[Infowarrior] - Damage Study Urged on Surveillance Reports

[Richard Forno]

The New York Times
http://tinyurl.com/r72yc

June 28, 2006
Damage Study Urged on Surveillance Reports
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, June 27 ‹ Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate
intelligence committee, asked the director of national intelligence on
Tuesday to assess any damage to American counterterrorism efforts caused by
the disclosure of secret programs to monitor telephone calls and financial
transactions.

Mr. Roberts, Republican of Kansas, singled out The New York Times for an
article last week that reported that the government was tracking money
transfers handled by a banking consortium based in Belgium. The targeting of
the financial data, which includes some Americans' transactions, was also
reported Thursday by The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal.

In his letter to John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, Mr.
Roberts wrote that "we have been unable to persuade the media to act
responsibly and to protect the means by which we protect this nation."

He asked for a formal evaluation of damage to intelligence collection
resulting from the revelation of the secret financial monitoring as well as
The Times's disclosure in December of the National Security Agency's
monitoring of phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans suspected of
having links to Al Qaeda.

In London, meanwhile, a human rights group said Tuesday that it had filed
complaints in 32 countries alleging that the banking consortium, known as
Swift, violated European and Asian privacy laws by giving the United States
access to its data.

Simon Davies, director of the group, Privacy International, said the scale
of the American monitoring, involving millions of records, "places this
disclosure in the realm of a fishing exercise rather than a legally
authorized investigation."

The Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, has asked the Justice Ministry
to investigate whether Swift violated Belgian law by allowing the United
States government access to its data.

The American Civil Liberties Union has condemned the program, and a Chicago
lawyer, Steven E. Schwarz, filed a federal class-action lawsuit against
Swift on Friday alleging that it had violated United States financial
privacy statutes.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow
and numerous Republicans in Congress have vigorously defended the financial
tracking program as legal and valuable and condemned its public disclosure.
They have suggested that the articles might tip off terrorists that their
money transfers could be detected. Representative J. D. Hayworth, Republican
of Arizona, circulated a letter to colleagues on Tuesday asking that The
Times's Congressional press credentials be suspended.

Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said any effort to measure damage to
intelligence collection would take some time.

"It's not as if the terrorists are going to say, 'Oops! Going to stop doing
that,' " Mr. Snow said at a briefing. "But I think it is safe to say that
once you provide a piece of intelligence, people on the other side act on
it."

The electronic messaging system operated by Swift, the Society for Worldwide
Interbank Financial Telecommunication, routes nearly $6 trillion a day in
transfers among nearly 8,000 financial institutions.

At a confirmation hearing on Tuesday for Henry M. Paulson Jr., the nominee
for Treasury secretary, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, asked
whether the monitoring might violate the Fourth Amendment's protection
against unreasonable searches. "I think you'll agree that we could fight
terrorism properly and adequately without having a police state in America,"
Mr. Baucus said.

Mr. Paulson did not express an opinion on the propriety of the Swift
monitoring but pledged to study it. "I am going to, if confirmed, be all
over it, make sure I learn everything there is to learn, make sure I
understand the law thoroughly," he said.

Democratic staff members said they had pressed Treasury officials in recent
days for a fuller accounting of which members of Congress were briefed on
the program and whether notification requirements under the International
Economic Emergency Powers Act, invoked by President Bush days after Sept.
11, were met.

Treasury officials have told Congressional staff members that they briefed
the full intelligence committees of both houses about a month ago, after
inquiries by The Times, according to one Democratic aide who spoke on
condition of anonymity. Some members were told of the program several years
ago, but the Treasury Department has not provided a list of who was informed
when, the aide said.

Democrats said they hoped to get a clearer idea of the legal foundations for
the program, how it was monitored, and how long it will be allowed to
continue under the president's invocation of emergency powers.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat who serves on the
House financial services committee, said Tuesday: "The administration is
basing its actions on a 1970's law that never envisioned a state of
perpetual emergency. It wasn't meant to become the status quo. That is why
Congress needs to look at it its current use."

Victor Comras, a former State Department official who served on a United
Nations counterterrorism advisory group, pointed out on The Counterterrorism
Blog that a 2002 United Nations report had noted with approval that the
United States was monitoring international financial systems.

While providing no details, the report mentioned Swift and similar
organizations, saying "the United States has begun to apply new monitoring
techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions."

Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Brussels for this article, andCarl
Hulse and Eric Lichtblau from Washington.