Europe Bristles at U.S. Security

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal


Europe Bristles at U.S. Security
By EVAN PEREZ IN WASHINGTON and DAVID CRAWFORD IN BERLIN
June 9, 2008; Page A3

The detentions of European executives at the U.S. border have made some corporate travelers nervous and revived charges by European officials that the U.S. is misusing security measures they believed were intended only to fight terrorism. In what has become a longstanding charge that the U.S. isn't upholding European privacy standards in trans-Atlantic matters, European civil-liberties groups and government officials have expressed misgivings over rules instituted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that require airlines to submit the names of passengers heading to the U.S.

The names are checked against watch lists maintained by government-security agencies. The process was enhanced to prevent terrorists from entering the country, but also aids law-enforcement agents working on criminal investigations. Federal agents who want to question a traveler can use government databases to learn when a potential target is entering the country. Fears about the U.S. use of this data were rekindled in recent weeks after executives and employees from defense contractor BAE Systems PLC and Swiss bank UBS AG, were briefly detained by federal investigators related to separate bribery and tax probes.

The Council of Europe, a European human-rights watchdog, said some of its members are concerned that the 2004 agreement between the U.S. and the European Union to share passenger data violates several human-rights conventions ratified by most of its 47 member states. Two British gambling-company officials were detained during visits to the U.S. in 2006 because U.S. residents were gambling via British Web sites. Internet gambling is outlawed in the U.S. but it is legal in the U.K.

(snip)

U.S. investigators can separately "flag" people they want to track or question for nonterrorism matters through the Customs and Border Protection agency. Even before 9/11, U.S. investigators were alerted when people they were tracking arrived at the border. U.S. law permits searches at the border that would otherwise be outlawed under constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. Stewart Baker, the DHS's assistant secretary for policy, defends U.S. privacy protections and in particular its collection of passenger data. "It is unfair to assume that this information originally was gathered only for antiterrorism purposes, or that it is being misused if it is used in criminal investigations," he said.

(snip)

The U.S. and the European Union also disagree over the use of international banking data for counterterrorism purposes. The controversy surfaced in 2006 following reports that Swift, a global banking-telecommunications network, gave information on cross-border wire transfers by EU citizens to the Treasury Department and the CIA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

(snip)


URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121295831242555377.html (subscription)

[Mika]

1. Before 9-11, there was this

http://www.greaterthings.com/Word-Number/Organizations/Echelon/