U.S. Treasury Tracking International Financial Data In Anti-Terror Operation

Today was a good day for this to happen, because the story below represents the second coming of the NSA “wiretapping” story:

Since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. Treasury Department has been secretly tracking suspected terrorist financing through a far-reaching program that gives it access to records from the network that handles nearly all international financial transfers.
The information comes from a Belgian firm known by its acronym, Swift, which manages much of the world’s financial-message traffic. Under the program, U.S. counter-terrorism analysts query Swift’s vast database of billions of financial transactions for information on activity by suspected terrorists. The program operates under a series of broad U.S. subpoenas.
U.S. officials say the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program has been highly successful both in leading to the apprehension of terrorism suspects and to thwarting terrorist operations. People familiar with the program said, for example, that it yielded useful information on the bombings that occurred last July 7 in London, as well as other attacks. The program “has helped to disrupt terrorist cells and operations and has helped save lives,” Treasury said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.
Stuart Levey, Treasury’s top counter-terrorism official, said the program was initiated after department lawyers determined they had the legal authority to subpoena Swift, which keeps its data in the U.S. To his knowledge, Mr. Levey said, such broad subpoenas of Swift data had not been attempted previously. But they are based on a long-standing American economic sanctions law.
The program is known to officials of the world’s leading central banks, as well as key U.S. allies in the war on terror, with whom the U.S. has shared data. But disclosure of its existence may be controversial in Europe and other parts of the world and within the global banking industry, which has long worried about the privacy of bank transactions. U.S. officials said few American citizens would have financial data that fall under the program, because they are unlikely to engage in international money transfers.
While U.S. officials have never discussed the tracking program publicly, they have repeatedly discussed in broad terms their efforts to engage in surveillance of cross-border financial activity around the world and have widely publicized the fruits of such surveillance in efforts to blacklist corrupt financial institutions.
In response to U.S. orders, Swift supplies “a limited subset” of data, Treasury said. In a statement, Swift said, “In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, Swift responded to compulsory subpoenas for limited sets of data. Our fundamental principle has been to preserve the confidentiality of our users’ data while complying with the lawful obligations in countries where we operate….Through this process, Swift received significant protections and assurances as to the purpose, confidentiality, oversight and control of the limited sets of data produced under the subpoenas.”

According to the article, there is no data mining going on. Rather, intelligence agents are simply allowed to search the data for terror suspects they are already aware of.

Intelligence analysts are only allowed to search data for specific individuals or groups suspected of terrorist involvement, he said, and the data isn’t subjected to controversial data-mining techniques such as pattern-seeking algorithms. In addition to the probe of the London bombings, the data helped lead investigators to “a key facilitator of terrorism in Iraq,” Mr. Levey said.

Seems reasonable enough for me. They aren’t going on fishing expeditions with this stuff, they are searching for financial transactions related to known suspects. That’s the sort of thing our intelligence guys need to be doing to keep us safe.
It also sounds as though this program was revealed preemptively by our government in order to prevent it from being unveiled (with the usual ominous sensationalism the media reserves especially for their attacks on Bush administration policies) through leaks.

U.S. officials agreed to discuss the program after concluding that knowledge of its existence was emerging and public disclosure was inevitable. But Mr. Levey said he fears that “sophisticated terrorists will now stop using the system in ways we have access to, or will take extensive precautions to hide their identities, and that is really a loss.”

Cue the usual left-wing demagogues going on and on about President Bush reviewing our checking accounts in 5…4…3…2…