In Mass Surveillance Fallout, European Parliament Votes To Suspend Financial Data Sharing With United States
Posted: 30 Oct 2013
Privacy: This week, the European Parliament voted to immediately suspend the sharing of European financial tracking data with the United States in a 280-254 decision, as well as calling for criminal investigations of the NSA. This follows in the footsteps of mass surveillance revelations that the NSA has illegally hacked into the SWIFT financial data. This appears to be yet another public wake-up and backlash against the secretive wiretapping industry.
The European Parliament has voted to immediately suspend the SWIFT data-sharing program with the United States. This follows on revelations that the NSA has hacked into the SWIFT system, which manages European and global financial transactions, and illegally given themselves access to the entire system. The European Parliament considers this to be so thorough and brutal a breach of trust, that the data-sharing agreement is called to be revoked immediately.
Under the so-called SWIFT data-sharing agreement, European financial transactions are sent to the United States in bulk, in a joint attempt to combat terrorism in the Terrorist Finance Tracking System (TFTS). Critics of the program have pointed out that it is a privacy violation of European citizens, as well as a naïve way of giving U.S. industries the upper hand in business negotiations by giving them an information advantage.
The European Parliament instructs the police of the European states to begin criminal investigations into the NSA’s dealings:
(from the Europarl report)
10. Asks the Council and the Member States, in the light of the above, to authorize an investigation by the Europol Cybercrime Centre into the allegations of unauthorized access to financial payment data governed by the Agreement;
11. Calls on the special inquiry by the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs into the mass surveillance of EU citizens to further investigate the allegations of unlawful access to financial payment messages covered by the Agreement;
The SWIFT data-sharing agreement was championed by European Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, who first negotiated it while sitting on a different chair, and then championed it from the Commission once having been appointed European Commissioner, insisting that the European Parliament must approve it. She has bet a lot of her career on this data-sharing, and the European Parliament’s vote this week is not just a blow to the credibility and trustability of the United States, but also to her personal political career.
It remains to be seen if Commissioner Malmström intends to defy the European Parliament by refusing to suspend the data sharing. It also remains to be seen if a revocation of voluntary data sharing has any practical effect, seeing how the NSA has illegally given itself access to the data anyway.
We Know With 100% Certainty That Mass Surveillance Hasn’t Foiled A Single Terror Plot
Privacy: We know with 100% absolute certainty that the wiretapping industry – NSA, GCHQ, FRA, etc – has stopped a total of exactly zero terror plots. We can be certain of this fact, as there have been no trials and no convictions of planning widespread destruction. Planning such a crime is almost as serious a crime as executing it, and while there can be secret evidence in some uncivilized countries, the courts and trials themselves are not secret.
In an attempt to justify their existence, the NSA, the GCHQ, the FRA, and other similar governmental agencies in the wiretapping industry tend to say that their existence and actually-criminal operations are justified by the fact that they “foil terror plots” – a textbook example of how the ends justify the means, and of the necessity of upholding the law by systematically breaking it.
We have heard this justification from the NSA, the GCHQ, and the FRA alike, just like from their brethren.
However, we know for a certainty that they are lying.
If an act of terror was being planned in some stage sufficienty advanced to talk of it in terms of a “terror plan”, then such planning and preparation is itself a crime. In Sweden, the principal crime is “causing devastation with a hazard to the public” (allmänfarlig ödeläggelse), and that is a crime that carries a prison sentence in the double digits or even life in prison. Planning and preparing for such a crime (“förberedelsebrott”) carries practically as high a sentence as carrying it out.
So if such a planning had actually been discovered, it would be in the courts, and somebody would be on trial for it. That sequence of events is absolutely inescapable. We don’t have secret courts (even if some uncivilized countries insist of having secret evidence); the trials and charges are public, so that the public can hold the judicial branch to proper account under transparency.
But no such charges have been filed, and no such trials have been held, and most importantly, there have been no convictions. It is absolutely and positively unthinkable, that if a terror plot was foiled, that no charges would be filed. If somebody had been discovered to prepare for “devastation with a hazard to the public”, that would mean a very serious crime had been committed with penalties including the harshest possible sentence – life in prison – and such criminals would have been brought to justice exactly 100% of the time, resulting in convictions if there were a “terror plot”.
Seeing how this has not happened, we can be absolutely certain that the wiretapping industry has stopped a total of exactly zero so-called “terror plots”.
In other words, when the governmental agencies of the wiretapping industry are mumbling about having stopped “fifty or so plots but we can’t tell you about them”, they are using a well-established political persuasion method called lying like a ****ing weasel.
The Author: Rick Falkvinge
Rick is the founder of the first Pirate Party and is a political evangelist, traveling around Europe and the world to talk and write about ideas of a sensible information policy.