Bank Surveillance (WaPo:"..exactly the sort of aggressive tactic the government should be taking..")

Washington Post ^ | 6/24/06 | editorial

[frankjr]

THE TREASURY Department's just-disclosed program of searching records of overseas bank transfers may provoke outraged comparisons to the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance and data-mining of telephone call records... So far, however, it seems like exactly the sort of aggressive tactic the government should be taking in the war on terrorism.

For one thing, it appears to be legal. The government is receiving large volumes of data detailing financial transfers from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a Belgium-based consortium that acts as a kind of messenger service for banks around the world, electronically notifying banks of transactions other banks are attempting to complete....

It is also the sort of information the government should be examining in any effort to frustrate terrorist financing and develop leads about who is funding whom....

...The administration only briefed the full intelligence committees recently, apparently after the program appeared likely to become public. These committees need to make sure that the legal basis for it is sound, as it appears; that the program is appropriately designed and tailored; that the internal controls are rigorous and the uses of the data are properly constrained. So far, however, there is little reason to think it poses a great civil liberties problem.

[frankjr]

Mmmm, the NYT does not have many friends left. I guess no one likes a treasonist.

[GrandEagle]

THE TREASURY Department's just-disclosed program of searching records of overseas bank transfers
I must be missing something. I see no issues at all with anything the government does overseas (other than diplomatic ramifications).

[bkepley]

The WaPo is still a somewhat serious paper.

[rightazrain]

"Because the administration is so secretive . . ."

Well, what do you expect the administration to be, in the course of fighting a war?

This kind of condescending attitude is disgusting.

[Jack Black]

ping

[Chgogal]

Pinch and Keller probably needed to transfer monies from Bin Laden to their super secret Dubai accounts so they had to sabotage the Government's tracking system.

[Arizona Carolyn]

Quite a change from the, very arrogant, editorial in the NYT today where THEY determined this had been going on to long and should stop; thus they were right in exposing it in order to stop it.

when is the administration going to do something about it?