The controversial plan has been the focus of efforts by the UK’s Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Sarah Ludford, who has argued that the “bulk transfer” of private individuals’ banking details to the US is a violation of their rights to privacy, and argues that any agreement to do so now “be a transitional solution only”.
"The EU must develop its own capacity to filter and extract data in Europe, obviating both worryingly large block handovers and an absurd reliance on the US to detect terrorists plotting on our territory," Ludford has stated.
A previous attempt to agree a deal for transfer of bank details to the US for anti-terrorism purposes was voted down by the European Parliament, on privacy grounds, in March.
In an interview on Sunday on BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend, Ludford said the goal was for any relevant data needed by the Americans to be “extracted in a targeted way on European soil”, and noted that there had been no talk of a reciprocal arrangement, whereby Americans’ banking details would be shipped to Europe.
“Some of us have wondered what Congress – and the Senate in particular – would say if Europe was to request that the banking data of all US citizens was to be transferred, in bulk, to Europe,” she noted.
Frank Gaffney, a former White House security official under President Reagan who was also on the show, said he suspected the reasons there might be resistance to such “otherwise [seemingly] unobjectionable” reciprocity might include “the extent [to which] European governments, and maybe even the European Parliament itself, have been penetrated by folks who are sympathetic to, or who are actually working for, organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood”, which in turn “would be a real problem from a security point of view”.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational Islamic political movement which officially does not advocate violence and which advocates a mostly traditional/conservative Islamic philosophy.
