data with the United States for tracking terrorist financing. The Members of the Parliament agreed to give their vote after they were promised that Europe will create its own data processing system similar to the Terrorism Finance Tracking Program (TFTP).
Back in February the European Parliament rejected an agreement signed in November 2009, that would have given the United States unrestricted access to the transaction data of Europeans held by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). The Parliament motivated its decision by saying that stricter controls need to be put in place to assure that the privacy of European citizens is respected.
The Spanish European Presidency and the US Department of Treasury worked out a revised variant that resolves some of the privacy issues, and signed it at the end of June. However, the new version was still criticized for allowing data to be transferred in "bulk," which is one of the Parliament's main problems with the agreement.
In order to resolve this, the executive promised to start work on creating a data processing system similar to the Terrorism Finance Tracking Program used by U.S.. This new system would resolve the bulk transfer issue, because it would allow Europe to determine in-house which transactions are suspicious and transfer only that information.
However, until that happens Europol was given the role of overseeing the process. EU's criminal intelligence agency will need to make sure that U.S. data requests are justified and that the quantity of data transfer is as smallest as possible. Additionally, an EU-appointed supervisor will be sent in U.S. to watch over how the data is processed and used.
The agreement also specifies that data must be deleted after the investigation to which it has been used stops. Data that has not been yet extracted must be re-evaluated and deleted if it's no longer required. Finally, data cannot be kept from longer that five years since it was transferred.