06.25.06

Below the Fold on the NY Times Bank Data Story

Posted in News of the World, Spooks, ELINT at 9:19 am by Spencer

The Bush spy-scandal du jour is, of course, about the massive data mining of international financial transfer data from the Belgian cooperative SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications.

Without rehashing the story or debating the program’s merits and faults here (okay, maybe a little), I’d just like to point out an aspect of the story that has gotten lost in the dust up. Pretty much all of the coverage so far, even including re-edited syndicated versions of the original NY Times article as it appeared in local papers across the US, has focused solely on SWIFT. This is somewhat understandable, since that is the Big Story. But it’s not the whole story.

As the original article mentioned:

Officials described the Swift program as the biggest and most far-reaching of several secret efforts to trace terrorist financing. Much more limited agreements with other companies have provided access to ATM transactions, credit card purchases and Western Union payments, the officials said.

Slightly more information about these “agreements” with other companies was provided much deeper in the long article, with a few details about one involving Western Union and its parent company.

[Following 9/11,] Financial company executives, many of whom had lost friends at the World Trade Center, were eager to help federal officials trace terrorist money. “They saw 9/11 not just as an attack on the United States, but on the financial industry as a whole,” said one former government official.

Quietly, counterterrorism officials sought to expand the information they were getting from financial institutions. Treasury officials, for instance, spoke with credit card companies about devising an alert if someone tried to buy fertilizer and timing devices that could be used for a bomb, but they were told the idea was not logistically possible, a lawyer in the discussions said.

The FBI began acquiring financial records from Western Union and its parent company, the First Data Corporation. The programs were alluded to in Congressional testimony by the FBI in 2003 and described in more detail in a book released this week, “The One Percent Doctrine,” by Ron Suskind. Using what officials described as individual, narrowly framed subpoenas and warrants, the FBI has obtained records from First Data, which processes credit and debit card transactions, to track financial activity and try to locate suspects.

Similar subpoenas for the Western Union data allowed the FBI to trace wire transfers, mainly outside the United States, and to help Israel disrupt about a half-dozen possible terrorist plots there by unraveling the financing, an official said.

Subpoenas — sounds good, right? Well, it would except for the fact that these were not subpoenas as you and I typically think of them. No judge reviewed them, there was no court hearing, no just cause was argued.

Rather, these were (are still) what are called “administrative subpoenas” or, more specifically, National Security Letters. This is a Constitutionally dubious legal device, first created in limited form in 1978 then expanded enormously by the USA PATRIOT Act, that literally empowers the executive branch to write its own subpoenas with zero — zero — court approval or review. What’s more, anyone receiving a National Security Letter (NSL) is prohibited from saying anything whatsoever about it, even that they received one. Everything about an NSL is a secret. They are nothing more or less than secret warrants issued with impunity by the President and his political appointees, with zero due process or independent oversight.

According to a 2005 story in the Washington Post, citing anonymous government sources, the FBI issues approximately 30,000 National Security Letters every year. You can learn more about the ongoing controversy surrounding NSLs at the ACLU web site, and many others.

Aaanyway…please note that the story so far has dealt with SWIFT and Western Union and its parent, First Data Corporation.  The excerpt above from the NY Times story would appear to indicate they have information about additional financial data mining ops involving other companies and financial institutions.

…And by the way, does anyone else here remember the TIA data mining program and how Congress passed a law expressly prohibiting it?

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