The Belgian govt. has no power over transfer of bank transaction ...

the information furnished by SWIFT to the U.S. Treasury was done through the normal activities of its U.S. subsidiary,” the Belgian govt. said. It still needed to receive a final report before making a decision on the matter, the govt. said, promising to communicate its conclusions to the Belgian parliament, but not giving any timetable for that. SWIFT said it had done nothing that violated the privacy of customers, and that it had done nothing illegal. In a statement, SWIFT said it negotiated with the “U.S. Treasury over the scope and oversight of the subpoenas.” Meanwhile, the ACLU welcomed London-based Privacy International’s (PI’s) call to investigate U.S. tracking. The group will aid PI in pressing European officials to act, it said. “Privacy rights are being violated on both sides of the Atlantic -- and we welcome a European investigation to get to the bottom of this,” ACLU Technology & Liberty Project Dir. Barry Steinhardt said. PI wrote to European privacy commissioners urging they investigate SWIFT data sharing. PI, which fears the practice “substantially violates data protection law,” asked policymakers to “demand that the disclosure program be suspended pending legal review.” The fact that millions of records are involved in the operation “places this disclosure in the realm of a fishing exercise rather than legally authorised investigation,” the group said. “Things have reached a crisis point when some of our best hopes for preserving privacy in America lie with foreign commissioners,” Steinhardt said.