Bank Data “Motherlode” in Feds’ Hands

At the end of today’s Century Foundation round table on gov­ern­ment snoop­ing, a ques­tioner asked if there were other gov­ern­ment mon­i­tor­ing pro­grams we didn’t all know about, yet. The response from us pan­elists — and I’m para­phras­ing here — was unan­i­mous: you bet your ass there are.
Usually it takes more than seven hours to get proven right. Not this time.
“Under a secret Bush admin­is­tra­tion pro­gram,” the Times’ Risen and Lichtblau report, “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.”

The pro­gram, how­ever, is a sig­nif­i­cant depar­ture from typ­i­cal prac­tice in how the gov­ern­ment acquires Americans’ finan­cial records. Treasury offi­cials did not seek indi­vid­ual court-​​approved war­rants or sub­poe­nas to exam­ine spe­cific trans­ac­tions, instead rely­ing on broad admin­is­tra­tive sub­poe­nas for mil­lions of records from the coop­er­a­tive, known as Swift…
“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…“
Swift is a cru­cial gate­keeper, pro­vid­ing elec­tronic instruc­tions on how to trans­fer money between 7,800 finan­cial insti­tu­tions world­wide. The coop­er­a­tive is owned by more than 2,200 orga­ni­za­tions, and vir­tu­ally every major com­mer­cial bank, as well as bro­ker­age houses, fund man­agers and stock exchanges, uses its ser­vices. Swift routes more than 11 mil­lion trans­ac­tions each day, most of them across bor­ders…
The Swift data has pro­vided clues to ter­ror money trails and ties between pos­si­ble ter­ror­ists and orga­ni­za­tions financ­ing them, the offi­cials said. In some instances, they said, the pro­gram has pointed them to new sus­pects, while in oth­ers it has but­tressed cases already under inves­ti­ga­tion.
Among the suc­cesses was the cap­ture of a Qaeda oper­a­tive, Riduan Isamuddin, bet­ter known as Hambali, believed to be the mas­ter­mind of the 2002 bomb­ing of a Bali resort, sev­eral offi­cials said. The Swift data iden­ti­fied a pre­vi­ously unknown fig­ure in Southeast Asia who had finan­cial deal­ings with a per­son sus­pected of being a mem­ber of Al Qaeda; that link helped locate Hambali in Thailand in 2003, they 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.
The F.B.I. began acquir­ing finan­cial records from Western Union and its par­ent com­pany, First Data Corporation. The pro­grams were alluded to in Congressional tes­ti­mony by the F.B.I. in 2003 and described in more detail in a book released this week, “The One Percent Doctrine,” by Ron Suskind. Using what offi­cials described as indi­vid­ual, nar­rowly framed sub­poe­nas and war­rants, the F.B.I. has obtained records from First Data, which processes credit and debit card trans­ac­tions, to track finan­cial activ­ity and try to locate sus­pects.
Similar sub­poe­nas for the Western Union data allowed the F.B.I. to trace wire trans­fers, mainly out­side the United States, and to help Israel trace the financ­ing of about a half-​​dozen pos­si­ble ter­ror­ist plots there, an offi­cial said.
The idea for the Swift pro­gram, sev­eral offi­cials recalled, grew out of a sug­ges­tion by a Wall Street exec­u­tive, who told a senior Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial about Swift’s data­base. Few gov­ern­ment offi­cials knew much about the con­sor­tium, which is led by a Brooklyn native, Leonard H. Schrank, but they quickly dis­cov­ered it offered unpar­al­leled access to inter­na­tional trans­ac­tions.
Swift, a for­mer gov­ern­ment offi­cial said, was “the mother lode, the Rosetta stone” for finan­cial data.

UPDATE 10:53 AM: Good com­men­tary from Intel Dump and HLS Watch.

June 22nd, 2006 | You can run... | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.