Well, the UK at least is sending white collar criminals to the U.S.

Also about the legality of it. I doubt it is legal from the viewpoint of Iran

My complaint is that all SWIFT’s records were copied to the CIA without an actual court order, undermining the idea that such requests should be subject to judicial oversight and should be limited in scope. This seems to me to violate the 1978 US banking privacy act and European rules on data protection, although Supreme Court cases imply that banking records do not have constitutional protection in the US. Perhaps an American court will rule that Bush’s all-purpose authorization to persue terrorists enables him to override the 1978 law. If, as SWIFT claims, it is impossible to hand over to the CIA only those records relating to the people they suspect of terrorist involvement, and they have to turn all the records over, then I should think it doubly necessary that the government obtain a warrant stating explicity whose records they intend to scrutinize. At present, I don’t see that there is any US law that would forbid the CIA from using SWIFT records in non-terrorist cases or even from using them to perform industrial espionage on foreign firms.

That is a matter of significant public interest and it should be a scandal.

If the CIA had obtained a secret court order from a real court with an actual judge, naming the people it was seeking records for, and then the NY Times had reported it, I would agree that the newspaper had behaved very questionably. As it stands, I am not aware of any statute limiting the use of SWIFT’s records, and the number of parties whose interests are affected is large and includes Europeans who enjoy stronger statutory protections than Americans. That’s a legitimate story to break, whether it harms US interests in fighting terrorism or not.

But what really scandalizes me is that European central bankers kept silent about a program that appears to at least heavily bend European banking privacy laws and was not even under American judicial review. American courts deserve some leeway in persuing terrorists. I agree that banking records should be subject to court-issued subpeonas, just as people’s homes are subject to court ordered searches. But granting American courts some leeway is very different from granting executive agencies leeway, especially considering the record the American executive has of late.

Citigroup is one of Enron’s main creditors, and Mr Rubin is reported to have asked Mr Fisher about the possibility of pressing bond-rating agencies not to downgrade their estimate of Enron bonds to avoid a crisis of confidence in the energy group.” But it is an ancillary point anyway so moving on…

With respect to the banking investigations, the responses are kind of contradictory. Some express ‘shock’ while also saying that the NYT couldn’t have done any harm because everyone knew the transactions were being tracked. It isn’t clear if you believe one or the other or both. (I certainly hope it isn’t both).

The idea that white collar criminals are a “core Bush constituency” and that Republicans have a vested interest in protecting money laundering and accounting fraud is ridiculous. It’s this kind of simplistic, knee-jerk nonsense that causes a lot of Americans to tune out European opinions.

As for SWIFT, the backlash so far has mainly been against the New York Times for printing a story about a program that even the Times has admitted is probably legal and has been effective. The incredible arrogance of the Times, which is essentially claiming that it should be the sole arbiter of whether classified information remains secret or not, has not gone over well with a lot of people. After 9/11, everyone, including the NY Times, advocated finding and shutting off the flow of money to terrorist groups but it is now undermining a program intended to do just that. The paper is under a lot of heat for this and deservedly so.

The volume of SWIFT transactions would prevent a “fishing expedition.” You would have to have a very good idea what you were looking for before you asked for it. For example, a taxpayer ID number, a bank account number, or some other unique identifier is all that would keep your database from burying you under unusable mounds of data. Once you have located a record, you can then trace it back to see who is interacting with your target. For example, if you send a wire transfer to a known Al Qaeda account, the message will also show the account it came from. With enough such links, you can get a pretty good idea of the funding of the operation. But again, you need to start with a known and identified account or user.

Second, I don’t know if you read the whole article, but the information was obtained under a subpoena. US judges do not issue these orders without probably cause to believe a crime has been committed. The prosecutor must convince the judge that the order does not interfere with the constitutional right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure (the evidence being sought is particularly described, known to be in the place to be searched, necessary to the investigation, etc.). Rooting around in someone’s filing cabinet in the hope that something incriminating will turn up is not allowed. The person or company is subject to the subpoena is compelled by law to furnish the documents or testimony required.

So here we have a program that was legal, effective, narrowly focused, and secret. Why did it have to get into the newspaper?

Thank you. I know very little about how money moves, I know nothing about being a terrorist but I have always sort of assumed that A) Electronic Money Transactions were being monitored by the the powers that be and B) The bad guys were aware of A.

Why is this news, let along controversial news?