Proof that the Blair government and Gordon Brown as Chancellor knew all along that the Bush administration was snooping through British citizens’ bank accounts without any due process comes via The Register.
UK Treasury knew of US hunt through British bank data
EU investigation closes inBy Mark Ballard Published Friday 16th February 2007 13:12 GMT
The Bank of England told HM Treasury about the secret US surveillance of international banking transactions as long as five years ago.
The US’s eager pursuit of terrorist financiers, begun within weeks of the 11 September attacks, involved a trawl through the world’s financial transactions through subpoenas on the firm that handles them for private banking clients – the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Communication (Swift).
European authorities, including the UK’s Information Commissioner, have since declared the US operation “illegal” and have begun to press financial institutions to put a stop to the warrantless and unprotected transfers of private banking data to the US authorities.
This programme remained a secret from privacy watchdogs – even from those people whose data was being handed over to US investigators – until the New York Times unearthed it last June. Yet HM Treasury knew about it for some years.
A spokesman for the Bank of England told The Register: “Swift told us in 2002 that it had agreed with the US subpoenas. We told Swift it should tell the government. We told HM Treasury. We felt they should know.”[…]
But the ECB had decided not to warn “other relevant authorities” about Swift’s decision to give US authorities access to its international banking transactions because it believed its own responsibility for “professional confidentiality” among its members was more important.
[…]
HM Treasury said in a statement: “On the financial stability point/impact on business confidence, we say that there is no greater risk to the financial system that the criminal abuse of or a terrorist attack on the system.”
“As you know this is a US project, and we don’t comment on this or any other security matter,” it added.
[…]
As the ECB was reprimanded for failing to tell privacy authorities when it first learned of the Swift subpoenas, and no banking clients are thought to have known that their private financial data was, via Swift, been pawed by the US Treasury, this concession appears to indicate some progress for campaigners like Privacy International, whose complaints to watchdogs across Europe lent the EU reaction to the Swift subpoenas some vigour.
Yet it only looks good on paper, as the ECB pointed out: “Payment orders from natural persons who do not consent to the use of SWIFT will not be processed.”
So if you want to use European banking services you must acquiesce to having your private financial affairs spied on by the Bush adminsitration.They’ll carry on blithely just as they did before and say it’s OK, they have our permission because we didn’t choose not to use the banks.
Fuckers.
This investigation meant nothing and does nothing except to tell us our supposedly democratic government is in breach of it’s own data protection regulations and our human rights – again.
It’s enough to make you start changing currency into gold and stashing it under the bed.
