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Bern: Swiss banks violated the law by passing banking information on to the US Central Intelligence Agency, the country's top data protection official said yesterday.
The banks, usually known for safeguarding the privacy of their clients, should have informed customers making international money transfers via the Belgium-based SWIFT service that their data could be passed on to third parties, Hanspeter Thuer said.
Just the possibility of the data being leaked should have been grounds enough to warn customers, he said.
After the September 11 attacks, SWIFT largely complied with US requests for banking information in its anti-terror investigations.
SWIFT, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, operates a secure electronic messaging service used by some 7,800 financial institutions to make international money transfers worth $6 trillion (Dh22 trillion) a day.
Thuer said the issue was whether information could be passed on to states whose data protection laws are not as stringent as those in Switzerland.
Standardisation
Referring to a report by a Belgian privacy commission, Thuer urged that a solution be negotiated by which US laws and European data protection rules are standardised.
Last month, Switzerland's Finance Minister Hans-Rudolf Merz said giving the CIA access to the SWIFT information did not infringe Swiss sovereignty or the country's banking secrecy rules.
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