An update on the international implications of the end of trust.

A week ago today the EU parliament passed a resolution asking the EU commission to suspend all passing of information to the US authorities under the EU-US Terrorist Finance Tracking Program agreement, because the data is being used by the US for purposes forbiddent by that agreement. The request is of course "just a request" since the TFTP was agreed before (just one day before) the commission ceased to have the power to enter into such agreements without the agreement of the parliament (until 1 December 2009 it required only the agreement of the European Council of ministers which had representatives of each national government); however the parliament has made it clear that the commission is unlikely to get agreement from the parliament (which has been required for about the last 7 years) for any future agreement with foreign states or groupings if it refuses to comply with this "request", so it's a "request" in pretty much the sense that "hands up" from a gunman pointing his weapon at you is a request.

This has been reported by Pinsent-Masons, a (the?) leading Britsh international law firm, in their online newsletter; you can read the report here[/url].

This wasn't a result of only the Snowden disclosures. The USA's illegal seizure of funds being transferred between a Danish company in Denmark and a German company in Germany, which it achieved by misusing such information (and misusing other inernational agreements at the same time) back in February last year, which teh US claimed was legal because the money was payment for Cuban cigars imported into Europe by the German comany, a claim that really takes one's breath away when one recalls that every time anyone objects to the extraterritoriality of the embargo the US claims there is no extraterritoriality because the embargo applies only to comapnies operating in the USA (which is actually what the various legal instruments creating teh embargo state, so as well as breaking international agreements and law the US authorities were breaking their own law as well on that occassion) had already wound the EU parliament up, as had the EUROPOL March 2011 report that the US authorities were not making any attempt to provide proper justification for their requests for data and the abuse of access to Swift data identified by the Belgian government in 2006 which had resulted in it becoming illegal for Swift to hold any of its data concerning Europeans on any server that could be subject to US legal action, which of course led to the TFTP agreement because it was felt the US needed properly justified access to the data in the light of the events of 2001.

I hope that Americans will not be too surprised that after 12 years of outrageous abuse by the US government of its access to our data the EU parliament has decided that enough is enough, and no longer feels that it can allow that access since it has been made pretty clear that your governments, of whichever party, (much like most politicians pretty well anwhere) have no intention of abiding by the agreements they enter into about limitations on its use.