The truly bizare thing about this..
is if they'd been up front a week or so after 9/11 (you know, when someone, somewhere stilled liked Americans) and said - "Hey do you mind if we have a quick shufty of your financial data, just to see if we can pinpoint the pricks that did this?", the EU and pretty much anyone else would have said, "No problem, go ahead."
But because they're still hiding behind and using 9/11 as an excuse to steal private information, listen in on phone calls, invade innocent 3rd world countries and all that other illegal behaviour - is it any surprise that one or two chaps in Europe are a tiny bit annoyed by the whole thing?
On the other hand if there was anyone in political office with a device we used to call a "backbone", the board and directors of Swift would be sitting in jail right now for illegally divulging financial information on a scale never before imagined.
Put it this way, if we put away hackers who peruse banking information for longer stretches than your average child molester, what do you think would have been appropriate for this lot?
Data thieves that steal a few thousand credit card numbers go to jail for 5-10 years. The guys that gave just about every piece of financial information they had access to, from the population of an entire continent, to a bunch of dodgy characters in black suits get to say it wasn't their fault - the Americans made us do it. And we're fine with that.
International financial transactions. That's not just corporates wiring money back and forth - ever ordered something directly from the US or Canada? Then that would be you too.