Justin Buist

I would like to add, in addition to my last post, that monitoring financial activity is probably the best thing the government can do to get a handle on terrorist organizations.

I’m also not to worried about getting court orders to retreive said data — provided that it was international. Perhaps I haven’t thought about the issue enough, but that is my stance for right now.

You see, here in America we don’t really have any privacy when it comes to our finances. That is, no privacy from the government. Every year we have to tell them how much money we made, where we got it from, and in the event that you want to write some of it off as a deduction what you spent it on.

So, privacy is already gone. I’m not happy about it, but the intrusion level is already so high that it doesn’t matter one whit to me if the Federal government knows that I sent $200 to some charity over in another country. If you want to talk about getting rid of income tax then I’m game.

That data, unlike phone call records, is probably going to net you a much higher return on finding actual terrorists. Of course, if you match that data with calling records (which I don’t like) you can increase the odds that you’re going to get a real terrorist hit when you investigate them.

Or, perhaps more importantly, when you fail to match financial support behind what you think is a terrorist organization you’ll know enough to leave them alone and go after the bigger fish in the pond.

You can’t do anything in this world without money.

It seems that all the Republicans are up in arms about the NYT story with regards to monitoring SWIFT for terrorist related activities.

Michelle Malkin has weighed in:

The New York Times (proudly publishing all the secrets unfit to spill since 9/11) and their reckless anonymous sources (come out, come out, you cowards) tipped off terrorists to America’s efforts to track their financial activities.

Guess what? It isn’t the first time blabbermouth journalists have jeopardized terror financing investigations since September 11, according to the government.

I guess if we don’t want the terrorists to know we’re tracking them financially then we shouldn’t tell them we have programs that:

• Targets all individuals and institutions linked to global terrorism.
• Allows the Treasury Department to freeze U.S. assets and block U.S. transactions of any person or institution associated with terrorists or terrorist organizations.
• Identifies charitable organizations that secretly funnel money to al-Qaeda.
• States the President’s intent to punish those financial institutions at home and abroad that continue to provide resources and/or services to terrorist organizations.

Now, that’s not what the NYT published. That’s just a subset of the fancy new stuff we were doing and was published by the Whitehouse on September 24, 2001!

Of course, the NYT did tipoff the terrorists that we were monitoring the SWIFT network. Oh, did you think SWIFT was some secret agency? Hell no! They’ve got a freaking website. They publish their own magazine!

Apparently anybody that knows anything about international banking also knows that all that data goes over the SWIFT network.

Further, SWIFT provides a handy little page about what they do to combat illegal activities. It’s pretty easy to find, because they’ve got this button icon right on their front page:

Behind that icon you’ll find this:

2. Cooperation – SWIFT has a history of cooperating in good faith with authorities such as central banks, treasury departments, law enforcement agencies and appropriate international organizations, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF*), in their efforts to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities.

The FATF is an international body, created by the G8, devoted to stopping money laundering and funding of terrorist groups!

So, the Whitehouse says we’re going to monitor finances to catch terrorists on September 24, 2001 and on top of that the financial institution responsible for international wire transfers puts right on their front page a link to something that says they cooperate with law enforcement agencies but the NYT is responsible for endangering the program.

Nothing like a good two minute hate to excite the party members I guess.