Dr Foivi Mouzakiti was invited to speak at the webinar series ‘Money as Security Data: Surveillance, Intelligence, Evidence’, hosted by the University of Amsterdam.

This webinar was the second webinar of the series ‘Money as Security Data: Surveillance, Intelligence, Evidence’. The series explores ways in which ‘money’ has become security data in the practices of counter-terrorism financing. In the series, guest speakers show, discuss and critique the digital cultures of financial surveillance and ways in which mundane financial transactions are analysed, identified, and shared. The series discusses how mundane transactions data become understood as ‘intelligence’ that is shared internationally in the context of investigations. It explores how transaction data have the capacity to function as ‘evidence’ before a court of law.

The event was sponsored by by the research network Global Digital Cultures. It took place on 23 June 2021.

The webinar was dedicated to the sharing of financial intelligence across boarders by Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs), and participants discussed how FIUs coordinate their operations across distance and difference. FIUs play a central role in the European Union’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing regime. They receive suspicious transaction reports from the private and financial sector, analyse them and, if necessary, disseminate any relevant information to the domestic law enforcement authorities, and to their counterparts in the EU and beyond. They are, in other words, the EU’s financial intelligence hubs.

In her presentation, Dr Foivi Mouzakiti drew attention to some of the data protection challenges that emerge in the context of FIU cooperation. She argued that the European Union’s legal framework financial intelligence is not adequate to regulate data transfers between EU FIUs in a manner that guarantees the effective protection of personal data.