You may remember, way back near the beginning of this blog, I cited a police request for personal information which was rightly refused as being a 'fishing' request...and the way in which the ensuing, detailed request was actually worse - in Data Protection terms, than the original.
Now news breaks, through the New York Times, of post 9/11 requests which are every bit as extraordinary. In this case, it was the US Treasury Department which approached the international payments consortium SWIFT, apparently submitting 'narrowly defined subpoenas' for information relating to anti-terrorism enquiries. In this instance, however, according to the Treasury secretary, "Officials at Swift responded that that they did not have the ability to "extract the particular information from their broad database."
"So they said, 'We'll give you all the data,' " Secretary Snow said."
I'm not sure what I find hardest to believe about that alleged response:
- The idea that SWIFT 'could not run a specific query against their data', but that the US Treasury people clearly would;
- The idea that SWIFT thought the most appropriate possible response was simply to hand over everything. Job done.
The article exactly doesn't spell out SWIFT's version of the story, though. And it contains the following tantalising throwaway one-liner from Treasury under-secretary Levey:
"people do not have a privacy interest in their international wire transactions."
So much for the safe-harbour provisions of Data Protection legislation; I wonder if the under-secretary really intended to sound so brazenly dismissive of the privacy rights of banking clients.
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