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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.
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?
Does anyone else worry that the USA might use its intelligent services to give its corporate entities an advantage over foreign ones?
If they use the information purely to look for money laundering or terrorism then that's cool, it would be 99% automated anyway... Looking for patterns and the like... But what if the security services use that information to give helpful hints to US companies over the international counterparts? Is that fair?
We are talking about large amounts of money, and most of us know that money can lead people to act less than morally, so it isn't a far stretch to believe that they might do that... Even be authorised to do that.
The fact that this is happening or the fact that this does not surprise me anymore. Every election year I tell myself I'll vote with my conscious and vote Libertarian. Screw that, I just want these f***ers OUT now.
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Bite Me Fanboy!!
It's not so secret any more!
Anyway...
Why don't companies announce immediately when they have been forced to do something by the government against their will (like Google)? As far as I was aware America is still a country where you can speak freely against the government without fear of punishment. Why not just admit it in public that you are being forced to hand over confidential information? If the banks are hiding it too, then they are as much to blame and should not be trusted.
Or is the government using threats to keep the banks quiet? If so, what threats do they use? And can anything be done about it to make sure it doesn't happen again?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
So the US found a quick way to access international payment flows. I wonder about their "successes", which sound a lot like the "take our word for it, we know Saddam has chemical weapons". Also SWIFT, a seemingly international organization, has in fact confirmed it is controlled by the US by agreeing to pass all its data to the US. I wonder what its Arab clients are thinking. SWIFT can probably now close shop.
Rubies and Pearls are not what you think.
You americans can do whatever the fuck you want to your own citizens.
But please keep us europeans out of it.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Just passing along this comment I saw on Instapundit:
What has not been stressed is that SWIFT is not used for individuals. It is used for processing money transfers, stock transfers and bond transfers from companies, governments, banks, insurance companies and NGO's. What we essentially had on file was the holdings for almost all our clients and the clearance data for these transactions dating back for years. We had to keep all this on file to satisfy all the governmental regulations on taxations, etc.
Uh oh you caught me!
:-(
You are right though, in reality I do not mind secret courts, phone tapping, bank tapping, warrantless searches, americans being held indefinatly without access to a lawyer or charges being filed, torture, secret prisons, war, CIA leaks, and our spending more money on defense than all other countries on the planet combined and doubled while our education and healthcare go down the toilet and we run up a defecit that cannot reasonably be paid in the next 5 generations.
Yup, red handed. Was just trying to annoy you, my bad.
Can we go back to blaming communism?
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
i'm a lefty pinko who advocates the protection and expansion of civil rights: wanna know what the worst aspect of this (and the NSA phone call database, etc is?
how much time is being wasted by the FBI when investigative man power could be directed more effectively at more pressing issues.
Not only do they know how much money you move, but by getting into the retail databases, they also know what ( and when, and where ) you are buying.
Just hope that what you bought today legally doesnt become 'questionable' ( or down right illegal ) tomrrow. You might find a knock on your door.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And we know from their illegal phone tapping practices, bloated do-not-fly lists etc, etc, that by now they've collected the names of pretty much every other American (not to mention nearly all other humans; remember, this is an international system; very heavily used by European banks, for one), and that with six degrees of separation, they all have enough ties to be part of the open investigations.
What isn't mentioned at all in this Washington Post article, which the New York Times does mention, are such snippets as:Read the entire New York Times article for more. Chilling.
Given the impact this has on Europeans involved in international transfers as well, if you're European, have you already contacted your bank to urge them to use their influence with SWIFT to make this stop?! There's never much to be done when there's the need to call or write congress critters, but with European privacy laws actually being worth something (in theory), here's a chance to voice very strong displeasure and make this stop!
This is exactly the sort of thing they should be doing.
If they should be checking up on financial transactions, why do they need to try to keep it secret?
Either make it a public policy and get it passed as a law or else don't do it. Same goes for illegal phone-tapping and other forms of spying on your own citizens.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
It would be greatly appreciated by the Billions of us that don't live there if you Americans would do something about your current government.
America increasingly represents the antithesis of 'freedom' and personal liberty especially for those in other countries. They are innovators in the strategic reduction of civil rights, at home and elsewhere. Freedom is not a brand, it's a right and you don't have to be American to have it FFS.
Cheney's predictable response: anyone who criticises mass surveillance is helping terrorists.
Uh, hasn't the IRS had access to this information forever? And I also seem to recall GWB announcing they were tracking financial info immediately following 9/11, just not how.
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
Do something like what? Vote them out? We try that every four years but still end up with Politicians (capitalized because it's a distinct subclass of humanity) in power and after the 24-hour warranty runs out, they all turn into the same evil, self-serving, corrupt muck as the rest of their kind. Overthrow them by force of arms? We did that a couple hundred years ago and it worked well until the very intelligent and respectable gentlemen who created our nation stepped down and the Politicians took over. We seem to be lacking in intelligent and respectable gentlemen, or ladies, these days who would be willing to step in and clean house so a revolution would not produce a change. So we'll muddle along with what we have and try to work around it.
> Cheney doesnt even have the grace to be emberassed about it.
If he's not embarassed to argue in favor of torture, why should a little thing like this faze him?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I can echo that. I live in Denmark and almost every international transfer that Danes perform, apart from credit card purchases, use the SWIFT system. Western Union and similar companies have very little market share, mostly because they're quite expensive compared to using SWIFT. For example, I recently transferred $100 to one of my US bank accounts using SWIFT to cover the account charges. I think the smallest SWIFT I ever did was £30 to the UK for some miscellaneous fees.
Jeez dude get a clue.
Russia isnt so nice and they hide things, they go the shit and 50megaton nukes.
Oh but because they have 1000s of them and subs we cant invade em coz we're toast.
Who sold the chemicals? That damn photo of RUmselfd shaking hands with Saddamn in the80s is so damn funny!!!
Btw, Rumselfd also was a director of a company that allowed/helped north korea with reactors and now dont want iran to have any.
Its a global scam, they just want all OIL resources.
FACE it people, OIL is the reason for the last 150years of human achievements. He who has >50% of its resources wins.
No matter how many lies, or deaths or billions or trillions spent, he who has it rules. Even if its part ownership or proxy.
Get a clue people. With out oil there wouldnt be so much plastics/food/power and hence people!!!!!!!!!!
Coal cant achieve that role.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
So far it seems though, and I say this as a foreign observer, that America is taking it all sitting down.
We're not taking it sitting down. We're taking it in the ass, bent over the lap of a bound lady liberty. And the funny thing is, there's a bunch of folks saying they absolutely love it, because George Bush said they love it.
"C'mon, you know you love it!" he says. But still they don't squirm like he likes, so he says, "Terrorism! 9/11!"
And then they orgasm. "Oooo, I just love you, Mr. President!" And they say, "Those other people who don't love getting raped in the ass by their government are nothing but liberal crybabies." Because it's easier for them to call names and ignore the waxing fascism than it is for them to admit the truth: they support a fascist regime that has not made us one iota safer.
They, the party that once called for reduced government interference in our lives, are whining about how fucking great it is that the government is more involved in our lives to the point where they know how we spend our money and whom we call, and they are telling us how to think.
So, no. We're not taking it sitting down. We can't sit down. Our asses are sore.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
hmmm... ""medieval-minded theocratic crazies"" ....careful how you bandy round a phrase like that... some might argue that somes up the current management of the USA quite nicely :-)
What the fuck are we doing in Europe, having US listening and monitoring stations listening in on us from our own soil?
If Americans want to elect Bush, thats there problem, but we should be protecting our interests, not theirs.
"More importantly, the SWIFT system is used to support massive international wire transfers, usually from one bank to another. We're not talking about Western Union transfers and we're not talking about your ATM records."
... randomly hard to deal with. And international cheques are _slow_ and uncertain, since you can't be sure you'll get the money until some days after you try to cash it.
Nonsense. As a Norwegian, all my non-VISA transactions to and from foreign countries have explicitly involved SWIFT. Payment for magazine articles, for example. Yes, down to 40 USD transactions for rare used books or ebay auctions.
It's the only practical alternative when Visa payment isn't an option, since paypal is
I'm not at all happy about the US having access to, say, Norway-to-France transactions via Swift. And I would expect this to hurt Swift quite a bit.
Uh oh you caught me!
:-(
You are right though, in reality I do not mind secret courts, phone tapping, bank tapping, warrantless searches, americans being held indefinatly without access to a lawyer or charges being filed, torture, secret prisons, war, CIA leaks, and our spending more money on defense than all other countries on the planet combined and doubled while our education and healthcare go down the toilet and we run up a defecit that cannot reasonably be paid in the next 5 generations.
Yup, red handed. Was just trying to annoy you, my bad.
Can we go back to blaming communism?
You know what I'm curious about? Whether the chap that set up 9/11 imagined this kind of outcome, even in his wildest dreams. I guess one man can in fact change the world, all he needs is some guns, a few planes and a couple of well-indoctrinated morons.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I will be interested in seeing the BBC's take on the matter.
The news program All Things Considered interviewed the undersecretary responsible for the program yesterday (6/24/06). The interviewer didn't really pull any punches and the answers were pretty interesting. I highly recommend going to NPR's web site and listening to it.
When asked what layers of security were in place to prevent misuse, the reply was that in order to perform a search, the analyst had to show that the individual or group being queried had been identified as having a potential terrorism link. That request had to be vetted by a supervisor, then by a representative from SWIFT. Then, when the query is performed, if no evidence is found, then the information is discarded at the analyst's level. A government auditing team reviews the information that is gleaned and a third party auditing team (from Booz Allen) audits the government.
The undersecretary said that they did remove an analyst earlier this year for abusing the system. The auditing system caught him.
The undersecretary also said that about 10% of the searches performed provided evidence of links to terrorist organizations. That, he said, was a very high rate compared to other intelligence methods.
For me, personally, if that's the way that the government is using the SWIFT database, I don't have a problem with it. If the queries are targeted, as opposed to a broad sweep, it strikes me as a legitimate use of an intelligence asset.
Interestingly enough, the general attitude of the security and privacy experts that ATC interviewed was fairly positive about the program.
-h-
You're right, I *do* suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Everything the man has done from the day he stepped into office has managed to make my life and my country worse.
Nor does it help that his defenders gleefully try to malign anyone who criticizes this train wreck of an administration, calling them anti-Americans, armchair terrorists, and worse. They also try to prove our insanity by saying that (in the case of "Dr. Sanity") we blame Bush for acts of God, like Hurricane Katrina and the Tsunami. If anyone goes around blaming hurricanes on human beings, it's Pat Robertson.
What we object to is our government's *reaction* to these events. The staffing of FEMA with incompetent ideological cronies was not an "act of God." The decision to redirect most government spending towards military pursuits, leaving us underfunded, undermanned, and underequipped at home, was not an "act of God." The ideology of "a government small enough to drown in the bathtub" didn't come from God, but from people who still have our President's attention and commitment.
Nor do we ask for the appeasement of terrorists. What we ask for are foreign policies that don't hand them one PR victory after another, helping them to radicalize vast swaths of the Islamic population. From Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghirab to rendition and torture, we are creating terrorists in the name of fighting terror. Frankly, it's not "appeasement" to recognize that had we spent the money squandered in Iraq on peaceful foreign aid, the true terrorists would find it much more difficult to get recruits. If we'd spent it on energy independence, our money wouldn't pour into the hands of people like the Saudi royalty, who use it to keep their people oppressed while using us as scapegoats to distract their own people. If we'd spent it on domestic programs, we would have saved more lives than were lost on September 11th. Had we not spent it at all, America would be on much more secure financial footing, and we'd have 100,000 soldiers home taking care of their families, rather than 2500 who never came home at all.
But then we'd have a mad dictator in power. Instead of a civil war. I'm about ready to call that one a toss-up.
So, yes, the man pisses me off to the point that it's hard to calm down when discussing him. Anyone who loves this country and can see where it's headed should be suffering from a severe case Bush Derangement Syndrome.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Look at the YEAR in which they were used.
... and rather short on facts about chemical weapons.
If Saddam had them 20 years ago, that does NOT make him a threat TODAY.
No one is saying that Saddam did not have chemical weapons at any time in the past. We know he did. We were the ones who were helping him develop them for use in the Iraq/Iran war.
And your articles are rather long on descriptions of Saddam lounging by a pool in a speedo
Dude, Iraq fought Iran.
Iraq was a secular totalitarian state.
There was NO danger of them changing to a Theocracy while Saddam was alive.
So just leaving Saddam and the sanctions in place would have achieved your stated goal without the loss of a single US soldier's life.
If it's not about oil, then make the case without mentioning oil.
Because you cannot do so, without fantasy scenarios that Saddam's existance would have prevented, it is/was/will be about the oil.
So? No one is saying he was an angel. Just that he was not a threat to the United States of America or our allies.
Do not confuse "bad person" with "threat to the US".
Do you have some kind of calendar-phobia?
You keep bringing up actions from years before the last invasion. What he did in 1990 has no bearing on whether we should invade in 2003. There were THIRTEEN YEARS between those two events.
I don't know about "feel convenient", but it certainly fits the established facts.
And again you support the position that it was about the oil. Or, more exactly, about who controls the oil.
So, be as sarcastic/flippant as you want to be about it. The fact remains that you do not have a justification that does NOT involve the oil.
Oil does not vote. Oil does not elect representatives. There is nothing noble about going to war for oil. Therefore, saying that the war was for oil cannot be "craven".
Only in your mind, only in your mind.
Germany was actively invading other countries and attacking our ally England.
Iraq had
Is when Bush does something like this, people come out of the woodwork to explain how the intentions are good.
It doesn't matter if the administration's intentions are good. The point is we have a court system and separation of powers for a reason. And it is the law of the land.
No matter how good one's intentions are, if they violate this (by not getting actual subpoenas), they're comminting a grave crime, and creating a situation where one branch (in this case the one headed by one man) can begin to take control of the actions of the entire government.
It's a constitutional issue. And this is another egregious violation of it. This is beyond absurdity now. We the people created this government, we should have to put up with it not following the restrictions we set down upon it. These people should be ejected from office.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
But answer me this: what part of what he describes would be difficult for the USA government to do? Is it a good idea to simply let them have the power to do these things and assume they'll never exercise it?
You might be a terrorist . . .
. . . if your name is Osama Bin Foxworthy.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
to the people who say "i don't have anything to hide, so its ok with me", i say, this is another huge symptom of the government/certain people in the government wanting to take our rights away. theres something called the 4th amendment... some people keep saying its ok, but when are they gonna get that we are gonna have to stand up for our rights or they'll keep taking them away till there aren't any left.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/ Ron Paul for President 2008 http://www.infowars.com/
I am a physicist and I consult on national vulnerability, and I can tell you that a terrorist will not come through an airport with any radionuclides. That is patently ridiculous. What is far more likely to happen is that someone with a bunch of money will find someone in Russia with little to no money (who formerly worked for the Strategic Rocket Forces) to provide them with a working (if decrepit) tactical nuke. Then, they would have some shipping company bring the container to New York or Miami and set it off. That's just to let you know about what OUR nightmares are -- and in the future, post about what you know.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
AFAICT, he's understating the situation. The nazi link, e.g., is not merely by methodological similarity, but also because some very high level nazi's made deals at the time of the surrender...and some of them went to work on for the agnecy that later became the CIA. (Nazism was dead...and they were experienced anti-communists... over time they worked their way up in the ranks.)
A "secret police" is a very dangerous (and necessary?) part of government. They are rather like an immune system that way. If the design isn't perfect, they are likely to attack the organism that produced them. (Well, that analogy is stretect further than it can stand. Unlike an immune system, secret police forces are capable of "owning" thier own resources out of sight of their controllers...and that can cause them to act quite independently, and without much concern for their putative parent body.)
My personal preference would be to have a less powerful "secret police" even at the cost of allowing some "disease organisms" to slip in, but this is clearly a matter of degree. More careful oversight is another important consideration...but who will watch the watchers? Corruption is a historical habit of human organizations.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Hint Ronald McDonald has killed quite literally thousands as times as many people as Osama Bin Laden,
chew on that for a while.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Is it a good idea to simply let them have the power to do these things and assume they'll never exercise it?
No. It is a fundamental law of human behaviour: All power gets used.
If you grant power to someone that power will eventually be used. History suggests sooner rather than later. Things you'd think would never happen in a million years have a way of being done well ahead of schedule. And any power will be used to the benefit of the people wielding it unless there are obvious negative consequences in doing so. Secret power is absolute power, because it can be used for anything with no consequences to the wielders.
And for anyone still using the "you have nothing to worry about if you've done nothing wrong" line, I would like to point out that that line requires assuming that the organs of the state Never Make Mistakes. Good luck with that.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.