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p2p news / p2pnet: That the Cheney /Bush administration has been pirating private citizen information to supposedly guard against Terrorism, the amorphous threat hoisted every time government agencies want to do something they shouldn't be doing, is by now a well publicized disgrace.
But, "relying on a presidential declaration of emergency," America has also been secretly, "tapping into a vast global database of confidential financial transactions for nearly five years, according to U.S. government and industry officials," says The Washington Post.
The story has current and former counterterrorism officials saying the program, "works in parallel with the previously reported surveillance of international telephone calls, faxes and e-mails by the National Security Agency, which has eavesdropped without warrants on more than 5,000 Americans suspected of terrorist links.
"Together with a hundredfold expansion of the FBI's use of 'national security letters' to obtain communications and banking records, the secret NSA and Treasury programs have built unprecedented government databases of private transactions, most of them involving people who prove irrelevant to terrorism investigators.
"Stuart Levey, undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in an interview last night that the newly disclosed program - the existence of which the government sought to conceal - has used the agency's powers of administrative subpoena to compel an international banking consortium to open its records," says The Washington Post. "The Brussels-based cooperative, known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, links about 7,800 banks and brokerages and handles billions of transactions a year."
The story says "terrorism investigators" have been trying to access the SWIFT' dbase since the 1990s, "but other government and industry authorities balked at the potential blow to confidence in the banking system."
