The Bush Administration: Western Union's Best Friend
By KM Das
In early February, I was saddened to hear that without any fanfare Western Union had sent its last telegraph. Although I was aware of the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance program at the time, I did not make the connection between the two news items at the time. With the revelation this past Thursday that the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (“SWIFT”) has been giving the Treasury Department all of its data on international wire transfer since soon after September 11, 2001, however, its hard to miss the connection. The Bush administration wants you to go back to sending telegraphs and wiring money through Western Union. It’s certainly no less credible an explanation than the explanation that this program, along with the NSA’s warrantless surveillance and telecommunications companies turning over their call data for data mining purposes, is meant to make us safer.
Soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Treasury Department subpoenaed SWIFT, a cooperative owned by the financial industry and headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, to get specific information on money transferred through SWIFT. In response, because it could not carve out the information the Treasury Department sought, SWIFT agreed to turn over all of its data. Considering that the network handles nine million transactions with a value of about $6 trillion a day, that’s a lot of data. The CIA has been running the program that obtains financial data using administrative subpoenas and not court warrants.
Now some of us, including yours truly, who have transferred money internationally since September 11, may foolishly believe that having this much data turned over to the CIA and the Treasury Department may be cause for concern. And some of us who have been following the news about the NSA’s data mining efforts might be so crazy as to believe that it would be incredibly tempting to apply data mining techniques to this data. We may even count amongst us Representative Edward J. Markey, co-chairman of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, who said on Friday, June 23: “Like the domestic surveillance program exposed last December, the Bush administration’s efforts to tap into the financial records of thousands of Americans appear to rely on justifications concocted without regard to current law.” You, like Representative Barney Frank, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, might be “deeply concerned” about your privacy. Fortunately, however, we have assurances from the Bush administration that nothing could be further from the truth.
Treasury Secretary John Snow explained that getting access to all of SWIFT’s data was not “data mining or trolling through the private financial records of Americans,” and that it was not “a fishing expedition.” In fact, the Treasury Department’s program is “entirely consistent with democratic values, with our best legal traditions.” As he did after the New York Times broke the news of the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance program, Vice President Cheney clarified that the news media revealing the existence of this program makes it “more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people.” He also explained that the program “was conducted in a way to guarantee and safeguard the civil liberties of the American people.” One suspects that subpoenas and grand jury indictments of the reporters who broke the story of the Treasury Department program will follow soon.
I will be sleeping a lot better knowing that the federal government has access to my financial transactions and my calling records for my own safety. However, if you are concerned about the privacy implications of this latest revelation, I suggest you start lobbying Western Union to bring back telegraphs and money transferred by stagecoach.