Complaint filed against US mining of banking data

London: A civil liberties group yesterday asked governments around the world to block the release of confidential financial records to US authorities as part of American anti-terrorist inquiry.

London-based watchdog Privacy International said it had filed complaints with data protection and privacy regulators in 32 countries and four territories, arguing that disclosures of financial transactions "were made without any legal basis or authority whatsoever".

The complaint, sent to regulators in all 25 European Union nations as well as Canada, Australia, Iceland, New Zealand, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Norway and the semi-autonomous Chinese territory of Hong Kong, asks authorities to "intervene to seek the immediate suspension of the disclosure programme pending legal review".

"All of these countries have the potential to suspend, disrupt, paralyse the system," said the group's director, Simon Davies.

He said complaints also had been sent to the British territories of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man.

The US Treasury acknowledged on Friday that since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, it has tracked millions of financial transactions handled by the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT.

SWIFT oversees about 11 million financial transactions a day.