SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a private institution (an industry-owned co-operative) based in Belgium that provides “secure, standardised messaging services” to thousands of banks and other financial institutions worldwide. Secure, that is, except from snooping by the US government. Payment messages sent via SWIFT include “customer names, account numbers and other identifying information”. After 9/11/2001 the US Treasury went on a fishing expedition, sifting through “millions of confidential financial transactions handled by SWIFT.” The New York Times revealed ("leaked") the secret program’s existence in June.

Now the European Central Bank and national central banks in Europe may be in trouble for violating data protection laws by looking the other way while the US authorities went through SWIFT’s records. The International Herald Tribune reports:

The Treasury Department has used broad administrative subpoenas to get access to large volumes of transactions from Swift, often millions at a time. The operation, while highly unusual, appears to fall into a gray area in American law protecting the banking privacy of customers. But legal experts said the program appears to conflict more directly in Europe with banking privacy restrictions, issued by the European Union and others, that impose tighter restrictions on how private banking data can be shared.

We in the US don't need to wait for the terrorists to restrict our liberty; our own government is doing a pretty good job of that.