U.S. mines bank data as tool in terror fight
U.S. mines bank data as tool in terror fight
By Eric Lichtblau and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: June 23, 2006
WASHINGTON The White House on Friday vigorously defended a secret program of combing through a vast international database containing banking transactions involving thousands of Americans. Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials said the program, whose existence was revealed Friday in an article in The New York Times, was both legal and necessary to deter terrorism.
Treasury Secretary John Snow, in his first public remarks about the program, called it "government at its best." He told reporters that the operation was carefully controlled to trace only those transactions with an identifiable link to possible terrorist activity.
"There can't be any doubt about the fact that the program is an effective weapon, an effective weapon in the larger war on terror," he said. "It's for that reason that these disclosures of the particular sources and methods are so regrettable."
Separately, President George W. Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, said the program complied with "the letter and spirit of the law." He said members of congressional intelligence committees had been apprised of the program, though he did not provide specifics.
The spokesman derided criticisms of the program as "entirely abstract in nature." He said that it had been subjected to outside auditing, and that the president did not need to seek authorization from Congress for it.
"Let me tell you why this is important: It works," he said. "It is sought only for terrorism investigations. A series of safeguards have been put in place."
The banking consortium, known as Swift, that maintains the database gave no sign Friday that it was rethinking its relationship with the government, despite the sudden glare of publicity aimed at an organization that generally keeps a very low profile.
American officials, in urging The Times not to publish Friday's article, expressed concerns that Swift, which has its headquarters in Brussels, could be prompted to pull out of the program if its role were revealed - particularly in light of sharp anti-American sentiments in parts of Europe. But an official with Swift, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that there had been "no discussions" about a withdrawal.
News of the program's existence renewed concerns about civil liberties first raised last year when The Times reported on another secret program, conducted by the National Security Agency, involving eavesdropping on telephone communications without court warrants.
Both disclosures prompted complaints to the administration from members of Congress, who are calling for more oversight, and from advocates for civil liberties.
"I am very concerned that the Bush administration may be once again violating the constitutional rights of innocent Americans, as part of another secret program created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks," Representative Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has made privacy a signature issue, said in a statement.
The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, condemned the program, calling it "another example of the Bush administration's abuse of power."
But Snow, the White House press secretary, said Americans by and large supported the eavesdropping program.
"You can go ahead and look at your own polling, and you will find that Americans - if somebody says, 'Do you want a program that listens in on people who have been identified as Al Qaeda terrorists?' - the answer would be, 'Yes, I would like to do that. I would like to find data on it.'"
The press secretary made his remarks during a lengthy morning briefing, during which he at times grew uncharacteristically testy.
At one point, he accused news organizations like CNN, The Times and The Los Angeles Times of collecting personal data from visitors to their Web sites without disclosing it. At another, he grew exasperated when Helen Thomas, a longtime White House correspondent, interrupted him, and told her to "stop heckling and let me conduct the press conference."
Eric Lichtblau and James Risen reported earlier from Washington:
Administration officials said the program was limited to tracing the transactions of people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from Swift, the nerve center of the global banking industry 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 or into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to the United States are not in the database.
Viewed by the administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most- wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said.
The program, run out of the CIA and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview Thursday.
The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.
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 Swift.
That access to large amounts of sensitive data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues.
"The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting, troubling," said a former senior counterterrorism official who considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the official added, "the potential for abuse is enormous."
The program is separate from the NSA's efforts to eavesdrop without warrants and collect domestic phone records, operations that have provoked fierce public debate and spurred lawsuits against the government and telecommunications companies.
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 ATM transactions, credit card purchases and Western Union wire payments, the officials said.
Nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives discussed aspects of the Swift operation with The Times on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. Some of those officials expressed reservations about the program, saying that what they viewed as an urgent, temporary measure had become permanent nearly five years later without specific congressional approval or formal authorization.
Data from Swift have allowed officials from the CIA, the FBI and other agencies to examine "tens of thousands" of financial transactions, Levey said.
While many of those transactions have occurred entirely on foreign soil, officials have also been keenly interested in international transfers of money by individuals, businesses, charities and other organizations under suspicion inside the United States, officials said. A small fraction of Swift's records involve transactions entirely within the United States, but Treasury officials said they were uncertain whether any had been examined.
Swift executives have been uneasy at times about their secret role, the government and industry officials said. By 2003, the executives told U.S. officials they were considering pulling out of the arrangement, which began as an emergency response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said. Worried about potential legal liability, the Swift executives agreed to continue providing the data only after top officials, including Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, intervened. At the same time, new controls were introduced.
Among the program's safeguards, government officials said, is an outside auditing firm that verifies that the data searches are based on a link to terrorism intelligence. Swift and Treasury officials said they were aware of no abuses. But Levey said one person had been removed from the operation for conducting a search considered inappropriate.
"We are not on a fishing expedition," Levey said. "We're not just turning on a vacuum cleaner and sucking in all the information that we can."
The administration has made no secret of its campaign to disrupt terrorist financing, and Bush, Treasury officials and others have spoken publicly about those efforts. Administration officials, however, asked The Times not to publish this article, saying that disclosure of the Swift program could jeopardize its effectiveness. They also enlisted several current and former officials, both Democrat and Republican, to vouch for its value.
Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, said: "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."
Levey agreed to discuss the classified operation after The Times' editors told him of the newspaper's decision.
On Thursday evening, Dana Perino, deputy White House press secretary, said: "Since immediately following 9/11, the American government has taken every legal measure to prevent another attack on our country."
She added: "We know the terrorists pay attention to our strategy to fight them, and now have another piece of the puzzle of how we are fighting them.
Referring to the disclosure by The Times in December of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program, she said, "The president is concerned that once again The New York Times has chosen to expose a classified program that is working to protect our citizens."
Barclay Walsh contributed reporting for this article.
By Eric Lichtblau and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: June 23, 2006
WASHINGTON The White House on Friday vigorously defended a secret program of combing through a vast international database containing banking transactions involving thousands of Americans. Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials said the program, whose existence was revealed Friday in an article in The New York Times, was both legal and necessary to deter terrorism.
Treasury Secretary John Snow, in his first public remarks about the program, called it "government at its best." He told reporters that the operation was carefully controlled to trace only those transactions with an identifiable link to possible terrorist activity.
"There can't be any doubt about the fact that the program is an effective weapon, an effective weapon in the larger war on terror," he said. "It's for that reason that these disclosures of the particular sources and methods are so regrettable."
Separately, President George W. Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, said the program complied with "the letter and spirit of the law." He said members of congressional intelligence committees had been apprised of the program, though he did not provide specifics.
The spokesman derided criticisms of the program as "entirely abstract in nature." He said that it had been subjected to outside auditing, and that the president did not need to seek authorization from Congress for it.
"Let me tell you why this is important: It works," he said. "It is sought only for terrorism investigations. A series of safeguards have been put in place."
The banking consortium, known as Swift, that maintains the database gave no sign Friday that it was rethinking its relationship with the government, despite the sudden glare of publicity aimed at an organization that generally keeps a very low profile.
American officials, in urging The Times not to publish Friday's article, expressed concerns that Swift, which has its headquarters in Brussels, could be prompted to pull out of the program if its role were revealed - particularly in light of sharp anti-American sentiments in parts of Europe. But an official with Swift, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that there had been "no discussions" about a withdrawal.
News of the program's existence renewed concerns about civil liberties first raised last year when The Times reported on another secret program, conducted by the National Security Agency, involving eavesdropping on telephone communications without court warrants.
Both disclosures prompted complaints to the administration from members of Congress, who are calling for more oversight, and from advocates for civil liberties.
"I am very concerned that the Bush administration may be once again violating the constitutional rights of innocent Americans, as part of another secret program created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks," Representative Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has made privacy a signature issue, said in a statement.
The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, condemned the program, calling it "another example of the Bush administration's abuse of power."
But Snow, the White House press secretary, said Americans by and large supported the eavesdropping program.
"You can go ahead and look at your own polling, and you will find that Americans - if somebody says, 'Do you want a program that listens in on people who have been identified as Al Qaeda terrorists?' - the answer would be, 'Yes, I would like to do that. I would like to find data on it.'"
The press secretary made his remarks during a lengthy morning briefing, during which he at times grew uncharacteristically testy.
At one point, he accused news organizations like CNN, The Times and The Los Angeles Times of collecting personal data from visitors to their Web sites without disclosing it. At another, he grew exasperated when Helen Thomas, a longtime White House correspondent, interrupted him, and told her to "stop heckling and let me conduct the press conference."
Eric Lichtblau and James Risen reported earlier from Washington:
Administration officials said the program was limited to tracing the transactions of people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from Swift, the nerve center of the global banking industry 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 or into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to the United States are not in the database.
Viewed by the administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most- wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said.
The program, run out of the CIA and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview Thursday.
The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.
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 Swift.
That access to large amounts of sensitive data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues.
"The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting, troubling," said a former senior counterterrorism official who considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the official added, "the potential for abuse is enormous."
The program is separate from the NSA's efforts to eavesdrop without warrants and collect domestic phone records, operations that have provoked fierce public debate and spurred lawsuits against the government and telecommunications companies.
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 ATM transactions, credit card purchases and Western Union wire payments, the officials said.
Nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives discussed aspects of the Swift operation with The Times on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. Some of those officials expressed reservations about the program, saying that what they viewed as an urgent, temporary measure had become permanent nearly five years later without specific congressional approval or formal authorization.
Data from Swift have allowed officials from the CIA, the FBI and other agencies to examine "tens of thousands" of financial transactions, Levey said.
While many of those transactions have occurred entirely on foreign soil, officials have also been keenly interested in international transfers of money by individuals, businesses, charities and other organizations under suspicion inside the United States, officials said. A small fraction of Swift's records involve transactions entirely within the United States, but Treasury officials said they were uncertain whether any had been examined.
Swift executives have been uneasy at times about their secret role, the government and industry officials said. By 2003, the executives told U.S. officials they were considering pulling out of the arrangement, which began as an emergency response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said. Worried about potential legal liability, the Swift executives agreed to continue providing the data only after top officials, including Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, intervened. At the same time, new controls were introduced.
Among the program's safeguards, government officials said, is an outside auditing firm that verifies that the data searches are based on a link to terrorism intelligence. Swift and Treasury officials said they were aware of no abuses. But Levey said one person had been removed from the operation for conducting a search considered inappropriate.
"We are not on a fishing expedition," Levey said. "We're not just turning on a vacuum cleaner and sucking in all the information that we can."
The administration has made no secret of its campaign to disrupt terrorist financing, and Bush, Treasury officials and others have spoken publicly about those efforts. Administration officials, however, asked The Times not to publish this article, saying that disclosure of the Swift program could jeopardize its effectiveness. They also enlisted several current and former officials, both Democrat and Republican, to vouch for its value.
Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, said: "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."
Levey agreed to discuss the classified operation after The Times' editors told him of the newspaper's decision.
On Thursday evening, Dana Perino, deputy White House press secretary, said: "Since immediately following 9/11, the American government has taken every legal measure to prevent another attack on our country."
She added: "We know the terrorists pay attention to our strategy to fight them, and now have another piece of the puzzle of how we are fighting them.
Referring to the disclosure by The Times in December of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program, she said, "The president is concerned that once again The New York Times has chosen to expose a classified program that is working to protect our citizens."
Barclay Walsh contributed reporting for this article.
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