Officials Defend Bank Data Tracking
WASHINGTON — In response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Treasury Department sought to enlist a reluctant ally. The world's banking industry long had been loath to give up data on its customers, so U.S. investigators issued a subpoena for just a narrow slice of information from a worldwide financial consortium.
The reply stunned Treasury officials.
The consortium couldn't extract the shards of data that U.S. terrorism analysts were looking for, so it offered something far more generous.
"They said, 'We'll give you all the data,' " Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said Friday during a news conference in which he defended the espionage program.
And just like that, intelligence teams that once had to scrape for scraps of data from individual banks were given keys to the international banking kingdom -- access to a vast database containing detailed records on billions of bank-to-bank money transfers around the world.
Disclosure of the arrangement by The Times and other media outlets prompted complaints from privacy advocates overseas and in the United States.
Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a member of the European Parliament, said the idea of U.S. intelligence agencies reviewing records on banking customers around the world "makes me uncomfortable
Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum, a San Diego research group, said the program was "just one piece of an emerging pattern" in which the U.S. government was pressuring corporations to give up data they were not willing to surrender before the Sept. 11 attacks.
"And once you have that," Dixon said during a radio interview, "that data can be kept forever and used for other purposes without oversight."
Administration officials spent much of Friday defending the operation as crucial to the war on terrorism.
In a speech in Chicago, Vice President Dick Cheney said that disclosure of the surveillance program would make it more difficult "to prevent future attacks against the American people." He said the program was "conducted in a way to guarantee and safeguard the civil liberties of the American people."
Stuart Levey, Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, who oversees the effort, said: "It has enabled us and our colleagues to identify terror suspects that we didn't know, as well as find addresses and other identifiers for those terrorists that we did know about."
