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Originally posted by Gattigap
Huh. Apparently not a single sentence of the NYT story revealed any new operational information about the program.

• But a search of public records -- government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 -- describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.
  
  "There have been public references to SWIFT before," said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. "The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before."
  
  Indeed, a report that [former State Department official Victor] Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into.

Oh, my fucking God. Those goddamned government officials are aidng and abetting the enemy that's trying to kill us. Hopefully the execution of Bill Keller will stop THAT shit.

Apparently the idea that the SWIFT monitoring system was still producing anything of value is...well...wrong .

• In The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind spends a lot of time describing the way U.S. intelligence tracked global money flows after 9/11, including accounts of the cooperation they got from Western Union (wire transfers), First Data Corporation (credit card records), and the takeover of a "money store" in Pakistan. He doesn't mention the SWIFT program specifically, but he makes it clear that U.S. teams had their fingers in a lot of financial pies and had a considerable amount of success with it.
  
  But only for a while:
  
  In the closing months of 2003...the carefully constructed global network of sigint and what can be called finint, or financial intelligence, started to go quiet.
  
  In short, al Qaeda, and its affiliates and imitators, stopped leaving electronic footprints. It started slowly, but then became distinct and clear, a definable trend. They were going underground.
  
  ...."We were surprised it took them so long," said one senior intelligence official. "But the lesson here is that with an adaptable, patient enemy, a victory sometimes creates the next set of challenges. In this case, we did some things that worked very well, and they started to evolve."
  
  Or devolve. The al Qaeda playbook, employed by what was left of the network, its affiliates and imitators, started to stress the necessity of using couriers to carry cash and hand-delivered letters. This slowed the pace of operations, if not their scale, and that was, indeed, a victory.
  
  By the beginning of 2004, Suskind says, the finint operation was in a "state of increasing obsolescence." The money store had closed down, the Palestinians had gotten wise to Western Union, and the "matrix," as he calls the overall finint operation, was becoming less and less effective.