Since 9/​11, nobody — and I mean nobody — has done more report­ing on the government’s attempts to track ter­ror­ists through their data trails than the National Journal’s Shane Harris. (The guy ate Spam and knocked back Tequizas with John Poindexter, for chris­sake!) So I couldn’t be more psy­ched to wel­come Shane to the Defense Tech fam­ily. This is the first of what I hope will be a long string of posts for the site.
Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have been lin­ing up to con­demn The New York Times for reveal­ing a pro­gram to track finan­cial trans­ac­tions as part of the war on ter­ror­ism. But if the Times rev­e­la­tion about a pro­gram to mon­i­tor inter­na­tional exchanges is so dam­ag­ing, why has the admin­is­tra­tion been chat­ter­ing about efforts to mon­i­tor domes­tic trans­ac­tions for nearly five years?
Shortly after the 9/​11 attacks, many jour­nal­ists includ­ing this one were briefed by U.S. Customs offi­cials on Operation Green Quest, an effort to roll up ter­ror­ist financiers by mon­i­tor­ing, among other things, “sus­pi­cious” bank trans­fers and ancient money lend­ing pro­grams favored by peo­ple of Middle Eastern descent.
I inter­viewed Marcy Forman, direc­tor of Green Quest, at her Washington offices in December 2001, when I was a writer for Government Executive mag­a­zine. Our meet­ing was sanc­tioned by Customs’ pub­lic affairs office, and came at a time when the White House was eager to talk about all the work fed­eral agen­cies were doing to hunt down ter­ror­ists. Forman told me the kinds of peo­ple, trans­ac­tions, even loca­tions that the gov­ern­ment was tar­get­ing. (These are details, it should be noted, that the recent Times piece did not reveal.) Among the poten­tially sen­si­tive items Forman told me, which were published:

Operation Green Quest is focus­ing on the infor­mal, largely paper­less form of money exchange known as hawala, which is Arabic for to change.
Few under­cover agents can pen­e­trate Middle Eastern com­mu­ni­ties and money laun­der­ing rings because they look like out­siders and don’t speak the lan­guage. As a result, Green Quest has to be more clever, by set­ting traps on the Internet and work­ing to flush cur­rency traf­fick­ers out of their hid­ing places.
Treasury and FBI inves­ti­ga­tors have iden­ti­fied hawala as a means by which the alleged Sept. 11 ter­ror­ists may have received money from over­seas.
Green Quest inves­ti­ga­tors, who’ve spent their careers dis­man­tling money laun­der­ing rack­ets, were blind­sided by the exis­tence of the sys­tem. Most of us couldn’t spell hawala before Sept. 11, Forman said.
The agen­cies’ [involved in Green Quest] coop­er­a­tive efforts have recently cul­mi­nated in raids of alleged money laun­der­ing oper­a­tions that aid sus­pected ter­ror­ist net­works.
Green Quest also wants to lower the thresh­old at which bank deposits and elec­tronic funds trans­fers must be doc­u­mented. Dropping the ceil­ing from $10,000 to $750, Forman said, may force money traf­fick­ers to try to get their cash out of the coun­try by hand. They would then be sub­ject to cap­ture by a beefed-​​up cadre of Customs Service offi­cers at bor­der cross­ings, air­ports and seaports. 

Green Quest was only one of the admin­is­tra­tions efforts to com­bat ter­ror­ist financ­ing which offi­cials dis­cussed pub­licly. More than two years after 9/​11, fed­eral offi­cials tes­ti­fied before a con­gres­sional field hear­ing in Miami and “detailed efforts to stop the ille­gal financ­ing of ter­ror­ist net­works.” A senior adviser for the Treasury Department “named sev­eral ini­tia­tives, such as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which is devel­op­ing tech­nol­ogy to let finan­cial insti­tu­tions report sus­pi­cious trans­ac­tions more eas­ily and quickly.” The adviser also named the sys­tem FinCEN was devel­op­ing to man­age a data­base built to search finan­cial trans­ac­tions. And he said the depart­ment was work­ing directly with finan­cial insti­tu­tions to help them “develop soft­ware to bet­ter iden­tify poten­tial terrorist-​​financing activ­i­ties.“
These details, pro­vided by Customs and Treasury offi­cials, undoubt­edly gave ter­ror­ists some insight into how the U.S. gov­ern­ment was track­ing them, and what inves­ti­ga­tors knew about ter­ror­ism financ­ing. These offi­cials wer­ent whistle­blow­er­s­they were sanc­tioned by the admin­is­tra­tion to dis­pense this infor­ma­tion.
In the wake of the lat­est Times rev­e­la­tion, Rep. Peter King of New York, the Republican chair­man of the House Homeland Security Committee, wants the attor­ney gen­eral to inves­ti­gate and pros­e­cute reporters and edi­tors of the Times for aid­ing the cause of our ene­mies. What King and oth­ers crit­ics havent addressed is how the pub­li­ca­tion of spe­cific details, over the past half decade, about the tech­niques the gov­ern­ment employ­ees to track ter­ror­ists money doesnt also aid their cause.
– Shane Harris
UPDATE 06/29/9:34 AM: Intel Dump takes a very dif­fer­ent point of view. Meanwhile, Bob Kerrey — and even, to some extent, Peter King — won­der the Times’ dis­clo­sure actu­ally helps coun­tert­er­ror efforts.

Bob Kerrey, a mem­ber of the 9/​11 com­mis­sion, [said] that if the news reports drive ter­ror­ists out of the bank­ing sys­tem, that could actu­ally help the coun­tert­er­ror­ism cause.
“If we tell peo­ple who are poten­tial crim­i­nals that we have a lot of police on the beat, that’s a sub­stan­tial deter­rent,” said Mr. Kerrey, now pres­i­dent of New School University. If ter­ror­ists decide it is too risky to move money through offi­cial chan­nels, “that’s very good, because it’s much, much harder to move money in other ways,” Mr. Kerrey said.
A State Department offi­cial, Anthony Wayne, made a par­al­lel point in 2004 before Congress. “As we’ve made it more dif­fi­cult for them to use the bank­ing sys­tem,” Mr. Wayne said, “they’ve been shift­ing to other less reli­able and more cum­ber­some meth­ods, such as cash couri­ers…“
Since [9/​11], the Treasury Department has pro­duced dozens of news releases and pub­lic reports detail­ing its efforts. Though offi­cials appear never to have men­tioned the Swift pro­gram, they have repeat­edly described their coop­er­a­tion with finan­cial net­works to iden­tify accounts held by peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions linked to ter­ror­ism…
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, con­vened a hear­ing in 2004 where Treasury offi­cials described at length their efforts, assisted by finan­cial insti­tu­tions, to trace ter­ror­ists’ money. But he has been among the most vehe­ment crit­ics of the dis­clo­sures about the Swift pro­gram, say­ing edi­tors and reporters of The New York Times should be impris­oned for pub­lish­ing gov­ern­ment secrets.
In an inter­view on Wednesday, Mr. King said he saw no con­tra­dic­tion. “Obviously we wanted the ter­ror­ists to know we were try­ing to track them,” Mr. King said. “But we didn’t want them to know the details.”