EU law violated in US banking data transfer scandal

The money transfer company Swift has violated EU privacy rules when it secretly supplied the US authorities with millions of private bank transactions for use in anti-terror investigations, a Belgian commission has said.

"It has to be seen as a gross miscalculation by Swift that it has, for years, secretly and systematically transferred massive amounts of personal data for surveillance without effective and clear legal basis and independent controls in line with Belgian and European law...