Saturday, October 13

SWIFT moves most of its data outside American control

SWIFT announced that they will setup a data centre in Switzerland to make sure that European and Asian messages stay outside the control of USA.

If you recall, there was a huge argument some time back when the US Government requested SWIFT to present huge amounts of data to check terrorism related financial transactions. This made the European leaders go up in smoke such as here and here. Poor SWIFT was caught in the middle.

I am not sure that this will be sufficient as the Americans have shown very clearly that if they wish to have data related to terrorism, they will get it. Even if SWIFT move the data to Switzerland, they will have to release it if asked for it. Will just take a bit longer as it will have to go through the Swiss authorities. But the Swiss move very fast as well when criminal evidence is presented. They do not want the squeaky clean privacy / secrecy oriented banking image sullied either.

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