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Shortly after September 11, 2001, the United States began requesting additional financial information about persons of interest by subpoenaing records located at the SWIFT banking consortium. SWIFT, which routes trillions of dollars a day, faced an ethical dilemma: fight the subpoenas in order to protect member privacy and the group's reputation for the highest level of confidentiality, or, comply and provide information about thousands of financial communications in the hope that lives will be saved. SWIFT decided to comply in secret, but in late June 2006, four major U.S. newspapers disclosed SWIFT's compliance. This sparked a heated public debate over the ethics of SWIFT's decision to reveal ostensibly confidential financial communications.
Analyzing the situation in hindsight, three ethical justifications existed for not complying with the Treasury Department's requests. First, SWIFT needed to uphold its long-standing values of confidentiality, non-disclosure, and institutional trust. The second ethical reason against SWIFT's involvement came with inadequate government oversight as the Treasury Department failed to construct necessary safeguards to ensure the privacy of the data. Third, international law must be upheld and one could argue quite strongly that the government's use of data breached some parts of international law.
Although SWIFT executives undoubtedly considered the aforementioned reasons for rejecting the government's subpoena, three ethical justifications for complying existed. First, it could be argued that the program was legal because the United States government possesses the authority to subpoena records stored within its territory and SWIFT maintained many of its records in Virginia. Second, it is entirely possible that complying with the government's subpoena thwarted another catastrophic terrorist attack that would have cost lives and dollars. Third, cooperating with the government did not explicitly violate any SWIFT policies due to the presence of a valid subpoena. However, the extent of cooperation certainly surprised many financial institutions and sparked some outrage and debate within the financial community.
While SWIFT had compelling arguments both for agreeing and refusing to cooperate with the U.S. government program, even in hindsight, it is impossible to judge with certitude the wisdom and ethics of SWIFT's decision to cooperate as we still lack answers to important questions such as: what information did the government want? What promises did the government make about data confidentially? What, if any, potentially impending threats did the government present to justify its need for data?
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Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
Correct Answer: A
- The complex and somewhat ambiguous issue of the legality of SWIFT's cooperation can be inferred by the fact that legal reasons exist both for cooperating and for not cooperating. For cooperating: "it could be argued that the program was legal because the United States government possesses the authority to subpoena records stored within its territory and SWIFT maintained many of its records in Virginia" For not cooperating: "international law must be upheld and one could argue quite strongly that the government's use of data breached some parts of international law"
- The passage enables us to infer the contrary by implying that SWIFT considered the legal implications of not cooperating ("SWIFT executives undoubtedly considered the aforementioned reasons [one being legal] for rejecting the government's subpoena").
- The passage never discusses the volume of money (only the number of transactions). Moreover, there is no comparison of money or transactions before and after SWIFT's decision became public.
- There is no information in the passage that allows anything close to this inference. The passage never mentions threats or government efforts to force SWIFT to comply.
- Although this did in fact occur, there is no information in the passage that allows anything close to this inference.
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