Administration official decries public disclosure of secret finance monitoring program

WASHINGTON — Disclosure of a secret program giving the U.S. government access to a massive international information data base will undercut efforts to catch terrorists, Congress was told Tuesday.

"This revelation is very damaging," Stuart Levey, the department's under secretary of terrorism and financial intelligence said in remarks prepared for a hearing before a House Financial Services panel.

"This disclosure compromised one of our most valuable programs and will only make our efforts to track terrorist financing — and to prevent terrorist attacks — harder," Levey argued.

The program, started shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, generated lots of leads, Levey said. Details remain classified, however, he said.

Levey said the program played an important role in an investigation that eventually led to the capture of Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, or Hambali, the operations chief of the al-Qaida linked Jemaah Islamiya, a Southeast Asian terror group. Hambali allegedly masterminded the deadly 2002 Bali bombings.

The terror tracking program was first publicly revealed late last month in published accounts by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal.

The revelation stirred some concern among privacy advocates and some Democrats. But it angered President Bush and administration officials who asserted that it could hobble their efforts to shut down avenues for terrorist fundraising.

The government was able to assess the immense data base, operated by a Belgium-based consortium and known by the acronym SWIFT — for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — only through subpoenas.

"The Swift subpoena is powerful but narrow," Levey said. "We cannot simply browse through the records that Swift turns over — we are only able to see the information which is responsive to targeted searches in the context of a specific terrorism investigation," he said.

A record is kept of every search conducted, he noted. These records are reviewed by Swift's representatives and an outside, independent auditor, he said.

"I want to emphasize that we cannot search this data for evidence of non-terrorist-related crime, such as tax evasion, economic espionage, money laundering or other criminal activity," Levey told the panel. "As a result we have accessed only a minute fraction of the data that Swift has provided."

Swift handles financial message traffic from thousands of financial institutions in more than 200 countries. The service routes more than 11 million messages each day, mostly capturing information on wire transfers and other methods of moving money in and out of the United States.