Bank Data Secretly Reviewed by U.S. to Fight Terror

NYTimes ^ | June 22, 2006 | ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

[baseball_fan]

WASHINGTON, June 22 - Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, 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, according to government and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative 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 this country are not in the database.

Viewed by the Bush 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 Central Intelligence Agency 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 undersecretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview Thursday. The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.

[baseball_fan]

I cannot remember who exactly said it today, maybe Treasury Secretary Snow?, but they compared it to what would have happened if the secret about Enigma in WWII had become publicly known. At first I thought this an overstatement; I'm not sure now.

The one thing that has tempered my outrage on this is the thought of what standards of privacy would I want if a demagogue like Huey Long in the '30s were to be elected president. We would want safeguards that would seem unreasonable for the current administration.

Yet even these concerns I'm assuming could have been handled through our elected representatives or at worst through the courts rather than the press. If and only if all those avenues were blocked and abuses were occuring would a calculation about going public have to be made.

If I were a suspense novelist, I can only imagine the kinds of stories the huge number of wire transfers that take place every day might tell. Funds going from Venezuela to Cuba? Iran to China? I expect we might get some real pushback now from some other countries over the control of this intelligence asset and that might start to represent an Enigma-like loss.