

Banking data: Why MEPs must say no to SWIFT agreement - bensummers
http://brusselsblogger.blogactiv.eu/2010/02/07/banking-data-why-meps-must-say-no-to-swift-agreement/

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bensummers
Dear The Government of the US,

Can we have all your banking transaction data in return, so we can mine it to
see what your corporations are up to? It's only fair.

Yours sincerely,

Citizens of the EU.

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viraptor
I can understand every point of that... apart from the first:

"Jenine Hennis-Plasschaert, made it very clear in her report that SWIFT is
actually unable to provide tailored data about individual transactions"

How can anyone seriously believe that organisation which deals mainly with
cash transfers cannot provide a filtered report on cash transfers? From a
"technical" point of view? That's simply a lie - they might not want to spend
time implementing the proper report generation which might take months in such
organisation, or might not be able to afford enough storage to keep the needed
information to do such filtering, it might be not practical, etc. But who
would believe in a "technical" reason?

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bensummers
Do they have the data to filter? Given they're just a clearing house for
sending messages between banks, it's not implausible that they might only have
source and destination account numbers and amount.

I'm not saying they do, I can't find the actual contents of the message with a
quick search, but isn't that a plausible technical reason?

But there's no good reason why the EU should hand _any_ data to the US,
filtered or not.

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viraptor
From what I understood, they can send all the data - so why not just a
fragment? They operate on full account numbers which can be mapped to a any
region/bank via IBAN needed for SWIFT transfer after all... Maybe I'm jumping
to wrong conclusions here, it just seems highly unlikely / crazy that they're
able to send everything, but not a subset.

~~~
bensummers
Sending a subset is easy, but choosing that subset can be more difficult.

I doubt the selection criteria would resolve around which bank, but
information about the account holders and their status. This data will only be
available to SWIFT's customer banks. Building an interface to query this data
in a standard form from lots of banks would be a nightmare.

