SWIFT tracking. What's amazing is how long this has stayed secret, given the amount of people who knew about it, including the auditors at Booz Allen Hamilton:

U.S. officials, some of whom expressed surprise the program had not previously been revealed by critics, acknowledged it would be controversial in the financial community. "It is certainly not going to sit well in the world marketplace," said a former counterterrorism official. "It could very likely undermine the integrity of SWIFT."

Bush administration officials asked the Times not to publish information about the program, contending that disclosure could damage its effectiveness and that sufficient safeguards are in place to protect the public. [...]

Under the program, Treasury issues a new [administrative] subpoena once a month and SWIFT turns over huge amounts of electronic financial data, according to Stuart Levey, the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. The administrative subpoenas are issued under authority granted in the 1977 International Emergency Powers Act.

The SWIFT information is added to a massive database that officials have been constructing since shortly after Sept. 11. Levey noted that SWIFT did not have the ability to search its own records. "We can because we built the capability to do that," he said.

Treasury shares the data with the CIA, the FBI and analysts from other agencies, who can run queries on specific individuals and accounts believed to have terrorist connections, Levey said Thursday in an interview with the Times.

In fact, the database is housed at the CIA, and overseen by Treasury. More from the NYT: "While the banking program is a closely held secret, administration officials have held classified briefings for some members of Congress and the Sept. 11 commission, the officials said. More lawmakers were briefed in recent weeks, after the administration learned The Times was making inquiries for this article."

And Swift doesn't sound very happy with the arrangement:

Despite the controls, Swift executives became increasingly worried about their secret involvement with the American government, the officials said. By 2003, the cooperative's officials were discussing pulling out because of their concerns about legal and financial risks if the program were revealed, one government official said.

"How long can this go on?" a Swift executive asked, according to the official.

Even some American officials began to question the open-ended arrangement. "I thought there was a limited shelf life and that this was going to go away," the former senior official said.

Via Ha'aretz, more drawn from Ron Suskind's new book about how a related terror finance tracking program works on the ground. What's interesting? Terror financiers figured out their Western Union transactions were being monitored over time from experience - and stopped using it -- not because of press revelations.

Posted by Laura at June 23, 2006 12:32 AM