Council and Commission challenged over transatlantic threats to privacy

5.04.51pm UTC (GMT +0000) Tue 30th Jan 2007

Speaking ahead of tomorrow's European Parliament debate on US access to EU air passengers' details and Europeans' banking information, Liberal Democrat European Justice Spokeswoman Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP has criticised the EU Council of Ministers and the European Commission for the unacceptable breach of data privacy protection owed to European citizens under EU law.

This debate follows the conclusion of the strongly criticised EU-US agreement of October 2006 on Passenger Name Records whereby the US gets passengers' information such as credit cards, email addresses and hotel bookings. In addition it has been revealed that Belgian-based money transfer company SWIFT and European banks have handed over European citizens' personal banking details to the US authorities.

It has since transpired that the US has not just used the PNR data legitimately to check for terrorist and criminal suspects but has combined data to build a mega database, the Automated Targeting System (ATS) which creates risk 'profiles' and assigns a secret risk score to each individual which will be held for 40 years. The Commission has apparently known about this since 2005.

Baroness Ludford said:

"The Commission and the Council are asleep on the job; they have allowed themselves to be fobbed off! They are totally failing in their duty to exercise proper oversight of the US use of our personal data."

"They must urgently clarify what they knew about the ATS scheme and whether it contains SWIFT banking data. How can 'profiling' and risk-scoring on this industrial scale possibly respect the PNR agreement limitation that data can only be used to combat specific terrorist and related crimes?"

"The ATS project is a data protection nightmare. Using highly personal information to create individual 'risk profiles' raises severe civil liberties dangers, from race and religious discrimination to misidentification and tarring by association."

"And it is unacceptable that European citizens' personal information can be stored on an American database open for wide access by a whole range of officials, potential employers or insurance companies, with shockingly few safeguards."