EU: EU data protection officials said yesterday they had "immediate concerns" about a covert CIA operation to sift through the bank records of millions of EU citizens.
They also warned that if EU and US negotiators fail to agree a new deal to transfer airline passenger data to US authorities in talks today the consequences could be chaotic.
Under an existing agreement, European airlines have been obliged to give US authorities 34 items of information on passengers flying to the US, including name, address, all forms of payment and contact telephone numbers.
This data must be supplied within 15 minutes of an aircraft taking off to enable the US authorities to screen all passengers to check if they pose any potential terrorist threat.
But in May the European Court of Justice struck down the deal on a technicality and gave the US and EU until this Saturday to reach a new agreement.
In the EU-US talks differences have emerged over whether the US should have access to more passenger information and the level of safeguards needed to ensure citizens' privacy.
In an opinion issued yesterday, an EU data protection committee warned that if no EU-US deal was struck it would fall to each national data protection commissioner to decide the legality of providing details on airline passengers to the US.
They could refuse to transfer some or all of the information to the US authorities, warned the opinion, which urged EU and US negotiators to put aside differences and agree a deal.
The data protection officials acknowledged that the US could ground flights if they outlawed airlines from providing passenger information to the security services.
However, they also fear that airlines could face a slew of lawsuits from individuals concerned that their personal information was being supplied illegally to the US.
In a separate development the committee said it had "immediate concerns about the lack of transparency" surrounding the CIA's covert monitoring of EU citizens' international banking transactions.
Earlier this year the Belgian firm Swift, which manages a network that enables banks to transfer money, admitted it was supplying customers' records to the CIA.
The committee said it would issue a formal opinion on the legality of the operation at its next meeting in November.
Every day 64,000 transactions made by Irish citizens or businesses are carried by Swift, which acts as a messaging intermediary for transmitting secure and confidential financial messages between the 7,800 financial institutions worldwide that are members.
The schemes to monitor data on EU airline passengers and on banking transfers have both been introduced in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11th, 2001.
They have been strongly criticised by MEPs for trampling on EU citizens' privacy rights.