|
More bank data may not aid fight against terrorism
18 Apr 2005 14:30:57 GMT
Source: Reuters
|
By Caroline Drees, Security Correspondent WASHINGTON, April 18 (Reuters) - A plan to force banks into disclosing hundreds of millions of wire transfers to help fight terrorist financing would overwhelm bankers and regulators and add questionable value to the war on terrorism, experts and officials say. The proposal is being studied by the U.S. Treasury and would grant the government unprecedented access to banking records. Banks wire more than $6 trillion across the globe each day, the bulk of it in and out of the United States. While counterterrorism officials are eager to tap into this mother lode of financial information, some officials, bankers and experts question whether authorities can actually glean pertinent information from the flood of data, while protecting the privacy of banking clients. "The big provisos are whether that data can be obtained in a cost-effective way that doesn't overburden the private sector, doesn't choke the government, and in a way that it can be ... used without running roughshod over privacy and civil liberties concerns," said Joseph Myers, a former National Security Council official under U.S. President George W. Bush. One current counterterrorism official said: "With a billion additional reported transactions a day, you're just increasing the amount of hay in the haystack. You're not getting any closer to finding the needle." Many officials and experts, including Myers, say wire transfers might contain useful information to track down terrorists and believe the idea of reporting some of those flows merits study, as long as the challenges are clear. BURDEN VS. BENEFIT A sweeping intelligence bill passed by the U.S. Congress in December to overhaul the U.S. spy community called on the Treasury to study whether the proposal was useful and feasible. A Treasury spokeswoman said, "Information collected from certain cross-border wire transfers could be incredibly valuable to our efforts to starve terrorists of funding." Douglas Greenburg, who coauthored the Sept. 11 commission's landmark report on terrorism financing, pointed to Abdul Aziz Ali, a facilitator of the Sept. 11, 2001, plot who wired an estimated $120,000 from Dubai to the hijackers in the United States. "If the government had a database they could search through by name to find what wire transfers he's made, where and to whom, that could be extraordinarily useful," Greenburg said. Dennis Lormel, who ran the FBI's anti-terrorism financing operations after the 2001 attacks, also said access to wire transfer data was a hugely valuable resource, but the government needed to develop better technology to analyze the vast amounts of information. "You have to balance the burden versus the benefit. Because right now, you're hard-pressed to demonstrate what the benefit would be," he said. In the industry, bankers are wary of more reporting requirements in the wake of Sept. 11. Financial institutions must already report to the government a host of other transactions, such as "suspicious activities" and some currency moves. "Someone needs to take a temperature check," said John Byrne, a senior official at the American Bankers Association. "Is all of this information worthwhile? Should resources be allocated to yet another information-gathering requirement without any sort of evidence that this is going to be remotely useful?" Jimmy Gurule, the Treasury's former undersecretary for enforcement, agreed. "In the end, the banks could be reporting this overwhelming volume of data, most of which will probably not have any legitimate investigative value."
|
|
|
