milicorn

ruminations on international financing and whatever

Thursday, June 29, 2006

SWIFT data mining reported by UN in 2002
International clearance centers such as the SWIFT are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. reported in Third report of the Monitoring Group established pursuant to Security Council resolution 1363 (2001) here

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Swift data most ever possessed
SWIFT(Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) couldn't extract the bits of data U.S. terrorism analysts were looking for; instead, `We'll give you all the data,' OFAC was given access to a vast database of detailed records on billions of bank-to-bank transfers worldwide, the most expansive database on international financial transactions the U.S. has ever possessed. Each month the Treasury Department issues a new subpoena to SWIFT under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. They are general administrative subpoenas, which are basically permission from one part of the executive branch to another.
WP NYT CT here