Not So SWIFT

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication is probably not thrilled to be showing up in newspaper articles. Financial institutions in Brussels are not known for enjoying the limelight. They didn’t have much choice, as they received seemingly legitimate subpoenas from the US Treasury Department, but they will now have to answer questions from their member institutions who will be very put out about this entire affair. The Wall Street Journal might be acceptable, but articles appearing in common general newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times [a California newspaper!] is really not how things are done.

[Links to the newspaper reports are at the bottom of the Wikipedia article.]

This is no surprise to al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is a Saudi millionaire who owned several international companies and started his extremist career moving money around to finance anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan. He is well versed in international money laundering, and is aware of the monitoring points.

There are banks like Clearstream Banking SA that seem to come up in international highjinks. Among Clearstream’s customers have been Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Crédit Lyonnais, Banco Ambrosiano, and Bahrain International Bank. Bahrain International Bank is suspected of being affiliated with bin Laden.

Of course they also have normal customers, like the Carlyle Group, so they can’t be called totally suspect.

The US government on multiple occasions has talked about tracing the financial transactions of terrorist groups, so they are obviously going to be working through clearing houses like SWIFT. That hasn’t been a secret before, and it isn’t a secret that they will continue to do so. They have prosecuted people for giving financial aid to terrorists, but never to al Qaeda. Most if not all of these prosecutions have dealt with Palestinian groups.

The problem is not what was done, but how much of it was done. Once again they have been hovering up data and expanding the hayloft. They seem to believe that having humongous amounts of data will somehow magically produce the answers, without considering how they are going to search that data.

I have no objection in principle to the government having data, but having just received a letter from the Veterans Administration, I have grave concerns about the government’s ability to protect that data. Every day, it seems, there is a new report of private data from government files being stolen or misplaced. They can’t possibly have enough people to process the data they have collected so we will find out at some point that they have out-sourced the process to a contractor, making it even less secure.

Even if you ignore the leaks they make for political reasons, the fact is these people don’t know what is important, and they can’t protect the information they have. They don’t bother to encrypt privacy information and they let people transfer all kind of sensitive information to laptops.

In Afghanistan reporters were buying intelligence information on “memory sticks” stolen from the American military. The information shouldn’t have been on the portable devices in the first place.

The real problem isn’t that the newspapers are reporting this stuff, it’s that the security in place makes it possible. This is just one of the many examples of the incompetence of this administration. Congress should stop asking for information from the White House and just hire a couple of reporters to get it for them.