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

Re:mindphuking nazi hypenosys leads to fatal loop

[LordKaT]

What the fuck? Am I drunk again?

Re: Wow

[HardCase]

And before you dismiss this as a troll...

I don't dismiss it as a troll, but rather as the ravings of a paranoid wingnut.

-h-

Re:quick success

[JavaLord]

They did find 500 WMD's in Iraq and announced it just last week. CNN refused to cover the story along with other liberal outlets. It's pretty funny that someone in the senate could hold a press conference, annouce something like that, and it doesn't get covered by the US press.

The weapons were a clear violation of the peace treaty Hussain signed in 1991. The war was justified.

As you say, Mod me down all you want. It's still true.

Media Bias

[Brandybuck]

Washington Post and New York Times are reporting on a Bush administration initiative that has...

For those of you still doubting the existance of media bias, compare and contrast the following two snippets. The first is from the story blurb. The second is written with an effort towards political neutrality:

Washington Post and New York Times are reporting on a Bush administration initiative that has [done a bad thing].

Washington Post and New York Times are reporting on a Treasury Department initiative that has [done a bad thing].

See the difference? While both are accurate and truthful, the first is clearly biased. The quote above is from Slashdot, but the original Washington Post makes the same bias.