BRUSSELS — The EU said today it is close to a five-year accord with the United States on financial data sharing in anti-terrorist investigations, stressing the deal will satisfy privacy concerns that led the European Parliament to void a previous draft.
EU Interior Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said the new agreement contained far better privacy safeguards.
If the European Union assembly approves it, it could take effect within weeks as the successor to a secret program launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that gave U.S. authorities access to European financial data by skirting Europe’s strict privacy rules. News of the program broke in 2006, angering EU legislators.
The new draft “contains significantly stronger data protection guarantees,” Malmstrom told a news conference.
In response to privacy concerns in the European Parliament, she said, U.S. authorities must delete or rectify inaccurate data and grant legal redress in American courts if data are abused.
The European police organization Europol would verify if U.S. requests for data are needed “for the fight against terrorism and its financing” before data are released, said Malmstrom.
The agreement would have tougher rules on transferring data to third countries and ban U.S. law enforcement agencies from randomly searching financial data without cause. “Access to individual data has to be related to an ongoing investigation on terrorism,” said Malmstrom.
Malmstrom left unchanged a five-year period for retaining bank data. She said U.S. officials persuaded her that was a reasonable period for the purpose of tracking terrorists.
The United States and the EU have taken slightly diverging tacks on anti-terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Obama administration sees the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program protecting lives on both sides of the Atlantic and wants it to continue with European cooperation.
European governments, however, tend to stress privacy concerns.
That gap has shown the complicated contours of the Obama administration’s efforts to set a centrist course on national security after eight years of hardline policies by the Bush administration.
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