Common Sense

I mentioned yesterday that I read in 2004 about the banking transaction tracking secret plan that was divulged by the New York Times last week. From The Price of Loyalty, page 181-82:

He knew immediately that a key for Treasury would be tracking the financial web behind the terrorists who wreaked tis destruction. Throughout the summer, there had been disputes on how the United States tried to stymie money laundering and other financial crimes. O’Neill found, digging through budgets, that the United States spends $1.1 billion a year to fight global money laundering and illegal offshore banking transactions and to freeze the accounts of felonious individuals. Most of the funds go to the collection and management of oceans of data from financial institutions around the globe and to the screening of data for irregular activities. In congressional testimony during the summer, O’Neill had fenced with Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, who headed the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, about whether that money produced any reasonable return. In fact, the sum spent, O’Neill discovered, was closer to $700 million - a rounding error of nearly half a billion - and the results were modest. O’Neill said he’d like to get agreements with countries that have offshore banks or loosely regulated banks to be more transparent about their transactions and help fight fraud. Levin said it was all but impossible, they’d been trying for years.

“You looked at bank data and you saw countless transactions at $9,999. Of course, the amount to trigger some regulatory notice was $10,000. It’s no surprise that the crooks and launders know these thresholds better than we do,” O’Neill said. “These huge data grabs take time and enormous resources and yield very little. We’ve invested a lot in this technique, but it doesn’t mean it works. I knew that 9/11 would change that - that we were going to have to rethink things.”

From what I read in the times article, this is basically what we were doing through the Swift consortium, and from this testimony, terrorists and other bad guys are well aware of what we do. It doesn’t seem like much of a secret and certainly not worth the ire that it has garnered amongst Republicans.