Treasury secretary defends records tracking

'Hundreds of thousands' of records
Snow insisted that the effort was not “data mining or trolling through the private financial records of Americans” nor “a fishing expedition.”

Asked how many transaction searches had been made, Stuart Levey, Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said there were “at least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.”

The consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton was retained to audit and review the U.S. activities in the program, Levey said. “They have found consistently the government is not abusing this data,” Levey said.

Under the program, officials said that the U.S. counterterrorism analysts could query Swift to look for information on activities by suspected terrorists as part of specific terrorism investigations. They would do so by plugging in a name or names, the official said.

Swift handles financial message traffic from 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries.

The service, which routes more than 11 million messages each day, mostly captures information on wire transfers and other methods of moving money in and out of the United States. It doesn’t execute these money transfers. The service generally doesn’t detect private, individual transactions in the United States, such as withdrawals from an ATM or bank deposits. It is aimed mostly at international transfers.

The existence of the program was first reported Thursday night on the Web sites of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal.

The decision to publish was “a tough call; it was not a decision made lightly,” said Doyle McManus, the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau chief.

Treasury Department officials spent 90 minutes Thursday meeting with the newspaper’s reporters, stressing the legality of the program and urging the paper to not publish a story on the program, McManus said in a telephone interview.

Bill Keller, The New York Times’ executive editor, said it considered the administration’s arguments but in the end decided to publish. “We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use it may be, is a matter of public interest.”

Dean Baquet, editor of the Los Angeles 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.”

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