First the Bush administration monitored international telephone calls, then it was domestic calls, then it was domestic email and web browsing; now it’s banking records. All without warrants. All in the name of terrorism suppression. It’s gotten so bad that corporate journalists can just use a template to write their stories on government data gathering on citizens.
Here’s the nut graf for all these stories from Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, breaking the story in the New York Times:
“But all the programs grew out of the Bush administration’s desire to exploit technological tools to prevent another terrorist strike, and all reflect attempts to break down longstanding legal or institutional barriers to the government’s access to private information about Americans and others inside the United States.”
Once again the administration insists that the secret program is used only to track transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda. But since what’s being monitored is what Licthblau and Risen call “the nerve center of the global banking industry,” (the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT)) that’s probably arguable. The program is a project of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, and is deemed to be legal—by the administration, but no one else—through the president’s emergency economic powers. According to Lichtblau and Risen, the Treasury Department ruled the SWIFT program “was exempt from American laws restricting government access to private financial records because the cooperative was considered a messaging service, not a bank or financial institution.”
Once again, it depends on what the definition of “is” is.
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