Dean Baquet, editor of The Times, said: "We weighed the government's arguments carefully, but in the end we determined that it was in the public interest to publish information about the extraordinary reach of this program. It is part of the continuing national debate over the aggressive measures employed by the government."
Under the program, Treasury issues a new subpoena once a month, and SWIFT turns over huge amounts of electronic financial data, according to Stuart Levey, the department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. The administrative subpoenas are issued under authority granted in the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The SWIFT information is added to a massive database that officials have been constructing since shortly after Sept. 11. Levey noted that SWIFT did not have the ability to search its own records. "We can, because we built the capability to do that," he said.
Treasury shares the data with the CIA, the FBI and analysts from other agencies, who can run queries on specific individuals and accounts believed to have terrorist connections, Levey said Thursday in an interview with The Times.
Levey said that "tens of thousands" of searches of the database have been done over the last five years.
The program was initially a closely guarded secret, but it has recently become known to a wider circle of government officials, former officials, banking executives and outside experts.
Current and former U.S. officials said the effort has been only marginally successful against Al Qaeda, which long ago began transferring money through other means, including the highly informal banking system common in Islamic countries.
The value of the program, Levey and others said, has been in tracking lower- and mid-level terrorist operatives and financiers who believe they have not been detected, and militant groups, such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that also operate political and social welfare organizations.
*
It's no secret that the Treasury Department tries to track terrorist financing, or that those efforts ramped up significantly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But the SWIFT program goes far beyond what has been publicly disclosed about that effort in terms of the amount of financial data that U.S. intelligence agencies can access.
