The Patriot Act

I read a most interesting article in this weekend's NRC Handelsblad -- one of the few, if not the only, remotely decent newspaper in Holland. The journalist in question had interviewed the head of the organisation responsible for controlling laws, rules and regulations in the area of (personal) privacy, Mr. Jacob Kohnstamm.

The article starts out with a comparison. I will reword it a bit, so as to make you see the point. Suppose that a terrorist attack on two metro stations in Madrid kills 191 persons, wounds several more and causes an awful lot of damage. The Spanish government, supported by its parliament, is outraged and vows to hunt down those responsible where ever they are. Three months later they adopt a law which entitles them to claim (claim -- not ask) all information they want about any international financial transaction from any bank in any country. Don't laugh, because it turns out that they can as the main branch of THRIFT, the company that has the monopoly on the hard- and software for these international transactions is in Madrid. All banks in the world use THRIFT and they do not want to jeopardize their good relations with the management of DRIFT as it would seriously impede business. The management of THRIFT is under extreme pressure of the Spanish government, so they decide to cooperate. They tell all their clients that they should give up all the details on any financial transaction that the Spanish authorities demand, or else THRIFT will be forced to exclude that bank from doing business with them. Within weeks, the first requests from the Spanish authorities for information on the banking details of clients in Mexico, the USA, Canada and what have you come in. Mind you, the authorities of these countries have not been asked to cooperate, nor have the banks in these countries been asked: they have been told. Wouldn't that bother you? And what is such requests came from Poland? Or Russia?

Wouldn't it bother you even more if your bank never told you that it will hand over information on your financial transactions should the Spanish/Polish/Russian authorities happen to ask for it?

And yet this is precisely what has happened in NL, where banks have supplied such details to the US intelligence agencies in more than190 cases for the last four years (see here). Mr. Kohnstamm announced that all banks should explicitly inform their customers if they cannot avoid participating in the world-wide investigation into terrorist financial streams and was also quite outraged that this is happening in the first place. He announced that the NL banks can look forward to some hefty fines if they do not do so asap. He was also very "disappointed" with the Dutch National Bank and the financial authorities because he had been asking them to do this for months. The DNB first played down the impact of the Patriot Act on the Dutch banking system and then flatly refused to cooperate -- which explains why Mr. Kohnstamm has sought publicity for this matter.

I don't know what to think of all this, but Mr. Kohnstamm has a point that the Dutch banks have delivered the issue of privacy protection of your and my finances to the discretion of the CIA without warning their customers that this was happening.

Doesn't that bother you? It does bother me....