Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Treason at the NYT - Not So Much

Curious Al Qaeda operatives didn't have to wait for the New York Times to reveal that the US was using SWIFT to track financial transactions. They could have downloaded this PDF back in December of 2002. Third report of the Monitoring Group established pursuant to Security Council resolution 1363 (2001) and extended by resolution 1390 (2002)
31. The settlement of international transactions is usually handled through correspondent banking relationships or large-value message and payment systems, such as the SWIFT, Fedwire or CHIPS systems in the United States of America. Such international clearance centres are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. The Group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries.
Update- Apparently you can only access docs if you go thru the "front door" and a search page and get a cookie.
Go to
http://documents.un.org/
and click "welcome." This takes you to a search page. Do an advanced search for-

Third report of the Monitoring Group established pursuant to Security Council resolution 1363 (2001) and extended by resolution 1390 (2002)
That will get you to the document.