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31 Aug 07    Will US ‘Secrets’ Privilege Stop Suit on SWIFT Records?, NYT, Eric Lichtblau
23 Nov 06   Press Release on SWIFT case, EU
23 Nov 06   EU agency finds data transfers to U.S. by Swift illegal, IHT, Dan Bilefsky
23 Nov 06   Money firm breached EU data law, BBC NEWS
22 Nov 06   Opinion 10/2006 on the processing of personal data by SWIFT, EU
22.Juli 06   Datenschutz - ein vernachlässigtes Grundrecht, NZZ, Leitartikel
7 July 06   European Parliament Probes US Bank Data Tracking, IHT, K. Bennhold
7 July 06   CIA Monitors SWIFT & Endangers Small Business, Al Martin, comment
7 juil 06   Le mutisme du Conseil fédéral critiqué, AGEFI
7 juil 06   Le secret bancaire n'est pas un mythe, mais une réalité, AGEFI, R. Bleeker, EDITORIAL
7 juil 06   Le mythe du secret bancaire égratigné, AGEFI, Daniela Karst
7 juil 06   La Commission fédérale des banques a tu l'affaire Swift, Le Temps, W. Boder
6 July 06   No cover up on SWIFT bank scandal, Brussels promises, EUobserver.com, Andrew Rettman
6.Juli 06   Fast alle Schweizer Banken waren im Bild, Facts, mst
6.Juli 06   DER CIA IMMER TREU Dem US-Geheimdienst stehen Schweizer Türen schon lange offen, Facts
6.Juli 06   Betretenes Schweigen zur Bankgeheimnis-Verletzung, kleinreport.ch
5.Juli 06   «Wir haben absolut von nichts gewusst», Handels-Zeitung, Martin Spieler
3 July 06   Banks slammed for downplaying CIA probe, nzz.ch, Matthew Allen interviews Prof.Hans Geiger
3 July 06   Privacy in Europe is a casualty of America's terror war, Financial Times, Henry Farrell, comment
2.Juli 06   «Bankgeheimnis büsst Kraft ein», NZZ am Sonntag, D.P. Bernet interviewt Konrad Hummler
1 July 06    Outcry over America's tracking of international money transfers, The Economist
1.Juli 06   Die Schweiz verhält sich gegenüber den USA zu devot, Tages-Anzeiger, A. Bundi, Kommentar
1 July 06   When Do We Publish a Secret?, New York Times, Dean Baquet & Bill Keller
30 June 06   A Secret the Terrorists Already Knew, NYT, R.A.Clarke & R.W.Cressey
30 juin 06   Au courant depuis 2002, Le Monde, Jean-Pierre Stroobants
29.Juni 06   Unerhört, diese Signale, Weltwoche, H. Geiger & O. Wünsch
29.Juni 06   Wir Servilen, Weltwoche, Peter Bodenmann, Kommentar
29 June 06   An Alert Press, Washington Post, Editorial
28 June 06   Patriotism and the Press, NYT, Editorial
28.Juni 06   Brüssel will mehr sensible Daten, Handels-Zeitung,  J.J. Schraner
28.Juni 06   CIA Bank-Schnüffelei: Bundesrat seit 2002 informiert, nzz.ch
27.Juni 06   Saft- und kraftlose Schweizer Finanzwelt, NZZ, Kommentar
27.Juni 06   Keine Gefahr für das Schweizer Bankgeheimnis[?], NZZ, ti
27 juin 06   Une administration hors lois?, AGEFI, Richard Anderegg, commentaire
27 juin 06   La guerre contre le terrorisme suscite une nouvelle polémique, AGEFI, T.Verhoosel
27.Juni 06   Bankdaten: Transparenz gefordert, Tages-Anzeiger Online, Hans Geiger, Kommentar
27.Juni 06   CIA Schnüffelaktion: Politiker intervenieren, Tages-Anzeiger, Annetta Bundi
27 June 06   Belgian leader orders bank inquiry, International Herald Tribune, Dan Bilefsky
27 June 06   Rights unit challenges U.S. over bank data, International Herald Tribune, Dan Bilefsky
27 June 06   Pulling a Swift one? Bank information sent to U.S. authorities, Privacy International
25 June 06   Letter From Bill Keller on The Times's Banking Records Report, NYT
25 June 06   CIA has access to Swiss transactions, nzz.ch
25.Juni 06   Wo die Macht sitzt, Sonntags-Blick, Frank A.Meyer, Kommentar
25.Juni 06   Den Schutz der Privatsphäre verteidigen, Handels-Zeitung, Martin Spieler, Kommentar
25. Juni 06  Auch gegenüber den USA gilt das Bankgeheimnis, NZZ am Sonntag, Kommentar
25. Juni 06  Terrorgelder nicht auf Banken angewiesen, NZZ am Sonntag
25. Juni 06  CIA untergräbt Bankgeheimnis, NZZ am Sonntag
24 juin 06   SWIFT en un clin d'oeil, Secret bancaire menacé?, Le Temps, commentaire, Nicolas Pinguely
24 juin 06   Les Etats-Unis ont accès à une mine de données financières, Le Temps, A.Campiotti
24 June 06   US monitors global financial transfers, Financial Times, Krishna Guha
24 June 06   Bank Data, Terror and The Times, Following the Money, and the Rules, NYT, Editorial
24 June 06   Cheney Assails Press on Report on Bank Data, NYT, Sheryl G. Stolberg et al.
24 June 06   Defending Financial Searches, Washington Post, K. DeYoung, Bank Surveillance, Editorial
24 june 06   Choke on terror cash secret and Swift, AP, New Zealand Herald
24.Juni 06   Bedenkliche Willfährigkeit, Tages-Anzeiger, Stefan Eiselin, Kommentar
24 juin 06   Intolérable espionnage par l'administration américaine, AGEFI, Jan Marejko, commentaire
24 juin 06   Transactions espionnées: la banque nationale des Pays-Bas était au courant, AFP
24 juin 06   Espionnage de transactions financières: enquête ouverte en Belgique, AFX France
24 juin 06   Espionnage: la Banque centrale et des ministres belges savaient, AFX France
24. Juni 06  SWIFT: Finanz-Knoten, Berliner Zeitung, SWIFT AT A GLANCE, Miami Herald
24. Juni 06  Bush ließ Millionen von Konten ausspähen, Stuttgarter Zeitung, Leitartikel
24. Juni 06  Auswüchse des Anti-Terror-Kampfes, Was Bush für nötig hält, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Leitartikel
24. Juni 06  Jagd mit dem Schleppnetz, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Nicolas Richter
24 June 06   Bush under fire over secret money transfer monitoring, The Guardian, S. Goldenberg
24 June 06   Belgium's Verhofstadt Orders Investigation into US Money Tracking Program, WNC
24 giu 06   La Cia spia i conti bancari in tutto il mondo, Cos'è la Swift, Corriere della Sera, E.Caretto
24 June 06   Show: THE BIG STORY WITH JOHN GIBSON, Fox News Network
23 June 06   Did New York Times Compromise U.S. Security?, Fox News Network, A.Colmes et al.
23 June 06   Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror, NYT, Eric Lichtblau et al.
23 June 06   Treasury Tracks Financial Data In Secret Program, WSJ, Glenn R. Simpson
8.Juni 06   "Sklavischer Gehorsam", Der Bund

    Since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. Treasury Department has been secretly tracking suspected terrorist financing through a far-reaching program that gives it access to records from the network that handles nearly all international financial transfers.
    The information comes from a Belgian firm known by its acronym, Swift, which manages much of the world's financial-message traffic. Under the program, U.S. counter-terrorism analysts query Swift's vast database of billions of financial transactions for information on activity by suspected terrorists. The program operates under a series of broad U.S. subpoenas.
    U.S. officials say the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program has been highly successful both in leading to the apprehension of terrorism suspects and in thwarting terrorist operations. People familiar with the program said, for example, that it yielded useful information on the bombings last July 7 in London. The program "has helped to disrupt terrorist cells and operations and has helped save lives," Treasury said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.
    Still, disclosure of its existence may be controversial in Europe and other parts of the world and within the global banking industry, which has long worried about the privacy of transactions. U.S. officials said few American citizens would have financial data that fall under the program, because they are unlikely to engage in international money transfers.
    Stuart Levey, Treasury's top counter-terrorism official, said the program was initiated after department lawyers determined they had the legal authority to subpoena Swift, which keeps its data in the U.S. To his knowledge, Mr. Levey said, such broad subpoenas of Swift data had not been attempted previously.
    He said the subpoenas are based on a longstanding U.S. law dealing with economic sanctions, known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Passed in 1977, it allows the president to impose economic sanctions when dealing with a national-security threat. The law has been used, among other things, to impose sanctions on rogue states.
    The program is known to officials of the world's leading central banks, as well as key U.S. allies in the war on terror, with which the U.S. has shared data. Its existence also is known to Swift's board, which consists of representatives of the organization's member banks.
    While U.S. officials had never discussed the tracking program publicly until yesterday, they have repeatedly discussed in broad terms their efforts to engage in surveillance of cross-border financial activity around the world and have widely publicized the fruits of such surveillance in efforts to blacklist corrupt financial institutions.
    In a statement, Swift said, "In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, Swift responded to compulsory subpoenas for limited sets of data. Our fundamental principle has been to preserve the confidentiality of our users' data while complying with the lawful obligations in countries where we operate....Through this process, Swift received significant protections and assurances as to the purpose, confidentiality, oversight and control of the limited sets of data produced under the subpoenas." The government has a similar program through which it accesses data from Western Union, The Wall Street Journal reported last year.
    Formed in 1973 by international banks, Swift is an industry cooperative that acts as an electronic gatekeeper for most of the world's major banks, brokerages, and investment managers to transmit funds across borders. Swift doesn't handle any funds, but processes some 11 million sets of transfer instructions and confirmations daily -- more than 2.5 billion a year.
    Through Swift, banks and brokerages relay information to each other about financial transfers through a series of standardized forms that contain large amounts of information, including the identities of sender and recipients, the amount being transferred, the account numbers used and intermediate banks. These forms are transmitted through a secure computer network. The actual funds or securities are transferred later by banks or clearing and settlement companies.
    Swift's board of directors is chosen by member banks; its legal regulator is the National Bank of Belgium. Since 1998, it also has been supervised by the world's major central banks, including the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan. Formally called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, Swift handles the vast bulk of world-wide cross-border wire traffic.
    Swift's headquarters is a tightly guarded campus with long, well-manicured lawns in La Hulpe, a suburb of Brussels, the Belgian capital and headquarters of the European Union. The company is run by an American, Leonard Schrank, whose office is adorned with photos from a management seminar Swift held at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
    Last night, in a statement, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow called the program an "essential tool" for fighting terror and said it had effective oversight and safeguards. "It is not 'data mining,' or trolling through the private financial records of Americans," he said. "It is not a 'fishing expedition,' but rather a sharp harpoon aimed at the heart of terrorist activity."
    Mr. Levey said safeguards include regular outside audits. Intelligence analysts are allowed to search data only for specific individuals or groups suspected of terrorist involvement, he said, and the data isn't subjected to controversial data-mining techniques such as pattern-seeking algorithms. In addition to the probe of the London bombings, the data helped lead investigators to "a key facilitator of terrorism in Iraq," Mr. Levey said.
    U.S. officials agreed to discuss the program after concluding that knowledge of its existence was emerging and public disclosure was inevitable. Aspects of it have recently been declassified. Mr. Snow called the disclosure "regrettable." Mr. Levey said he fears that "sophisticated terrorists will now stop using the system in ways we have access to, or will take extensive precautions to hide their identities, and that is really a loss."
    For their part, American banks are more accustomed to providing information to government agencies than are some of their foreign counterparts. Under a series of U.S. laws, domestic banks are required to turn over large amounts of data to the government to fight money laundering and terrorism.

Write to Glenn R. Simpson at glenn.simpson@wsj.com

WASHINGTON, June 22 — Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.

Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the 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, the officials said.

The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview on Thursday.

The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.

The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.

That access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues.

"The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting, troubling," said one former senior counterterrorism official who considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the official added, "the potential for abuse is enormous."

The program is separate from the National Security Agency's efforts to eavesdrop without warrants and collect domestic phone records, operations that have provoked fierce public debate and spurred lawsuits against the government and telecommunications companies.

But all the programs grew out of the Bush administration's desire to exploit technological tools to prevent another terrorist strike, and all reflect attempts to break down longstanding legal or institutional barriers to the government's access to private information about Americans and others inside the United States.

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 A.T.M. transactions, credit card purchases and Western Union wire payments, the officials said.

Nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives discussed aspects of the Swift operation with The New York Times on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. Some of those officials expressed reservations about the program, saying that what they viewed as an urgent, temporary measure had become permanent nearly five years later without specific Congressional approval or formal authorization.

Data from the Brussels-based banking consortium, formally known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, has allowed officials from the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies to examine "tens of thousands" of financial transactions, Mr. Levey said.

While many of those transactions have occurred entirely on foreign soil, officials have also been keenly interested in international transfers of money by individuals, businesses, charities and other groups under suspicion inside the United States, officials said. A small fraction of Swift's records involve transactions entirely within this country, but Treasury officials said they were uncertain whether any had been examined.

Swift executives have been uneasy at times about their secret role, the government and industry officials said. By 2003, the executives told American officials they were considering pulling out of the arrangement, which began as an emergency response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said. Worried about potential legal liability, the Swift executives agreed to continue providing the data only after top officials, including Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, intervened. At that time, new controls were introduced.

Among the safeguards, government officials said, is an outside auditing firm that verifies that the data searches are based on intelligence leads about suspected terrorists. "We are not on a fishing expedition," Mr. Levey said. "We're not just turning on a vacuum cleaner and sucking in all the information that we can."

Swift and Treasury officials said they were aware of no abuses. But Mr. Levey, the Treasury official, said one person had been removed from the operation for conducting a search considered inappropriate.

Treasury officials said Swift was exempt from American laws restricting government access to private financial records because the cooperative was considered a messaging service, not a bank or financial institution.

But at the outset of the operation, Treasury and Justice Department lawyers debated whether the program had to comply with such laws before concluding that it did not, people with knowledge of the debate said. Several outside banking experts, however, say that financial privacy laws are murky and sometimes contradictory and that the program raises difficult legal and public policy questions.

The Bush administration has made no secret of its campaign to disrupt terrorist financing, and President Bush, Treasury officials and others have spoken publicly about those efforts. Administration officials, however, asked The New York Times not to publish this article, saying that disclosure of the Swift program could jeopardize its effectiveness. They also enlisted several current and former officials, both Democrat and Republican, to vouch for its value.

Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, said: "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Mr. Levey agreed to discuss the classified operation after the Times editors told him of the newspaper's decision.

On Thursday evening, Dana Perino, deputy White House press secretary, said: "Since immediately following 9/11, the American government has taken every legal measure to prevent another attack on our country. One of the most important tools in the fight against terror is our ability to choke off funds for the terrorists."

She added: "We know the terrorists pay attention to our strategy to fight them, and now have another piece of the puzzle of how we are fighting them. We also know they adapt their methods, which increases the challenge to our intelligence and law enforcement officials."

Referring to the disclosure by The New York Times last December of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program, she said, "The president is concerned that once again The New York Times has chosen to expose a classified program that is working to protect our citizens."

Swift declined to discuss details of the program but defended its role in written responses to questions. "Swift has fully complied with all applicable laws," the consortium said. The organization said it insisted that the data be used only for terrorism investigations and had narrowed the scope of the information provided to American officials over time.

A Crucial Gatekeeper

Swift's database provides a rich hunting ground for government investigators. Swift is a crucial gatekeeper, providing electronic instructions on how to transfer money among 7,800 financial institutions worldwide. The cooperative is owned by more than 2,200 organizations, and virtually every major commercial bank, as well as brokerage houses, fund managers and stock exchanges, uses its services. Swift routes more than 11 million transactions each day, most of them across borders.

The cooperative's message traffic allows investigators, for example, to track money from the Saudi bank account of a suspected terrorist to a mosque in New York. Starting with tips from intelligence reports about specific targets, agents search the database in what one official described as a "24-7" operation. Customers' names, bank account numbers and other identifying information can be retrieved, the officials said.

The data does not allow the government to track routine financial activity, like A.T.M. withdrawals, confined to this country, or to see bank balances, Treasury officials said. And the information is not provided in real time — Swift generally turns it over several weeks later. Because of privacy concerns and the potential for abuse, the government sought the data only for terrorism investigations and prohibited its use for tax fraud, drug trafficking or other inquiries, the officials said.

The Treasury Department was charged by President Bush, in a September 2001 executive order, with taking the lead role in efforts to disrupt terrorist financing. Mr. Bush has been briefed on the program and Vice President Dick Cheney has attended C.I.A. demonstrations, the officials said. The National Security Agency has provided some technical assistance.

While the banking program is a closely held secret, administration officials have held classified briefings for some members of Congress and the Sept. 11 commission, the officials said. More lawmakers were briefed in recent weeks, after the administration learned The Times was making inquiries for this article.

Swift's 25-member board of directors, made up of representatives from financial institutions around the world, was previously told of the program. The Group of 10's central banks, in major industrialized countries, which oversee Swift, were also informed. It is not clear if other network participants know that American intelligence officials can examine their message traffic.

Because Swift is based overseas and has offices in the United States, it is governed by European and American laws. Several international regulations and policies impose privacy restrictions on companies that are generally regarded as more stringent than those in this country. United States law establishes some protections for the privacy of Americans' financial data, but they are not ironclad. A 1978 measure, the Right to Financial Privacy Act, has a limited scope and a number of exceptions, and its role in national security cases remains largely untested.

Several people familiar with the Swift program said they believed that they were exploiting a "gray area" in the law and that a case could be made for restricting the government's access to the records on Fourth Amendment and statutory grounds. They also worried about the impact on Swift if the program were disclosed.

"There was always concern about this program," a former official said.

One person involved in the Swift program estimated that analysts had reviewed international transfers involving "many thousands" of people or groups in the United States. Two other officials placed the figure in the thousands. Mr. Levey said he could not estimate the number.

The Swift data has provided clues to money trails and ties between possible terrorists and groups financing them, the officials said. In some instances, they said, the program has pointed them to new suspects, while in others it has buttressed cases already under investigation.

Among the successes was the capture of a Qaeda operative, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort, several officials said. The Swift data identified a previously unknown figure in Southeast Asia who had financial dealings with a person suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda; that link helped locate Hambali in Thailand in 2003, they said.

In the United States, the program has provided financial data in investigations into possible domestic terrorist cells as well as inquiries of Islamic charities with suspected of having links to extremists, the officials said.

The data also helped identify a Brooklyn man who was convicted on terrorism-related charges last year, the officials said. The man, Uzair Paracha, who worked at a New York import business, aided a Qaeda operative in Pakistan by agreeing to launder $200,000 through a Karachi bank, prosecutors said.

In terrorism prosecutions, intelligence officials have been careful to "sanitize," or hide the origins of evidence collected through the program to keep it secret, officials said.

The Bush administration has pursued steps that may provide some enhanced legal standing for the Swift program. In late 2004, Congress authorized the Treasury Department to develop regulations requiring American banks to turn over records of international wire transfers. Officials say a preliminary version of those rules may be ready soon. One official described the regulations as an attempt to "formalize" access to the kind of information secretly provided by Swift, though other officials said the initiative was unrelated to the program.

The Scramble for New Tools

Like other counterterrorism measures carried out by the Bush administration, the Swift program began in the hectic days after the Sept. 11 attacks, as officials scrambled to identify new tools to head off further strikes.

One priority was to cut off the flow of money to Al Qaeda. The 9/11 hijackers had helped finance their plot by moving money through banks. Nine of the hijackers, for instance, funneled money from Europe and the Middle East to SunTrust bank accounts in Florida. Some of the $130,000 they received was wired by people overseas with known links to Al Qaeda.

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 F.B.I. 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 F.B.I. 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 F.B.I. 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 F.B.I. 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.

The idea for the Swift program, several officials recalled, grew out of a suggestion by a Wall Street executive, who told a senior Bush administration official about Swift's database. Few government officials knew much about the consortium, which is led by a Brooklyn native, Leonard H. Schrank, but they quickly discovered it offered unparalleled access to international transactions. Swift, a former government official said, was "the mother lode, the Rosetta stone" for financial data.

Intelligence officials were so eager to use the Swift data that they discussed having the C.I.A. covertly gain access to the system, several officials involved in the talks said. But Treasury officials resisted, the officials said, and favored going to Swift directly.

At the same time, lawyers in the Treasury Department and the Justice Department were considering possible legal obstacles to the arrangement, the officials said.

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that Americans had no constitutional right to privacy for their records held by banks or other financial institutions. In response, Congress passed the Right to Financial Privacy Act two years later, restricting government access to Americans' banking records. In considering the Swift program, some government lawyers were particularly concerned about whether the law prohibited officials from gaining access to records without a warrant or subpoena based on some level of suspicion about each target.

For many years, law enforcement officials have relied on grand-jury subpoenas or court-approved warrants for such financial data. Since 9/11, the F.B.I. has turned more frequently to an administrative subpoena, known as a national security letter, to demand such records.

After an initial debate, Treasury Department lawyers, consulting with the Justice Department, concluded that the privacy laws applied to banks, not to a banking cooperative like Swift. They also said the law protected individual customers and small companies, not the major institutions that route money through Swift on behalf of their customers.

Other state, federal and international regulations place different and sometimes conflicting restrictions on the government's access to financial records. Some put greater burdens on the company disclosing the information than on the government officials demanding it.

Among their considerations, American officials saw Swift as a willing partner in the operation. But Swift said its participation was never voluntary. "Swift has made clear that it could provide data only in response to a valid subpoena," according to its written statement.

Indeed, the cooperative's executives voiced early concerns about legal and corporate liability, officials said, and the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control began issuing broad subpoenas for the cooperative's records related to terrorism. One official said the subpoenas were intended to give Swift some legal protection.

Underlying the government's legal analysis was the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Mr. Bush invoked after the 9/11 attacks. The law gives the president what legal experts say is broad authority to "investigate, regulate or prohibit" foreign transactions in responding to "an unusual and extraordinary threat."

But L. Richard Fischer, a Washington lawyer who wrote a book on banking privacy and is regarded as a leading expert in the field, said he was troubled that the Treasury Department would use broad subpoenas to demand large volumes of financial records for analysis. Such a program, he said, appears to do an end run around bank-privacy laws that generally require the government to show that the records of a particular person or group are relevant to an investigation.

"There has to be some due process," Mr. Fischer said. "At an absolute minimum, it strikes me as inappropriate."

Several former officials said they had lingering concerns about the legal underpinnings of the Swift operation. The program "arguably complies with the letter of the law, if not the spirit," one official said.

Another official said: "This was creative stuff. Nothing was clear cut, because we had never gone after information this way before."

Treasury officials said they considered the government's authority to subpoena the Swift records to be clear. "People do not have a privacy interest in their international wire transactions," Mr. Levey, the Treasury under secretary, said.

Tighter Controls Sought

Within weeks of 9/11, Swift began turning over records that allowed American analysts to look for evidence of terrorist financing. Initially, there appear to have been few formal limits on the searches.

"At first, they got everything — the entire Swift database," one person close to the operation said.

Intelligence officials paid particular attention to transfers to or from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates because most of the 9/11 hijackers were from those countries.

The volume of data, particularly at the outset, was often overwhelming, officials said. "We were turning on every spigot we could find and seeing what water would come out," one former administration official said. "Sometimes there were hits, but a lot of times there weren't."

Officials realized the potential for abuse, and narrowed the program's targets and put in more safeguards. Among them were the auditing firm, an electronic record of every search and a requirement that analysts involved in the operation document the intelligence that justified each data search. Mr. Levey said the program was used only to examine records of individuals or entities, not for broader data searches.

Despite the controls, Swift executives became increasingly worried about their secret involvement with the American government, the officials said. By 2003, the cooperative's officials were discussing pulling out because of their concerns about legal and financial risks if the program were revealed, one government official said.

"How long can this go on?" a Swift executive asked, according to the official.

Even some American officials began to question the open-ended arrangement. "I thought there was a limited shelf life and that this was going to go away," the former senior official said.

In 2003, administration officials asked Swift executives and some board members to come to Washington. They met with Mr. Greenspan, Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, and Treasury officials, among others, in what one official described as "a full-court press." Aides to Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Mueller declined to comment on the meetings.

The executives agreed to continue supplying records after the Americans pledged to impose tighter controls. Swift representatives would be stationed alongside intelligence officials and could block any searches considered inappropriate, several officials said.

The procedural change provoked some opposition at the C.I.A. because "the agency was chomping at the bit to have unfettered access to the information," a senior counterterrorism official said. But the Treasury Department saw it as a necessary compromise, the official said, to "save the program."

Barclay Walsh contributed reporting for this article.

After the attacks on 9/11, when the terrorist threat seemed equally dangerous and amorphous, one of the few clear strategies for counterattack was to follow the money. Almost everyone, including this page, urged the Bush administration to be aggressive in shutting down the flow of cash to terrorist organizations, and to root out the people who were supplying it.

The administration went to work, and one very useful source of information turned out to be a banking cooperative known as Swift — Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. It routes about $6 trillion a day among 7,800 financial institutions worldwide. An article by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen in yesterday's Times — and similar stories in The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times — detailed how investigators have made use of Swift data to track potential terrorist financing. Government officials say the information has helped capture one important Al Qaeda operative abroad, and that it has assisted domestic investigations as well.

That sounds like good news. What's worrisome is a familiar refrain. Despite a compliant Congress, which was eager to give the administration all the investigative tools it requested, the White House has chosen to operate outside any real scrutiny, and not to seek explicit authorization for what has clearly become a permanent program.

In the heightened state of emergency after 9/11, the government began examining the Swift records with the help of general administrative subpoenas, which are basically permission from one part of the executive branch to another. Now it is nearly five years later, and nothing has changed. Investigators have examined the international money transfers of thousands of Americans, apparently without ever trying to get a court order or warrant to do the searches. And Congress, as usual, has never exercised any oversight.

A few members were briefed on the program, and a few more told about it once it became clear that newspapers were preparing an article. But the briefings tend to become a trap in which those who are informed about what is going on are required under security rules not to talk about what they know even after it becomes public. Armed with some knowledge, they become more impotent than when they were completely in the dark.

One danger of a never-ending government investigation into people's financial transactions is mission creep. A Treasury Department spokesman told The Times that the information mined from Swift — which includes millions of records — cannot be used for anything except terrorism searches. But there is little to guarantee that will continue to be the case.

Congress, which has given the administration many new powers to conduct terrorism investigations, needs to judge whether this was what it had in mind. The original Patriot Act made major changes in money-laundering laws that provided for the use of administrative subpoenas. But the Judiciary chairman, Arlen Specter, was quoted yesterday as questioning whether their use in the Swift investigation has been too broad. The committee has already scheduled an oversight hearing this month, at which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is slated to appear. The senators should take the opportunity to look deeper.

So far, the only check on the executive branch appears to have come from the Swift executives themselves, who grew increasingly concerned when what they envisioned to be a short-term program seemed on its way to becoming permanent. It was at their insistence that the controls the government now cites were put into place. An outside auditing firm is now used to verify that investigators have real intelligence leads behind their requests for information. That is all to the good; it is clear that when it comes to defending their customers, international banking executives are far more aggressive than, say, American telephone company executives.

When government agencies are involved in continuing investigations that might infringe on Americans' privacy, it is important that some outside entity is keeping track of what is going on. That principle is particularly true now, when the United States is trying to learn how to live in a perpetual war on terror.

Investigators will probably need to monitor the flow of money to and from suspected terrorists and listen in on their phone conversations for decades to come. No one wants that to stop, but if America is going to continue to be America, these efforts need to be done under a clear and coherent set of rules, with the oversight of Congress and the courts.
 
 

WASHINGTON, June 23 — Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday vigorously defended a secret program that examines banking records of Americans and others in a vast international database, and harshly criticized the news media for disclosing an operation he said was legal and "absolutely essential" to fighting terrorism.

"What I find most disturbing about these stories is the fact that some of the news media take it upon themselves to disclose vital national security programs, thereby making it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people," Mr. Cheney said, in impromptu remarks at a fund-raising luncheon for a Republican Congressional candidate in Chicago. "That offends me."

The financial tracking program was disclosed Thursday by The New York Times and other news organizations. American officials had expressed concerns that the Brussels banking consortium that provides access to the database might withdraw from the program if its role were disclosed, particularly in light of anti-American sentiment in some parts of Europe.

But the consortium, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, published a statement on its Web site on Friday, saying its executives "have done their utmost to get the right balance in fulfilling their obligations to the authorities in a manner protective of the interests of the company and its members."

A representative for the cooperative, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to talk about its internal discussions, said that he knew of no discussions about withdrawing, adding that the group was "very resolute" in its commitment to the financial tracking operation.

The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, has allowed counterterrorism authorities to gain access to millions of records of transactions routed through Swift from individual banks and financial institutions around the world. The data is obtained using broad administrative subpoenas, not court warrants.

Investigators have used the data to do "at least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of searches" of people and institutions suspected of having ties to terrorists, Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, told reporters at a briefing on Friday. Officials say the program has proven valuable in a number of foreign and domestic terrorism investigations, and led to the 2003 capture of the most wanted Qaeda fugitive in Southeast Asia, known as Hambali.

News accounts of the program appeared just as President Bush returned from a two-day trip to Europe, where he met in Vienna with leaders of the European Union. Neither that organization nor any of its member states commented Friday, but one advocate for civil liberties in London said the program could create new tensions in Europe just as Mr. Bush was trying to smooth trans-Atlantic relations.

"Our data has been effectively hijacked by the U.S. under cover of secret agreements and entirely undisclosed terms," said the civil liberties advocate, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, a London-based organization focused on the intrusion on privacy by governments and businesses. "There will be a snapping point, and this may be it."

Initial reaction from global banks was muted, with one executive saying that while the privacy of information was a contentious issue within the industry, the Swift operation had so far generated few complaints.

In Washington on Friday, privacy groups and civil liberties advocates were critical of the program, as were some Democrats and one prominent Republican on Capitol Hill.

The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony D. Romero, condemned the program, calling it "another example of the Bush administration's abuse of power."

Lauren Weinstein, the head of the California-based Privacy Forum, an online discussion group, raised concerns about lack of independent review of the operation. "Oversight is the difference between something being reasonable and something being abuse," he said.

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he had sent letters on Friday to both Treasury Secretary John W. Snow and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales on the issue. While he declined to release the letters, he said he was concerned about the legal authority for the operation.

Mr. Specter has been at odds with the administration over another previously secret counterterrorism operation, the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program. The senator said he was particularly troubled that the administration had expanded its Congressional briefings on the financial tracking program in recent weeks after having learned that The New York Times was making inquiries.

"Why does it take a newspaper investigation to get them to comply with the law?" the senator asked. "That's a big, important point."

In explaining the program, Mr. Levey, the Treasury under secretary who oversees the program, said in an interview earlier in the week that "people do not have a privacy interest in their international wire transactions." But Mr. Specter was skeptical.

"I'm not surprised that a Treasury official would take that position, but I'm not so sure he's right," the senator said. "I don't think it's an open-and-shut question."

Representative Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who has made privacy a signature issue, said, "I am very concerned that the Bush administration may be once again violating the constitutional rights of innocent Americans as part of another secret program created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks."

But Mr. Cheney was emphatic on Friday in arguing the program is necessary, and predicted that the Bush administration might be criticized over it in much the same way that critics have assailed the National Security Agency eavesdropping, which has been done without warrants.

"The fact of the matter is that these are good, solid, sound programs," the vice president said at the fund-raiser in Chicago for David McSweeney, a Republican who is running against Representative Melissa Bean, a freshman Democrat.

"They are conducted in accordance with the laws of the land," Mr. Cheney continued, adding, "They're carried out in a manner that is fully consistent with the constitutional authority of the president of the United States. They are absolutely essential in terms of protecting us against attacks."

Mr. Cheney's sentiments were echoed Friday by two other top administration officials, Treasury Secretary Snow and the White House press secretary, Tony Snow.

The two men, who are not related, defended the program in separate news conferences on Friday. The Treasury secretary called the operation "government at its best," and the press secretary derided criticism of it as "entirely abstract in nature."

The Treasury secretary called the program "an effective weapon, an effective weapon in the larger war on terror."

Administration officials spoke to various reporters about the financial tracking program Thursday night after The New York Times published an article about the program on its Web site. Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, has said the newspaper decided to publish the story because "we remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Swift has said that its role in the program was never voluntary, but that it was obligated to comply with a valid subpoena, and had worked to narrow the range of data it provided to American officials.

But the Treasury secretary, Mr. Snow, said Friday that after the Sept. 11 attacks, Treasury Department officials initially presented the cooperative with what he described as "really narrowly crafted subpoenas all tied to terrorism." Officials at Swift responded that that they did not have the ability to "extract the particular information from their broad database."

"So they said, 'We'll give you all the data,' " Secretary Snow said.

Craig S. Smith contributed reporting from Paris for this article, Eric Dash from New York and Laurie J. Flynn from San Francisco.

To the Editor:
    Re "Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror" (front page, June 23):
    The question is, What's more important, the Central Intelligence Agency's ability to track terrorist financing, or the "public interest" in these activities?
    Before deciding, one must consider that the C.I.A.'s strategy to "follow the money" has resulted in the exposure of several terrorist activities, and The New York Times's decision to print this article will likely decrease the effectiveness of the program.
    To be fair, any operation delving into private transactions (with or without legal warrants) may violate civil liberties if it isn't managed properly and/or doesn't receive appropriate oversight.
    I'm far more interested in eliminating terrorist threats to our security than learning about the details of C.I.A. operations, and trust the courts and Congress to opine on the legality of such operations.
    Although The Times had the constitutional right to print the article, it also had a responsibility to more carefully assess the effect such disclosures would have on national security, and not base a decision to print solely on the public's interest.

Salvatore J. Bommarito
New York, June 23, 2006
•

To the Editor:
    Thank you, New York Times. Thank you for publishing the Pentagon Papers, for your Watergate coverage, for your courage in shining a light into dark and secret places and revealing the frequently unpleasant truths.
    A paragraph in your article about the Bush administration's poking about in Americans' bank records says much: the programs "reflect attempts to break down longstanding legal or institutional barriers to the government's access to private information about Americans."
    How much of a stretch is it for the Internal Revenue Service to be enlisted to subject Americans to audits because of contributions to groups it considers hostile to the administration? Amnesty International? MoveOn.org? The American Civil Liberties Union?

Beatrice Williams-Rude
New York, June 23, 2006
•

To the Editor:
    I am disappointed by your decision to publish the article.
    Newspapers do have a duty to reveal possible abuses of power in the government, but they must weigh that duty with the obligation to avoid jeopardizing national security.
    In this case, the Swift program, which relies on data from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, seems to be legal, and the article itself reveals that there are several checks on the searches. Even so, publishing the article would be excusable if not for the fact that it now makes the program, which has been a success, worthless.
    When the National Security Agency's phone monitoring was revealed, the program could still continue, but in this case, terrorists now know to avoid Swift, and will certainly do so.
    I appreciate the difficulty of deciding whether to publish an article, but in this case, The Times made the wrong choice.

Coleman Glenn
Bryn Athyn, Pa., June 23, 2006
•

To the Editor:
    I write as a United States citizen who is working abroad.
    Regardless of which side of the political spectrum one is on, there has been an undeniable, fundamental and significant shift in the center of gravity regarding longstanding and long-treasured privacy-versus-security norms.
    The revelation of large-scale secret sifting of bank transactions is the latest example and most likely not the last.
    Right or wrong, the fact that so many of these programs have been carried out in secret, without sufficient Congressional or judicial oversight, means that the slow but steady erosion of constitutional principles of privacy and protection against unlawful search and seizure is taking place without any broad debate.
    If President Bush truly appreciated his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution to the same degree as his obligation to protect American citizens, he would respect the checks and balances in our system of three branches of government, as opposed to trampling on them.

Leonard Novick
Amsterdam, June 23, 2006
•

To the Editor:
    The Times blows the cover on a classified program used successfully to catch terrorists, and its executive editor justifies this by saying the existence of the program is "a matter of public interest."
    Isn't the point that the public's right to know must be balanced against protecting the public at a time of war?
    I'd rather know that the bad guys were being caught than having my "interest" in this story satisfied over this morning's cup of coffee.
    I think that your decision to publish this information was irresponsible, and puts us all at greater risk.

John A. Maher
Summit, N.J., June 23, 2006
•

To the Editor:
    Your decision to print this article is disturbing to me. Timing is the issue with me.
    We have troops in the field fighting every day. We have just recently seen the brutality of the enemy.
    The time to consider which programs are successful or not is after the troops come home, which in this case means a free Afghanistan and Iraq.
    Please consider the timing of your articles in matters of national security when troops are still on the ground.

Terri Wagner
Elberta, Ala., June 23, 2006

THE TREASURY Department's just-disclosed program of searching records of overseas bank transfers may provoke outraged comparisons to the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance and data-mining of telephone call records. At least if news reports and government statements concerning the revelations are correct, however, this program is far less troubling. As with all revelations concerning the secretive Bush administration, you have to worry about what you don't know. So far, however, it seems like exactly the sort of aggressive tactic the government should be taking in the war on terrorism.

For one thing, it appears to be legal. The government is receiving large volumes of data detailing financial transfers from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a Belgium-based consortium that acts as a kind of messenger service for banks around the world, electronically notifying banks of transactions other banks are attempting to complete. The government, if it develops suspicions about a person, can search the system for any transactions that person may have engaged in. While customer banking data are generally private under federal law, the statute does not appear to cover the society, which isn't a bank and doesn't have individual customers. What's more, a different law gives the president broad powers in a national emergency situation to investigate, or even prohibit, certain financial transactions.

It is also the sort of information the government should be examining in any effort to frustrate terrorist financing and develop leads about who is funding whom. While such data can certainly be misused, records of overseas financial transfers are less sensitive from a privacy point of view than, say, the contents of phone calls or e-mails. And some safeguards appear to be in place to make sure the information is not misused. The department receives the material under a subpoena, Treasury officials emphasized yesterday. SWIFT's representatives audit all searches, as does an outside auditing firm. Unlike a data-mining operation, where analysts try to identify high-risk individuals using patterns and trends embedded in huge data sets, analysts here are searching for transactions involving individuals about whom they already have suspicions.

Because the administration is so secretive, it is essential that Congress appropriately inform itself of the details and contours of the program. The administration only briefed the full intelligence committees recently, apparently after the program appeared likely to become public. These committees need to make sure that the legal basis for it is sound, as it appears; that the program is appropriately designed and tailored; that the internal controls are rigorous and the uses of the data are properly constrained. So far, however, there is little reason to think it poses a great civil liberties problem.

A secret program that allowed U.S. officials to examine hundreds of thousands of private banking records from around the world in search of terrorist ties has been "absolutely essential" to protecting the country from further attacks, Vice President Cheney said yesterday.

Outgoing Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said that the program, in effect since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is the thing "I'm proudest of" in his tenure and insisted that strong safeguards protect the privacy of individual Americans. "It's really government at its best," Snow said at a news conference. "It's responsible government. It's effective government."

The comments by Cheney, Snow and other senior Bush administration officials were made the day after news organizations exposed the surveillance effort, in which the Treasury Department has subpoenaed data from an international banking cooperative that serves as a messaging service for overseas monetary transfers.

The revelations -- which Cheney and other officials said undermined an important counterterrorism tool -- prompted renewed criticism from Democrats and civil liberties groups that the administration is operating outside legal and congressional controls.

"It would be very disturbing to me to find out that this program represents yet another unilateral action and further abuse of executive authority without proper safeguards and oversight," said Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.), the senior Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. Others described the program as an invasion of privacy and called for hearings on possible violations of domestic and international law.

But far from giving ground, the administration mounted a muscular defense of the program, dispatching its principal Treasury Department supervisor to explain how it works. The tactic was in sharp contrast to the administration's refusal to provide details about other secret programs that had been revealed earlier by news organizations, including the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretaps of overseas calls made by U.S. citizens and residents.

At the White House, press secretary Tony Snow acknowledged that the program relies on an expansive interpretation of Treasury's powers that is unusual. "Well, so was September 11," he said.

The program falls well within the president's executive authority, Tony Snow asserted, and President Bush did not need to seek congressional authorization, although Snow said legislative oversight committees "know all about it."

There was some disagreement yesterday, however, over who had been briefed on the program and when. The White House referred reporters to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), who said he had been informed about the secret effort four years ago, when he was named chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Treasury Department. "I think it is a tremendous tool," Bond said.

Although the chairmen and senior Democrats on the two intelligence committees apparently were also briefed when the program began, there have been changes in the intelligence panels' leadership since 2001. The full committees -- and the current chairmen and senior Democrats in some cases -- learned of the program in May, when CIA and Treasury Department officials offered new briefings after learning that the New York Times was preparing an article on it, a Treasury official said.

Some lawmakers on the several committees that oversee the Treasury Department appeared to have been left in the dark. "No one ever called us, no one ever asked us. Nothing," said a spokesman for Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (N.Y.), the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services subcommittee in charge of international monetary policy and technology.

U.S. counterterrorism officials obtained the financial records from an international banking cooperative called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. SWIFT, as it is known, is owned and controlled by nearly 8,000 commercial banks in more than 20 countries that use its services.

SWIFT is headquartered in Brussels, but much of its operations are based in the United States, where knowledge of the government's secret access to its data was not widespread. Of officials at three large U.S. banks who agreed to speak about the program, only one said his institution had knowledge of it before yesterday.

"People around here are fine with this," said the official at a major New York bank, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It was done right." Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey said yesterday that the central bank governors of major industrialized nations had also been briefed, although he did not say when that occurred.

In a lengthy news conference and in several television appearances, Levey described exposure of the program as "a great disappointment to me," saying the disclosures "fundamentally undermine and degrade an important source of information."

"The only beneficiaries of that are the terrorists," he said. "If people are sending money to help al-Qaeda, we want to know about it. The American people expect us to know about it."

SWIFT data "enabled us . . . to identify terror suspects that we didn't know, as well as to find addresses and other identifiers for those terrorists that we did know about. It provided key links in our investigations of al-Qaeda and other deadly terrorist groups," he said.

Levey declined to identify any terrorist apprehended as a result of the SWIFT data, but Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said the information had helped capture Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali, an Indonesian described by Bush as "one of the world's most lethal terrorists" after his 2004 arrest in connection with the Bali bombing that killed 202 people the previous year.

"It's provided information on domestic terror cells," Snow said. "It helped identify a Brooklyn man convicted on terrorism-related charges last year."

SWIFT's extensive U.S. operations enabled Treasury to issue what the organization called "compulsory" subpoenas in this country, officials said yesterday. But Levey insisted that stringent safeguards were put in place to protect banking privacy and to ensure that U.S. intelligence had access only to the records of persons whose possible terrorist connections it could prove.

"We started with really narrowly crafted subpoenas all tied to terrorism," Treasury Secretary Snow said. But because SWIFT "didn't have the ability to extract the particular information from their broad database . . . they said, 'We'll give you all the data.' " Once a suspect was identified, U.S. officials had to present SWIFT with evidence of terrorist connections -- in the form of a name on a watch list, or a classified cable -- and were allowed to access information tied only to that name.

SWIFT auditors and Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., an independent firm contracted by the U.S. government, supervised all the searches, Levey said. "The audit reports have been issued periodically since the beginning of the program, and they have found consistently that the government is not abusing this data, that we are using it for counterterrorism purposes.

"There was one instance noted at one point in an audit that there had been one search that was done that was, in our view, inappropriate. . . . The person who conducted that search is no longer allowed to work on this program. And no information from any search that's even been questioned has ever been disseminated," Levey said. When information appeared that indicated a non-terrorist crime, such as money laundering or drug trafficking, he said the source of the information was "sanitized" before it was passed to other law enforcement agencies.

SWIFT manages data from millions of wire transfers and other monetary transactions each day. "We've done a large number of searches" since the program began, Levey said. "I don't know the exact number but it's . . . at least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of searches."

Because SWIFT largely deals with financial data transfers across international borders, Levey said that U.S. transactions would be subject to surveillance only if they were to or from other countries.

A lawsuit filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Chicago accused SWIFT of violating the privacy rights of Americans by disclosing private financial information to the government, Bloomberg News reported. The plaintiff named in the suit, Ian Walker, was described as a D.C. resident, although no further information was made available. The suit seeks statutory, compensatory and punitive damages on behalf of every American who made a domestic or international financial transaction after Sept. 11, 2001.

The program was criticized yesterday by privacy advocates and civil liberties groups. Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, called it "contrary to the fundamental American value of privacy. . . . How many other secret spying programs has the Bush administration enacted without Congress, the courts or the public knowing?"

Bond dismissed any suggestion that many Americans are concerned that the administration is compromising their privacy. "They are not Big Brother techniques. They are permitted by law. And the people I serve are glad we are doing everything we can to make another 9/11 less likely," he said.

Staff writers Paul Blustein, Michael A. Fletcher, Dafna Linzer, Terence O'Hara and Jonathan Weisman contributed to this report.

 WHAT IT IS: Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Treasury Department obtained access to conduct searches in the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication database, also known as SWIFT.

WHAT IT DOES: SWIFT captures information on money moved in more than 200 countries.

WHAT IT DOESN'T DO: SWIFT generally doesn't detect private, individual transactions in the United States, such as withdrawals or deposits.

Tens of thousands of electronic searches have been conducted under a secret US programme to monitor global financial transfers for signs of terrorist activity, the official in charge of the programme has told the Financial Times.

Stuart Levey, the under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the US Treasury, said a "very small number" of these searches related to companies suspected of being fronts for terrorist organisations, but the vast majority related to individual terrorist suspects. He said it had been a "very, very powerful" tool in the struggle against terrorism.

The government yesterday confirmed the existence of the programme after it was disclosed by US newspapers. It said that since September 11 2001, the Treasury has probed suspect financial flows using the database maintained by Swift, a Belgium-based co-operative used by the world's big banks to route about Dollars 6,000bn a day in international financial transactions.

In an interview with the FT, Mr Levey said the US notified the central banks of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan about the programme. But he said the Treasury contacted only some of those countries' governments directly.

A spokesman for the European Commission said last night: "Officials are looking into this matter, but cannot make any comment at present."

The US Treasury also briefed "dozens" of members of Congress, but not all of them, Mr Levey added. He stressed that there were "very, very strong controls on this programme". He said: "We get a data set from Swift but our analysts cannot just look through that data - they have to type into a computer the targeted search they want to do."

This search request must include the name of the targeted person or entity and the reason for believing that person could be associated with terrorism. "There is a record kept of every single search," he said. "Swift itself has people inside our facility who can monitor these searches in real time, and if they have any questions they can stop a search instantly and ask these questions."

As a further safeguard, he said, the Treasury had appointed an independent auditor to examine the log of search requests. Mr Levey said the Treasury could not see the data unless it came up in response to a specific search. "Our most recent number is 0.13 per cent of the information that we have we can access."

According to the New York Times, some of these safeguards were introduced in 2003 after Swift threatened to pull out of the programme. Swift said it had "responded to compulsory subpoenas for limited sets of data". It added that it had "negotiated with the US Treasury over the scope and oversight of the subpoenas" and had received "significant protections and assurances".

In London, the Home Office said: "The UK is aware of arrangements between the US government and Swift and the UK strongly supports the US efforts to target, disrupt and cut off sources of funding for terrorism."

 Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the US Treasury Department and the CIA have been granted access to specific data on international financial transactions on the basis of broad confidential administrative subpoenas and without any legal controls.  More particularly, they have gained access to data on international transactions of the globally operating SWIFT [Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication] organization, the headquarters of which are based in Brussels.  Every day, SWIFT transmits some 11 million records of international payments among banks, stock exchanges, and other financial institutes. [passage omitted on disclosure in US media]

The disclosures on the data tracking program in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal raise many questions, especially in view of the lack of legal controls, which means that banking secrecy and citizens' privacy may be at stake.  According to sources of this newspaper, the experts of three European commissioners have met in an emergency meeting to prepare a comprehensive status report on the affair that will be submitted to the Commission by Monday [ 26 June].

Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the US Treasury Department and the CIA have been granted access to specific data on international financial transactions on the basis of broad confidential administrative subpoenas and without any legal control.

Although SWIFT's headquarters are based in Brussels, there were only unofficial rumors yesterday about possible persons who may have been aware of the data access granted to the Americans. Several sources confirmed that the National Bank of Belgium (NBB) and its Governor Guy Quaden have been aware of the program "for at least several months" -- the data tracking program has been in effect for almost five years.

SWIFT is said to have recently informed the NBB.  In late April, the NBB reportedly passed on the information to Finance Minister Reynders (MR [French-speaking Reform Movement]) via an informal and indirect channel.  The Finance Ministry said: "Formally speaking, we have not been informed." In addition, Justice Minister Laurette Onkelinx (PS [French-speaking Socialist Party]) is said to have been aware of these US practices.

In addition, some time ago, SWIFT also informed the largest banks.  The story has also been circulating within the Belgian financial community.  As a matter of fact, SWIFT's board of directors includes a few Belgians.

It is strange that Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt (VLD [Flemish Liberal Democrats]) "formally" stated that he had not heard of the issue until yesterday's reports in US media.  "Our country is cooperative in the fight against terrorism and will lend its full support at the multilateral and bilateral levels," Verhofstadt said.  Yet he added: "I assume that this is happening with due respect for fundamental freedoms and within the boundaries of legally existing restrictions.  However, it would be unacceptable if this were happening without any respect for fundamental freedoms and for the guarantees offered by the rule-of-law state.  I have ordered our services to investigate this issue."

Many Questions About Granting United States Access to Database

Is it necessary to grant the US authorities confidential access to the SWIFT database so as to track down murderous terrorists?  Or has Big Brother been brought into being? [passage omitted on US media reports]

The reports also stirred many questions in Belgium, where SWIFT's headquarters are based. SWIFT has a huge computer center in the United States, but would it be possible to gain access to all international transactions via this center alone?

The NBB is coordinating the supervision of the international SWIFT organization and sends reports to this effect to the other central banks.  Strictly speaking, it is not up to the NBB to act on the information it is receiving.  For instance, the NBB had no obligation whatsoever to make this information public.  It is up to SWIFT to decide this.

However, according to reliable sources, Finance Minister Reynders was informed via an informal channel "about one and a half month ago."

And will this affair not seriously taint the reputation of SWIFT, the backbone of which consists of maintaining all its activities strictly confidential?  "Time will tell," said SWIFT board member Pascal Deman.  "We have done what we deemed to be right, but I must admit that it was a very difficult balancing exercise between the fight against terrorism and data confidentiality."

 The Bush administration was forced yesterday for the second time in months to account for a controversial spying programme, defending its tracking of millions of financial transactions as an important tool in the war on terror.

The revelation that CIA agents and treasury officials had been secretly monitoring financial transactions routed through Swift, the Brussels-based banking cooperative, caused uproar. It followed intense controversy - and a number of law suits from civil liberty organisations - provoked by the disclosure in the New York Times last December that George Bush had instructed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and emails of Americans without court oversight.

Under the banking surveillance programme, disclosed on Thursday night on the websites of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, agents from the US treasury department and CIA gained access to a trove of international financial transactions.

Although the White House has often spoken of the importance of disrupting terrorist financial networks, it had not previously revealed its methods. But John Snow, the treasury secretary, said yesterday the administration had not intruded unduly on Americans' privacy. "It's entirely consistent with democratic values, with our best legal traditions," he told a press conference.

But such arguments carried little weight with Democrats and civil libertarians, who said the latest disclosure was further evidence of Mr Bush's abuse of executive powers as president. "Like the domestic surveillance program exposed last December, the Bush administration's efforts to tap into the financial records of thousands of Americans appear to rely on justifications concocted without regard to current law," said Ed Markey, a Massachusetts congressman, in a statement.

Swift, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, provides electronic instructions for money transfers among some 7,800 financial institutions - virtually every bank, brokerage house, and stock exchange. It routes more than 11m transactions each day. The New York Times and LA Times said they had been pressed by administration officials not to report on the existence of the programme.

 FRANKFURT (kdo). Der amerikanische Präsident George W. Bush ist wegen des Zugriffs auf Millionen von Bankkonten im Zusammenhang mit der Fahndung nach Terroristen in die Kritik geraten. Wie mehrere Medien in den USA gestern berichteten, hat sich die US-Regierung nach den Anschlägen vom 11. September 2001 Zugang zu der internationalen Datenbank Swift im belgischen La Hulpe verschafft. Swift soll den USA vertrauliche Daten von Bankkunden übermittelt haben. Über den Finanzknoten Swift laufen täglich mehr als elf Millionen Transaktionen im Wert von rund 4,9 Billionen Euro, die von rund 7800 Banken, Brokerhäusern, Aktienhändlern und anderen Finanzinstitutionen in 200 Ländern aufgegeben werden.

Nach Ansicht von Kritikern hat die US-Regierung die Privatsphäre von Unschuldigen missachtet. Schon im September 2005 war Bushs Regierung kritisiert worden, weil sie US-Geheimdiensten erlaubt hatte, ohne richterlichen Beschluss Telefongespräche ins Ausland abzuhören. Später wurde bekannt, dass die USA in einer geheimen Datenbank Angaben von Millionen von Telefonkunden speichern. Ob deutsche Banken von der Swift-Affäre betroffen sind, war nicht zu erfahren.

Hintergrund: Kontenüberwachung Seite 4

Auf der Suche nach den Geldquellen von Terroristen haben amerikanische Ermittler seit 2001 systematisch den internationalen Überweisungsverkehr kontrolliert. Dieser wird durch die „Swift“, eine Datenbank in Brüssel, abgewickelt, die täglich Informationen über etwa 12 Millionen Finanztransfers weiterleitet. Die US-Regierung verteidigt die Geheimaktion, bei der sie Swift zur Herausgabe der Daten gezwungen hat.

 Was gibt es sonst für Neuigkeiten? So oder ähnlich ist die Reaktion vieler, wenn sie hören, dass Amerikas Geheimdienste auf Weisung der Regierung Bush wieder einmal gegen geltendes Recht, internationale Gepflogenheiten und moralische Maßstäbe verstoßen haben. Diesmal geht es um das Abfischen von Daten zu internationalen Geldüberweisungen. Die New York Times berichtet, dass die CIA seit Jahren die Computer von Swift, eines in Belgien ansässigen Dienstleisters für die weltweite Finanzbranche, angezapft hat. Dies wurde nicht von US-Gerichten – ganz zu schweigen von solchen in Europa – genehmigt. Das Weiße Haus wollte es, weil es die CIA für nötig hielt.

Im „Kampf gegen den Terror“ hat sich die Regierung Bush längst von jenen Standards verabschiedet, die sie im Irak einzuführen vorgibt. Die Freiheitsrechte des Bürgers sind ihr keinen Pfifferling mehr wert. Wenn es der geheimdienstlich-politische Komplex für angebracht hält, werden Verdächtige verschleppt, gefoltert, und hin und wieder verschwinden sie einfach. Die Zahl jener Fälle, in denen US-Soldaten im Irak morden und nicht nur im Kampf töten, ist so groß geworden, dass man nicht mehr von bedauerlichen Einzelfällen sprechen kann.

Gewiss, die Welt steht einem Monster gegenüber: dem vorgeblich islamisch motivierten Terrorismus. Wer das Monster aber mit Mitteln jenseits der rechtsstaatlichen Ordnung bekämpft, nährt es weiter. Washington tut dies, ganz besonders im Irak. Seit Jahrzehnten heißt es, Grundlage des deutsch-amerikanischen Verhältnisses sei die gemeinsame Werteordnung. Manchmal scheint es so, als werde diese Gemeinsamkeit von der Regierung Bush „im Kampf gegen den Terror“ immer wieder mal aufgekündigt.
kk

 Bis zum 11. September 2001 jagte Amerika Terroristen präzise und gezielt, wie mit der Harpune. Kommandos der CIA streiften durch Afghanistan auf der Suche nach Osama bin Laden, die Hintermänner der Anschläge auf US-Botschaften wurden aufgespürt und vor ein US-Gericht gestellt. Nach dem Terror vom 11.9. aber befand die amerikanische Regierung, sie stehe einer solch riesigen Bedrohung gegenüber, dass die Harpune als Jadgwerkzeug nicht mehr ausreiche.

Seitdem wird mit dem Schleppnetz nach Terrorverdächtigen gefischt, möglichst viele sollen in den Maschen hängen bleiben. Die Regierung kann gar nicht mehr genug Informationen bekommen – sei es über Telefongespräche, Banküberweisungen oder Flugpassagierlisten.

So ist es wenig erstaunlich, dass die Terrorjäger auch eine der ergiebigsten Datenbanken der Welt abfischten: Die des Bankdienstleisters Swift mit Sitz in Belgien, wo Nachrichten über Geldströme aus aller Welt zusammenlaufen. Die Rolle der Swift ist es nicht, Geld zu verwalten, sondern die Kommunikation zwischen Banken zu gewährleisten. Wie Swift am Freitag bestätigte, habe es nur auf gezielte Anfragen des US-Finanzministeriums geantwortet und sich seinen gesetzlichen Pflichten zur Kooperation unterworfen. US-Finanzminister John Snow erklärte, die Regierung habe mit der Harpune gearbeitet und nur auf „das Herz terroristischer Aktivitäten gezielt“.

US-Medienberichte vom Freitag, die die Operation enthüllten, wecken allerdings Zweifel an dieser Darstellung. Der New York Times zufolge setzte sich die US-Regierung bewusst über das gesetzliche amerikanische Bankgeheimnis hinweg – mit dem Argument, Swift sei gar keine Bank. Dass der Sitz des Unternehmens in Belgien liegt, schützt ebenfalls nicht vor dem Zugriff durch die US-Regierung, weil Swift auch Büros in Amerika hat. Die gesamte Operation ähnelt eher einem Schleppnetz denn einem gezielten Harpunenschuss: Die Justiz blieb in dem gesamten Verfahren außen vor, Swift stellte die Anfragen der US-Regierung als Zwangsmaßnahme dar, die sich nicht auf Gerichtsbeschlüsse stützten, sondern auf breite Handlungsspielräume des US-Präsidenten im Kampf gegen den internationalen Terror.

Der Zugriff auf die Swift-Datenbank folgte demselben Muster wie eine – erst im Dezember 2005 enthüllte – Lauschaktion des US-Geheimdienstes NSA. Wie im Fall Swift war die Operation zu keinem Zeitpunkt von den Gerichten gebilligt worden. Die NSA sammelte auf Anweisung des Weißen Hauses Informationen über Tausende Telefonanschlüsse amerikanischer Bürger und berief sich auf die Erfordernisse der Terrorabwehr. In beiden Fällen sammelte der Staat die Daten, ohne dass gegen die Betroffenen auch nur der geringste Verdacht vorliegen musste. Erst nachdem der Lauschangriff der NSA bekannt wurde, verklagten zahlreiche Amerikaner Regierung und Telefongesellschaften.

Eine andere illegale Datensammelaktion der US-Regierung war den Betroffenen zumindest bekannt: die Weitergabe von Flugpassagierdaten aus Europa an die Amerikaner. Die USA und die EU hatten sich 2004 auf Drängen der US-Regierung darauf geeinigt, dass Informationen über alle Fluggäste, die in Amerika landen oder das Land überfliegen, den amerikanischen Behörden pauschal bekannt gegeben werden. Das umfasste nicht nur Namen und Adressen der Besucher, sondern zum Beispiel auch deren Kreditkartennummer oder E-Mail-Adresse. Der Europäische Gerichtshof erklärte dies im
Mai für rechtswidrig.

Trotzdem ist vielen Terrorabwehrmaßnahmen gemeinsam, dass die Exekutive äußerst breite Befugnisse in Anspruch nimmt, um in Datenbanken zu wildern oder gar Sanktionen gegen Personen zu verhängen, ohne dass die Justiz dies überprüfen oder gar verwerfen könnte. So verhängten die Vereinten Nationen nach dem 11. September Finanz-Sanktionen gegen eine Reihe von – im weitesten Sinne – terrorverdächtigen Personen oder Organisationen. Die Europäischen Union setzte dies um, woraufhin die Konten von Betroffenen auch in Europa eingefroren wurden, ohne dass die Terrorvorwürfe näher begründet wurden. Als schwedische Bürger und Organisationen dagegen klagten, erklärte ein EU-Gerichtin erster Instanz, der Beschluss der UN sei nicht anfechtbar.

Nicht alle Richter aber lassen das systematische Fischen nach Terrorverdächtigen mit dem Schleppnetz zu: Ende Mai setzte das Bundesverfassungsgericht in Karlsruhe der breit angelegten Rasterfahdung Grenzen und forderte dafür konkrete Verdachtsmomente gegen bestimmte Personengruppen. Mit anderen Worten: die Rückkehr zur Harpune.

Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) ist ein Knotenpunkt für internationale Geldtransaktionen. Die von der internationalen Finanzindustrie vor gut 30 Jahren eingerichtete Drehscheibe wickelt nach eigenen Angaben täglich zwölf Millionen Einzeltransaktionen im Wert von rund fünf Billionen Euro ab.

Teilnehmer: Angeschlossen an das System sind 7 800 Teilnehmer der Finanzbranche in über 200 Ländern der Welt. Dies sind beispielsweise Banken, Börsenhändler und Investmentmanager.

 LA HAYE, 24 juin 2006 (AFP) - La banque nationale des Pays-Bas (DNB) savait que le gouvernement américain espionne depuis près de cinq ans des transactions financières internationales passant par l'intermédiaire Swift, a indiqué la radio publique néerlandaise NOS samedi. Contactée par l'AFP, la DNB n'était pas joignable pour commenter cette information.

La DNB fait partie du conseil de surveillance de Swift, et l'essentiel de son rôle est de contrôler le suivi des normes de sécurité financières, indique l'ANP.

L'espionnage des transactions financières par Washington s'inscrit dans le cadre de sa lutte contre le terrorisme, à l'instar du programme d'écoutes controversé des citoyens américains. L'affaire a été révélée vendredi par la presse américaine qui s'inquiète de possibles atteintes à la vie privée.

Swift est une entreprise installée en Belgique qui joue un rôle d'intermédiaire pour la plupart des transactions financières mondiales. Swift (Society for Worlwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) ne gère pas les transferts, mais les informations sur ces transferts, pour le compte de 7.800 organismes financiers.

gdh/cm

DAL NOSTRO CORRISPONDENTE WASHINGTON - Dalle intercettazioni delle telecomunicazioni per mano della Nsa, il più segreto dei servizi di spionaggio Usa, alle intercettazioni delle transazioni finanziarie per mano della Cia, dell'Fbi, la polizia federale, e del ministero del Tesoro. Assieme, i tre più grandi giornali americani, il New York Times, il Wall Street Journal e il Los Angeles Times hanno ieri svelato che dal settembre 2001, ossia dalle stragi delle Torri gemelle a Manhattan, l'Amministrazione Bush non spia soltanto ciò che si dicono decine di migliaia di persone al telefono o su Internet in tutto il mondo.

Spia anche le loro operazioni finanziarie, monitorando la società di intermediazione bancaria Swift (Society for worldwide interbank financial telecommunications), con sede in Belgio. La Swift è il centro di smistamento di 7.800 istituti bancari di 200 Paesi, che da lì fanno passare oltre 6.000 miliardi di dollari al giorno. La ragione per cui il governo la controlla: scoprire chi aiuta Al Qaeda.

È un nuovo scandalo che conferisce un connotato da Grande Fratello al governo americano. Uno scandalo che, secondo il New York Times, il più documentato in merito, investe anche la Federal Reserve e le banche centrali degli altri Paesi del Club dei dieci, tra cui quella italiana. Riferisce il giornale che nel 2003, dopo avere collaborato con l'Amministrazione, la Swift manifestò il timore che lo spionaggio finanziario non fosse legale e che continuò a collaborare solo dopo precise rassicurazioni dell'allora governatore della Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan e dopo che le altre banche centrali furono messe al corrente di quanto  accadeva. Ieri la Swift ha reagito alle rivelazioni dei tre quotidiani, che potrebbero portare a imbarazzanti inchieste in America e in  Europa, dicendo di avere fornito i dati al governo «in seguito a valide ingiunzioni» e la Federal Reserve ha asserito che una ditta di consulenza verifica che vengano monitorate solo le transazioni su cui l'intelligence nutre sospetti fondati. Ma il New York Times sostiene che la Cia e l'Fbi non hanno mai chiesto mandati alla magistratura e cita un anonimo funzionario del Tesoro: «Il monitoraggio si presta a gravi abusi».

Il New York Times e il Los Angeles Times, ma non il Wall Street Journal, hanno aggiunto che l'Amministrazione tentò d'impedire loro di pubblicare la notizia, come aveva già fatto invano nello scandalo della Nsa (National security agency). Bill Keller, il direttore del foglio newyorchese, ha spiegato di avere esaminato «con serietà e con rispetto» la richiesta, ma di avere concluso che «lo straordinario accesso a un deposito tanto vasto di dati finanziari, per quanto sia attentamente mirato, è materia di pubblico interesse». La Casa Bianca lo ha accusato di semi-tradimento tramite il portavoce Dana Perino: «È essenziale bloccare i finanziamenti al terrorismo e questo è il metodo migliore. Rendendolo pubblico, abbiamo segnalato ai terroristi come li combattiamo. Il presidente è preoccupato perché il New York Times ha di nuovo deciso di denunciare un programma segreto destinato a proteggere i cittadini».

E ha sottolineato che grazie a esso furono arrestati alcuni leader di Al Qaeda, incluso Ridman Isamuddin Hambali, il mandante delle stragi di Bali del 2000.

Per limitare i danni dello scandalo, che ha suscitato le furenti denunce dei democratici, l'Amministrazione ha fatto scendere in campo il ministro della Giustizia, Albert Gonzales e quello del Tesoro John Snow. A riprova della gravità del pericolo terrorista, il primo ha annunciato l'arresto a Miami di sette giovani che volevano formare una Jihad Usa in appoggio ad Al Qaeda e far saltare la Sears Tower a Chicago. Il secondo ha ribadito che lo spionaggio finanziario è legale «in quanto il Congresso ha conferito poteri economici eccezionali al presidente Bush» ed è «interamente compatibile con la democrazia e con i nostri valori». La violazione del diritto alla riservatezza è però così eclatante e la Casa Bianca vi è così invischiata - il vicepresidente Cheney seguì di persona un test del programma - che questa linea di difesa potrebbe non reggere, come non sta reggendo quella sul campo d'internamento di Guantanamo.

    LA SOCIETÀ Swift è una società di intermediazione bancaria nata agli inizi degli Anni '70 con sede in Belgio.
    GLI UTENTI Sono 7.800 gli istituti di 200 Paesi che usano la società, tra cui banche, broker e gestori di investimenti. Ogni giorno nel consorzio passano 6 mila miliardi di dollari LA TECNICA La Swift offre ai suoi utenti una rete interbancaria e messaggi standardizzati, quindi elaborabili automaticamente, riguardanti le operazioni con l'estero.

Fox News Network    June 23, 2006, 21.30

    LOWRY: Welcome back to Hannity Colmes. I'm Rich Lowry in tonight for Sean. Today's New York Times front page story reported on a secret Bush administration program started after September 11 that allowed intelligence officials to gain access to thousands of financial records. The New York Times implied in the story that this is just another example of the administration being caught secretly spying on Americans, but now everyone is looking at the story that way.
    Joining us now is former CIA operative Wayne Simmons. Wayne, given that there's nothing the least bit illegal about this program, not even really arguably illegal, who benefits from its publication besides the terrorists?
    WAYNE SIMMONS, FORMER CIA OPERATIVE: Yes, Rich. Imagine that, something that is not illegal that is -- that is gleaning vast amounts of intel for the United States to protect the United States. And the only ones that benefit from -- from publishing this type of top secret, top secret intel is the enemy, is the enemy al Qaeda. They monitor everything. So now again, once again we have a top secret program, a legal top secret program being compromised by those inside of our intelligence agency somewhere committing treasonous crimes that are benefiting the agency. If the administration now does not finally take a very, very hard line and find out who's leaking this intel and either stand them in front of a firing squad or put them in prison for the rest of their lives, then you know what? Shame on them.
    LOWRY: OK, you don't have me on the firing squad, but I agree with you. This is a very serious matter. And let's address one of the arguments that people on the other side will say. They'll say, Oh, terrorists of course they know they're being tracked. And their financial tractions -- transactions are being sought after by a government. But I guarantee you that there are very few of any terrorists who were aware of the SWIFT program, that were aware that a financial transaction from Saudi Arabia to Sudan, say, could actually be tracked by the United States government, and now they know.
    SIMMONS: Rich, listen, I was involved in a SWIFT -- in SWIFT programs in tracking these 16 years ago in the beginning. And I can tell you unequivocally, every movement of virtually every bit of money that moves around the world every day, thousands and thousands and thousands of times, is -- has been tracked and is tracked. This is nothing that we haven't done before, and it benefits all of us. These guys are not as sophisticated as we might think about the financial institutions. This hurt us.
    COLMES: Wayne, let me get back to this firing squad? You what a line -- what do you want a lineup? The editor and publisher of the New York Times and shoot them to death?
    SIMMONS: Actually, I don't, but I think he needs to go to prison.
    COLMES: Wait. Wait a second. Don't we have, like, a due process in this country? Don't we have court systems? You've decided you want to send to prison a journalist who breaks a story about a question about whether it's legal?
    SIMMONS: Oh, Alan, excuse me. All of a sudden, here we go again. You give these people this -- this wonderful, magical title of being a journalist, so it gives this journalist somehow the authority to -- to divulge and...
    COLMES: Let me -- Wayne, let me get the other guest in here, Wayne. And unfortunately, because we were late getting on. James Bovard, the author of Attention Deficit Democracy. James, thank you for being with us.
    JAMES BOVARD, AUTHOR, ATTENTION DEFICIT DEMOCRACY : Thanks for having me on.
    COLMES: Is this treasonous? Do we know if laws were broken? Wasn't there the 1978 right to privacy, financial privacy act that restricted government access to Americans' financial records? Please respond to what Wayne said.
    BOVARD: Yes, it's news to me that the role of the media and in a free society is to supposed to be to cover up government crimes. You know, we still have no idea what the government has done here. The government's stories after every major surveillance expose, the government is change the story day after day, week after week. The -- this story is probably going to look a lot worse three or four days from now than it does now. And we have no idea what the government's doing. And this whole idea that the government's not breaking the law, I mean, from what the news accounts today, it sounds as if there were simply secret subpoenas of the caliber of sending a notice to Brussels and saying, Send us all the information on financial transactions by anybody named Ahmed. I mean, these are very broad. These are vacuum cleaners. And these are vacuum cleaners that have failed in the past because the government's swept up way too much information.
    COLMES: And last I checked, Wayne Simmons, we used warrants. We were told we were going to use warrants the last time, but turns out that they didn't. They weren't direct with us out in the NSA and what that was doing. Why should we believe them now that this is narrow and targeted? We've been down that road before and they weren't telling us the truth.
    SIMMONS: Alan, great question. Why should we believe the government? Because exactly what you and James and those like you claimed about the NSA terrorist eavesdropping before proved to be false. And that's what's going to happen.
    LOWRY: All right, guys. We've got to leave it right there. By the way, the Supreme Court has clearly held that these sort of records that are in the hands of a third party, there's no privacy right there.

    GIBSON: Resetting one of our big stories. Another classified national security program has been revealed yet again by The New York Times. The paper and several others published the workings of a secret program the Bush administration has been using since 2001 to monitor terrorist banking transactions. The White House asked the papers not to print the story but they did it anyway. Times reporter James Risen, who exposed the NSA program, has his name on the byline of this one too.
    Should reporters like him be able to get away with jeopardizing our national security? Let's ask Newsday columnist and FOX News contributor Ellis Henican. So Ellis, I know you will join with me and say enough is enough, time for some reporters to march off to the slam.
    ELLIS HENICAN, FOX NEWS ANALYST: I'm not so sure about that, John. Listen, government in an open society doesn't get to cover itself. Journalists are not in the business of just printing government press releases.
    GIBSON: Oh, stop. This is not what we're talking about.
    HENICAN: It's very simple, John.
    GIBSON: This is a secret program, legal, not illegal, anything the government was doing, it was just fine and legal.
    (CROSSTALK)
    GIBSON: It was secret because if we know it, the terrorists know it, then they'll stop using it, then we won't be able to catch it. Under what rationale would The New York Times possibly feel they were compelled to reveal this program?
    HENICAN: First of all, it's not just The New York Times. It's The L.A. Times and that great bastion of liberal journalism known as The Wall Street Journal. All of those papers...
    GIBSON: Well, The New York Times and The L.A. Times were asked specifically not to.
    HENICAN: All of those papers understand the role of the journalist.
    (CROSSTALK)
    GIBSON: Wait a minute, Ellis. The New York Times has a special role in this. Risen and Lichtblau did this before in the NSA thing.
    HENICAN: They're good reporters. Terrific investigative reporters. The job of government officials is to keep secrets. The job of journalists is to responsibly, to tell the public...
    GIBSON: They're not supposed to (inaudible), and I'll know you'll go along with it...
    HENICAN: .. what it needs to know.
    GIBSON: If the job of government is to keep secrets and it's illegal for government officials to reveal those secrets, let us call Risen and Lichtblau in, demand they tell us who told them, and if they don't, they can go sit in the jail for a while.
    HENICAN: And you know what? Let us hope, and I suspect it's true with those two fine journalists, they will go to the jail for the rest of their lives, if that's what it takes, to protect an anonymous source on an important story like this.
    GIBSON: Well, mission accomplished. They won't get any sources in there, will they?
    HENICAN: John, if the cops came and tried to drag you away, I hope you would maintain the same purity of standard as well.
    GIBSON: I can make you a promise. I'm not going to reveal...
    HENICAN: You'd fold in a second.
    GIBSON: ... a secret that protects us from terrorists. Not going to happen.
    HENICAN: John, you have spent enough time in this business to understand that oftentimes, you write things that the government officials (inaudible) don't want you to know.
    GIBSON: That's not what this is about!
    HENICAN: Oh, it's always about that.
    GIBSON: This isn't a cranky reporter offending some government official someplace.
    HENICAN: Some of the same principles at play in that.
    GIBSON: And it may be the same principle...
    HENICAN: Some principles at play.
    GIBSON: ... but in fact, it's not the same thing. There is a world of difference.
    HENICAN: So who do you think -- John, who do you think should decide? Government should decide what reporters write?
    GIBSON: I don't think The New York Times editor...
    HENICAN: I don't think so.
    GIBSON: ... should decide not to reveal something like that. It was their readers killed on 9/11.
    HENICAN: First of all, there is no evidence that this thing is killing anybody. It's a government program designed to track financial information. The terrorists are already smart enough not to be sending their financial information that way.
    GIBSON: Caught the 2002 bomber -- Bali bomber using this program.
    HENICAN: Listen, the truth of the matter is that government officials never, ever want reporters to write any kind of thing that reveals what a government is doing.
    GIBSON: You are making this a government official story. This is not. This is a New York Times story.
    HENICAN: No, it is in part. It's our money, it's our government.
    GIBSON: They're revealing secrets.
    HENICAN: Listen, you need to stop hyperventilating about this, John. The reality is...
    GIBSON: You need to get your feet on the ground, Ellis!
    HENICAN: The reality is, my friend, that journalists make independent, responsible judgments. The part that you're right about, incidentally, is that some government officials may well be at legal peril here, and they ought to leak very carefully in the future.
    GIBSON: Good.
    HENICAN: Very, very carefully.
    GIBSON: I hope they do. Ellis Henican, thanks. Have a good weekend, Ellis. Thanks a lot.
    HENICAN: Keep it going, buddy.
    GIBSON: So, are these media outlets undermining our national security, and if they are, what can we do about it legally? Joining me to help answer that question, FOX News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano.
    NAPOLITANO: You don't want to hear this.
    GIBSON: The author of the best-selling book The Constitution in Exile, a great read for Independence Day or any other day.
    NAPOLITANO: Ellis is right.
    GIBSON: No, he's not.
    NAPOLITANO: He is right on the law. Morally, perhaps The New York Times has an obligation to restrain itself. But under the law, only the leaker, the person who is subject to...
    GIBSON: I understand that.
    NAPOLITANO: ... the president's order.
    GIBSON: I understand that. But one of the ways the government can act to one, stop the leaker, and two, let the news organization know they're serious is call them into a grand jury and say, tell us who leaked.
    NAPOLITANO: Oh, but the government has done that. And the government may very well do that here.
    GIBSON: They didn't do it with Risen and Lichtblau in the NSA. Why not?
    NAPOLITANO: They haven't done it yet. In the Lewis Libby investigation, Judith Miller spent a long time in jail until her source decided that she didn't have to maintain the confidence. Putting reporters in jail for failing to reveal their sources may not be a wise thing to do politically, but it is lawful, after all other means of looking for the sources have been exhausted and been fruitless.
    GIBSON: Haven't caught the NSA leaker yet, and I suspect that this is the same leaker. This is somebody who -- the Treasury -- you know, Dick Cheney, September 17th, 2001, said we're going to do this. He said we're going to use the Treasury Department.
    NAPOLITANO: I read The New York Times article a couple of times. According to that article, they talked over 20 people in the government. So it is a number of leakers, either people who don't like George W. Bush or feel that this program was wrong. Now, you are right in this respect: The program is not illegal. The program is not even arguably illegal. There are questions about its constitutionality, but the government followed a statute.
    GIBSON: So why (inaudible) -- so what -- under what rationale does The New York Times have for revealing a secret program that is not illegal?
    NAPOLITANO: The Supreme Court has said many times that the media can report on anything that the media believes materially affects the public interest. That is almost anything. Anything that the media could argue the public would want to know about this, the media can print.
    GIBSON: But The New York Times didn't even argue that the public has a right to know this. Didn't even use that famous phrase.
    NAPOLITANO: Yeah. You know what? I think the best way to get The New York Times to publish something is to call them and ask them not to. That's what happened here, again.
    GIBSON: All right. Judge Andrew Napolitano. Judge, thank you very much.

My Word.
    Senator John Kerry's proposal for a troop withdrawal fell flat in the U.S. Senate, as you have no doubt heard. The senator proposed a deadline for withdrawing from Iraq July 1st, 2007. A year from now, essentially. The senator said that Bush's plan for Iraq was, quote, lie and die. He said his plan was tell the Iraqis they had to get it together in a year because we're going home. He said, we have accomplished what we needed to do in Iraq and that it's time to come home.
    He probably knew his fellow senators were not going to vote for his deadline, and he certainly knew President Bush wasn't going to pay any attention to it. You think maybe the senator is running for president again and he would like to enter 2008 saying quote, I had a plan; the president didn't listen to me? Well, he says a lot of things, doesn't he?
    Remember this one from the last election campaign? It was December 3rd, 2003, candidate Kerry speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations. He said the following. I fear that in the runup to the 2004 election, the administration -- that's George Bush -- is considering what is tantamount to a -- get this -- cut and run strategy.
    Could that be our Senator Kerry accusing Bush of cut and run? Yes. He continued.
    Their sudden embrace of accelerated Iraqification and American troop withdrawal dates without adequate stability is an invitation to fa