WASHINGTON, 24 June 2006 — The Bush administration has been quietly tracking people suspected of bankrolling terrorism, using a secret program that gives the government access to a massive database of international financial transactions. Treasury Department officials said they used broad subpoenas to collect the financial records from an international system known as Swift. Stuart Levey, Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, called the subpoenas “a legal and proper use of our authorities.”
“Since immediately following 9/11, the US has taken every legal measure to prevent another attack on our country,” Dana Perino, deputy White House press secretary, said.
Under the program, US counterterrorism analysts could query Swift’s financial data base looking for information on activities by suspected terrorists as part of specific terrorism investigations, a Treasury Department official said. They would do so by plugging in a name or names, the official said.
The program involved both the CIA and the Treasury Department.
Swift, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a cooperative based in Belgium that handles financial message traffic from 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries.
The service, which routes more than 11 million messages each day, mostly captures information on wire transfers and other methods of moving money in and out of the United States. It doesn’t execute these money transfers. The service generally doesn’t detect private, individual transactions in the United States, such as withdrawals from an ATM or bank deposits. It is aimed mostly at international transfers.
The existence of the program was first reported Thursday night on the Web sites of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal.
While confirming the newspaper reports, both Levey and Perino expressed concern that disclosure of the program could undermine efforts to track terrorism-related activities.
The financial messages routed over Swift’s network carry information including the full name and address the sender and receiver.
The New York Times and Los Angeles Times quoted their editors as defending their decision to publish despite being asked by the Bush administration to withhold publication.
Treasury Secretary John Snow yesterday said a program tracking millions of financial transactions was not invasion of privacy of Americans but “government at its best” and vital to the war on terrorism.
Snow told a news conference the program, run by the CIA and overseen by the Treasury Department, was “responsible government, it’s effective government, it’s government that works.”
“It’s entirely consistent with democratic values, with our best legal traditions,” Snow said.
Snow defended the newly disclosed program, saying it was an effective tool in tracking the financial operations of terrorists.
“By following the money we’ve been able to locate operatives, we’ve been able to locate their financiers, we’ve been able to chart the terrorist networks and we’ve been able to bring the terrorists to justice,” he said. He added that Congress had been briefed on the program.
At the White House, presidential spokesman Tony Snow said the focus had been shutting off terrorist financing. “It’s a good thing to shut off the spigot, the financial spigot,” he said. “It does seem to be working.”
“It’s important to understand that very significant protocols and safeguards have been put in pace in a cooperative way between Swift and the Treasury Department,” Snow said.
Snow declined to give specific examples of where the program had been successful in shutting off terrorist financing, but said that he had assured himself that it was working.
Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass. , co-chairman of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, said yesterday there were disturbing similarities between the two programs.
“Like the domestic surveillance program exposed last December, the Bush administration’s efforts to tap into the financial records of thousands of Americans appear to rely on justifications concocted without regard to current law,” Markey said in a statement. However, Republicans defended the effort. Senate Republican leader Bill Frist of Tennessee had been briefed on the program and had “full confidence in the effectiveness of, and the legal authority for, this vital anti-terrorism tool,” said Frist spokeswoman Amy Call.
Snow insisted that the effort was not “data mining or trolling through the private financial records of Americans” nor “a fishing expedition.”
