http://myblog.es/tera-patrick

Current and former US officials said the SWIFT effort had only been marginally successful against al-Qaeda, which long ago began transferring money through other means, including the highly informal banking system common in Islamic countries. The value of the program, they said, had been in tracking lower and mid-level terrorist operatives and financiers who believe they have not been detected, and militant groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, that also operate political and welfare organisations.

Those who say that terrorists already knew about the financial monitoring should pay heed.

From the SF Chronicle (6/24/06):

In response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Treasury Department sought to enlist a reluctant ally. The world’s banking industry long had been loath to give up data on its customers, so U.S. investigators issued a subpoena for just a narrow slice of information from a worldwide financial consortium.

The reply stunned Treasury officials.

The consortium couldn’t extract the shards of data that U.S. terrorism analysts were looking for, so it offered something far more generous.

“They said, ‘We’ll give you all the data,’ ” Treasury Secretary John Snow said Friday during a news conference in which he defended the espionage program.

And just like that, intelligence teams that once had to scrape for scraps of data from individual banks were given keys to the international banking kingdom — access to a vast database that contains detailed records on billions of bank-to-bank money transfers around the world.

The extent of our access was a surprise to US and European officials – why wouldn’t it have been a surprise to terrorists as well?

No mention of the Boston Globe reports?

hmmm, suspect.

[Suspect only to someone whose partisanship interferes with their reasoning powers and ability to click on the links. The silly U.N. report argument is demolished in one of posts you failed to click on. The Boston Globe? I don't even know what your argument is, since you failed to make one. (Hmmm . . . Suspect!) If your argument is that the Globe published too, then click on the link for the WSJ entry and make your argument that the Globe is different. If you can. -- P]

2) As far as an absolute first amendment right which you appear to be asserting, try yelling fire in a theater and see if any law enforcement personnel infringe on your freedom of speech. Or try organizing a protest within 100 yards of a Presidential visit.

Or more generally, there’s several first amendment exceptions. Just with freedom of speech and off the top of my head, here’s five: 1) Libel/slander. 2) Copyright infringement. 3) Contract infringement. 4) Endangering lives (e.g., inciting to violence,). 5) Lying under oath / to a federal official.

And depending on how the AIPAC case goes, disclosing classified information even if you don’t have a clearance (disclosing while having a clearance would be an example of #3.) will be another exception. And depending on your reading of the Espionage Act, it is now.

George Bush gets to strike the righteous pose again when he declares,”There can be no excuse for anyone entrusted with vital intelligence to leak it — and no excuse for any newspaper to print it.”
George Bush should look in the mirror. …

it prohibits the U.S. Congress from infringing on six rights. It forbids federal laws that:

* Respect an establishment of religion (the “Establishment Clause”);
* Prohibit free exercise of religion (the “Free Exercise Clause”);
* Infringe the freedom of speech;
* Infringe the freedom of the press;
* Limit the right to assemble peaceably;
* Limit the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

and to think that you’re a lawyer. stop defending the globalists. you are not one of the elite, and you’re fooling yourself if you think you are.

if we don’t criticize our govt’s actions, who will? if we don’t know who is doing what, then how are we to critcize our govt’s actions? it wouldn’t be a democracy if these things didn’t come into play.

I think it’s an undeniable fact that the government wanted the Journal to have an exclusive.

Also, nothing worrysome about levelling our opprobrium at the press on the basis of whether they did or did not do as ordered by the government.

If the gutted old core of the network is being replaced by a more loosely affiliated and less sophisticated group of operators then individual terrorist pre-knowledge of Swift becomes less likely and the program even more important to safeguard.

I don’t understand why knowledge of SWIFT is so important for terrorists. What are they going to do? Find a bank outside the swift consortium? Because the NYT or the WSJ hasn’t reported on those? And that means we’re not using the same subpeona rules or interpretations of privacy policy on those?