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Banking data: Why MEPs must say no to SWIFT agreement

17 points by bensummers 17y ago

bensummers 17y ago
Dear The Government of the US, Can we have all your banking transaction data in return, so we can mine it to see what your corporations are up to? It's only fair. Yours sincerely, Citizens of the EU.
viraptor 17y ago
I can understand every point of that... apart from the first: "Jenine Hennis-Plasschaert, made it very clear in her report that SWIFT is actually unable to provide tailored data about individual transactions" How can anyone seriously believe that organisation which deals mainly with cash transfers cannot provide a filtered report on cash transfers? From a "technical" point of view? That's simply a lie - they might not want to spend time implementing the proper report generation which might take months in such organisation, or might not be able to afford enough storage to keep the needed information to do such filtering, it might be not practical, etc. But who would believe in a "technical" reason?
- buro9 17y ago
  At a far stretch of the imagination... maybe it's a message based system that simply provides checks (money out = money in) at every point. No centralisation = no reporting. I really don't know the implementation, but if you're not designing for reporting then it's feasible that reporting is non-trivial against the implementation. Just saying... though I realise it sounds dumb and I would tend to agree with your view, but it is possible that this could be true.
- bensummers 17y ago
  Do they have the data to filter? Given they're just a clearing house for sending messages between banks, it's not implausible that they might only have source and destination account numbers and amount. I'm not saying they do, I can't find the actual contents of the message with a quick search, but isn't that a plausible technical reason? But there's no good reason why the EU should hand _any_ data to the US, filtered or not.
  - viraptor 17y ago
    From what I understood, they can send all the data - so why not just a fragment? They operate on full account numbers which can be mapped to a any region/bank via IBAN needed for SWIFT transfer after all... Maybe I'm jumping to wrong conclusions here, it just seems highly unlikely / crazy that they're able to send everything, but not a subset.
    - bensummers 17y ago
      Sending a subset is easy, but choosing that subset can be more difficult. I doubt the selection criteria would resolve around which bank, but information about the account holders and their status. This data will only be available to SWIFT's customer banks. Building an interface to query this data in a standard form from lots of banks would be a nightmare.

17 points by bensummers 17y ago

Dear The Government of the US, Can we have all your banking transaction data in return, so we can mine it to see what your corporations are up to? It's only fair. Yours sincerely, Citizens of the EU.

viraptor 17y ago

I can understand every point of that... apart from the first: "Jenine Hennis-Plasschaert, made it very clear in her report that SWIFT is actually unable to provide tailored data about individual transactions" How can anyone seriously believe that organisation which deals mainly with cash transfers cannot provide a filtered report on cash transfers? From a "technical" point of view? That's simply a lie - they might not want to spend time implementing the proper report generation which might take months in such organisation, or might not be able to afford enough storage to keep the needed information to do such filtering, it might be not practical, etc. But who would believe in a "technical" reason?

buro9 17y ago
At a far stretch of the imagination... maybe it's a message based system that simply provides checks (money out = money in) at every point. No centralisation = no reporting. I really don't know the implementation, but if you're not designing for reporting then it's feasible that reporting is non-trivial against the implementation. Just saying... though I realise it sounds dumb and I would tend to agree with your view, but it is possible that this could be true.
bensummers 17y ago
Do they have the data to filter? Given they're just a clearing house for sending messages between banks, it's not implausible that they might only have source and destination account numbers and amount. I'm not saying they do, I can't find the actual contents of the message with a quick search, but isn't that a plausible technical reason? But there's no good reason why the EU should hand _any_ data to the US, filtered or not.
- viraptor 17y ago
  From what I understood, they can send all the data - so why not just a fragment? They operate on full account numbers which can be mapped to a any region/bank via IBAN needed for SWIFT transfer after all... Maybe I'm jumping to wrong conclusions here, it just seems highly unlikely / crazy that they're able to send everything, but not a subset.
  - bensummers 17y ago
    Sending a subset is easy, but choosing that subset can be more difficult. I doubt the selection criteria would resolve around which bank, but information about the account holders and their status. This data will only be available to SWIFT's customer banks. Building an interface to query this data in a standard form from lots of banks would be a nightmare.