In a suprisingly brazen move, a Treasury Department offical said during congressional testimony yesterday that the White House is considering pushing banks to turn over
all records of international wire transfers, regadless of whether or not they're considered suspicious.
The program under consideration would capture international transactions involving only U.S. banks, while the SWIFT system logs transfers across any international borders. But the Treasury Department would be free to use the data for investigations and crime-fighting beyond terrorism cases.
More below the cut.
"We can use that information for terrorism, money laundering -- all sorts of law enforcement purposes," Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, told the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations. "And we can do all kinds of the things that people traditionally think about when they think about data mining in terms of looking for trend analysis, suspicious activity and the like."
Yes, isn't it amazing all the wonderful things you can do when you don't need a warrant?
Once again, the Bush administration is showing a blatent disregard for the civil liberties and right to privacy of United States citizens. If this program is implemented, the government will be alerted if my mother sends me spending money while I'm in Paris next semester. I'd make a crack about being a terrorist mastermind here, but I don't want to give Google that kind of quoting power.
The industry protested the proposal as being burdensome and unlikely to turn up many potential terrorists. The program will also create even more financial burden on an already over-taxed government budget, as "even supporters concede that it would take millions of dollars to upgrade department computers and software to make sense of the data coming from multiple sources."
If this program is implemented, it will be another step on that famous slippery slope toward the complete decimation of our rights to privacy and civil liberties. Wholesale monitoring of our bank transactions could lead to similar programs for our internet activity, what we watch on television, and virtually any other previously private information.
Habeus Corpus? What's that?
Via LA Times