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EU Rejection of Swift Data Sharing Agreement Leaves U.S. Scrambling
By Colby Adams
printThe rejection by the EU Parliament Thursday of a data sharing agreement with the United States is likely to leave U.S. investigators without timely access to European banking data for the second month in a row. Citing privacy concerns, EU lawmakers voted 378 to 196 to effectively kill the proposed nine-month accord, which would have formalized U.S. access to financial information stored by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift), a Brussels-based consortium. Federal investigators have been privy to U.S.-based Swift data since at least October 2001, but needed a formal agreement after Swift closed down its servers in...
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