Bank-data mining defended

WASHINGTON — In response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Treasury Department sought to enlist a reluctant ally. The world's banking industry long had been loath to give up data on customers, so U.S. investigators issued a subpoena for a narrow slice of information from a worldwide financial consortium.

The reply stunned Treasury officials.

The consortium couldn't extract the shards of data U.S. terrorism analysts were looking for, so it offered something more generous.

"They said, 'We'll give you all the data,' " Treasury Secretary John Snow said Friday during a news conference in which he defended the program.

And just like that, intelligence teams were given keys to the international banking kingdom, including billions of money transfers worldwide.

Disclosure of the arrangement has prompted complaints from privacy advocates. Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a member of the European Parliament, said the idea of U.S. intelligence agencies reviewing records on banking customers around the world "makes me uncomfortable. ... The Bush administration is turning into a nasty big brother."

Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum, a San Diego research group, said the program is "just one piece of an emerging pattern" in which the U.S. government is pressuring corporations to give up data they were not willing to surrender before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush administration officials spent much of Friday defending the operation as crucial to the war on terrorism.

In Chicago, Vice President Dick Cheney said disclosure of the surveillance program would make it "more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people." He said the program was "conducted in a way to guarantee and safeguard the civil liberties of the American people."

Stuart Levey, the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury Department who oversees the program, said, "It has enabled us and our colleagues to identify terror suspects that we didn't know, as well as find addresses and other identifiers for those terrorists that we did know about."

Levey said that "at least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of searches" have been conducted using the data from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT.

The cooperation from an industry known for zealously guarding customer confidentiality reflected how profoundly the Sept. 11 attacks changed corporate mind-sets.

Nearly five years after the attacks, the program continues, and each month the Treasury Department issues a new subpoena to SWIFT under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Snow said the program was the thing "I'm proudest of" during his tenure and insisted that strong safeguards protected the privacy of individual Americans. "It's responsible government. It's effective government," he said.

SWIFT is owned and controlled by the world's largest financial institutions, including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase Bank and Citigroup in the United States, and major European companies, including Deutsche Bank in Germany.

Material from The Washington Post is included in this report.