U.S. searching bank transaction records.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: UP FRONT

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that the United States has been secretly tracking the flow of terrorist money through a program that gives the Treasury Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) access to a large database of international financial transactions.

According to the reports, following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. Treasury Department obtained data from an international cooperative, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), which transmits information between financial institutions worldwide.

Based in Belgium, SWIFT is a financial industry cooperative that distributes data messages between 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries, as well as provides the software that allows the institutions to communicate. According to The Wall Street Journal, SWIFT handles more than 11 million transactions a day. The Times reported that it handles $6 trillion in transactions daily.

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In an attempt to disrupt the flow of money to terrorism, Treasury Department officials admitted using a series of broad subpoenas to examine SWIFT financial records. Under the program, U.S. counterterrorism analysts could search SWIFT's database for information on activities by suspected terrorists as part of specific terrorism investigations, officials said. The program is limited, government officials said, to tracing transactions of people with suspected ties to A1 Qaeda.

The financial messages muted over SWIFT's network carry information including the full name and address of both sender and receiver, U.S. officials said. The service mostly captures information on international wire transfers and other methods of moving money in and out of the United States and generally doesn't detect private, individual transactions in the United States, such as ATM withdrawals or bank deposits. Data from SWIFT has allowed officials from the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other agencies to examine "tens of thousands" of financial transactions--most of which occurred on foreign soil, a Treasury official said.

Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, according to the Times, instead relying...