Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror

[coderman]

ho hum, who didn't see this coming?

:P

"How long can this go on?" indeed...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/washington/23intel.html
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Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, June 22  Under a secret Bush administration program
initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials
have gained access to financial records from a vast international
database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of
Americans and others in the United States, according to government and
industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing
transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by
reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking
industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily
between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The
records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving
money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine
financial transactions confined to this country are not in the
database.
...
"The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting,
troubling," said one former senior counterterrorism official who
considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the
official added, "the potential for abuse is enormous."
...
Officials described the Swift program as the biggest and most
far-reaching of several secret efforts to trace terrorist financing.
Much more limited agreements with other companies have provided access
to A.T.M. transactions, credit card purchases and Western Union wire
payments, the officials said.
...
Treasury officials said Swift was exempt from American laws
restricting government access to private financial records because the
cooperative was considered a messaging service, not a bank or
financial institution. [ED: heheh]
...
Several people familiar with the Swift program said they believed that
they were exploiting a "gray area" in the law and that a case could be
made for restricting the government's access to the records on Fourth
Amendment and statutory grounds.
...
In terrorism prosecutions, intelligence officials have been careful to
"sanitize," or hide the origins of evidence collected through the
program to keep it secret, officials said.
...
Quietly, counterterrorism officials sought to expand the information
they were getting from financial institutions. Treasury officials, for
instance, spoke with credit card companies about devising an alert if
someone tried to buy fertilizer and timing devices that could be used
for a bomb, but they were told the idea was not logistically possible,
a lawyer in the discussions said.
...
Intelligence officials were so eager to use the Swift data that they
discussed having the C.I.A. covertly gain access to the system,
several officials involved in the talks said. But Treasury officials
resisted, the officials said, and favored going to Swift directly.
[ED: wow, that would have been fun. crash an international banking
network by accident? oops!]
...
Within weeks of 9/11, Swift began turning over records that allowed
American analysts to look for evidence of terrorist financing.
Initially, there appear to have been few formal limits on the
searches.

"At first, they got everything  the entire Swift database," one
person close to the operation said.
...
Officials realized the potential for abuse, and narrowed the program's
targets and put in more safeguards. Among them were the auditing firm,
an electronic record of every search and a requirement that analysts
involved in the operation document the intelligence that justified
each data search. Mr. Levey said the program was used only to examine
records of individuals or entities, not for broader data searches.

Despite the controls, Swift executives became increasingly worried
about their secret involvement with the American government, the
officials said. By 2003, the cooperative's officials were discussing
pulling out because of their concerns about legal and financial risks
if the program were revealed, one government official said.

"How long can this go on?" a Swift executive asked, according to the official.

Even some American officials began to question the open-ended
arrangement. "I thought there was a limited shelf life and that this
was going to go away," the former senior official said.
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