Late last month, EU Home Affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmström announced the resumption of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP), under which American counterterror investigators have consulted and analyzed selected data on international bank transactions originating in Europe. (Note that it was not the Obama administration that announced the resumption of the program.)

The American public will indeed have largely been under impression that the program had already resumed earlier. On July 8, the European parliament voted to approve a revised version of the so-called SWIFT agreement laying out the terms of EU-U.S. cooperation in the program. In February, the parliament had rejected a first version of the agreement, thus bring the TFTP to a halt. In welcoming the parliament’s approval of the revised agreement, President Obama mentioned that it was slated to enter into force on August 1, “thus fully restoring this important counterterrorism tool and resuming the sharing of investigative data that has been suspended since January 2010 [sic].”