U.S. Secretly Tapping Bank Databases

The Washington Post and New York Times are reporting on a Bush administration initiative that has tapped into a vast global database of confidential financial transactions for nearly five years. Relying on a presidential emergency declaration made under the International Emergency Economic Powers, the administration has been surveilling the data from the SWIFT database, which links about 7,800 banks and brokerages and handles billions of transactions a year. From the article:

Together with a hundredfold expansion of the FBI's use of "national security letters" to obtain communications and banking records, the secret NSA and Treasury programs have built unprecedented government databases of private transactions, most of them involving people who prove irrelevant to terrorism investigators.

The NYTimes goes on to say that the joint CIA-Treasury 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. Still, the access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, and concerns were raised about legal and privacy issues.

Comments

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Folks -- if they don't have enough intelligence to invade the right country then I doubt they have enough intelligence to monitor bank records. They can't even manage to look after their own federal spending, why do they need to look after mine?

Re: Wow

[vishbar]

...but by anyone who has some capacity of independent thought.

Yes. BOTH of those Americans will taunt you nonstop.

Re:Corporate advantage?

[ultranova]

American companies and their foreign subsidiaries are not allowed to bribe officials abroad, even if it is consonant with foreign law.

Instead, they bribe politicians back home.

I guess US politicians don't want to share their bribes.

Re:You Might Be A TERRORIST!!!!!!

[Ohreally_factor]

You might be a terrorist . . .

. . . if your name is Osama Bin Foxworthy.