Germans Rule U.S. Financial Spying Illegal

From Privacy International:

The Data Protection Commission for the German Lander of Schleswig-Holstein released its legal analysis of the SWIFT transfer of transactional data to the US Government. The analysis was released August 23, 2006 and is available for download on the commissioner's website. [PDF in German here - C.]

The analysis concludes that the transfers violate German and European data protection law, and calls for the immediate cessation of the mirroring of European data in the U.S. data centre. That is, the analysis sees no reason why intra-EU transactions should be processed at the SWIFT data processing offices in the U.S. and therefore they do not believe that the SWIFT operations in Europe need to be held by the SWIFT offices in the U.S. through any form of mirroring. As such, the data on intra-European transfers should never be within the legal jurisdiction of the U.S. Government.

In this analysis, SWIFT is seen as a data processor for German banks, thus giving the Commission of Schleswig-Holstein jurisdiction over the case.