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:For other meanings of the word swift, see swift (disambiguation).


The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication ("SWIFT") runs a worldwide network by which messages concerning financial transactions are exchanged among banks and other financial institutions.

As of April 2006 SWIFT linked over 7,800 financial institutions in 205 countries.

SWIFT is a cooperative society under Belgian law, owned by its member financial institutions with offices around the world. SWIFT's headquarters are located in La Hulpe near Brussels.

It was founded in Brussels in 1973, supported by 239 banks in 15 countries. It started to establish a common language for financial transactions and a shared data processing system and worldwide communications network.
Fundamental operating procedures, rules for liability etc., were established in 1975 and the first message was sent in 1977.

Terrorist Finance Tracking Program

A series of articles published on June 23, 2006, by The New York Times
Lichtblau, Eric and Risen, James. "Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror ", The New York Times, June 22, 2006. Accessed June 23, 2006., The Wall Street Journal
Simpson, Glenn R. "U.S. Treasury Tracks Financial Data In Secret Program ", The Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2006. Accessed June 23, 2006. and The Los Angeles TimesMeyer, Josh and Miller, Greg. "Secret U.S. Program Tracks Global Bank Transfers ", The Los Angeles Times. June 22, 2006. Accessed June 23, 2006. revealed sensitive information that the United States government, specifically the Treasury Department and the CIA, had a program to access the SWIFT transaction database after the September 11th attacks. According to the June 2006 The New York Times article, the program helped lead to the capture of an al-Qaeda operative known as Hambali in 2003, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombing, as well as helped identify a Brooklyn man convicted in 2005 for laundering money for an al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan. The Treasury Department and White House responded to the leak the day before it was published and claimed that the leak damaged counter-terrorism activities. They also referred to the program as the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program ("TFTP"), similar to the Terrorist Surveillance Program in the NSA wiretapping controversy.Blustein, Paul, Gellman, Barton, and Linzer, Dafna. "Bank Records Secretly Tapped ", Washington Post, June 23, 2006. Accessed June 23, 2006.

The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program is viewed by the Bush administration as another tool in the Global War on Terrorism. The administration believes the program allows additional scrutiny that could prove instrumental in tracking transactions between terrorist cells. Some have raised concerns that this classified program might also be a violation of U.S. and European financial privacy laws, because individual search warrants to access financial data were not obtained in advance.http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2006/06/28/rights_group_complains In response to the claim that the program violates U.S. law, some have noted that the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Miller (1976) has ruled that there is not an expected right to privacy for financial transaction records held by third parties and that "the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed."U.S. Supreme Court. UNITED STATES v. MILLER, 425 U.S. 435 (1976) , Argued January 12, 1976. Decided April 21, 1976. Accessed July 1, 2006.

Immediately following the disclosure, SWIFT released an official press statement asserting that they did give information to the US in compliance with Treasury Department subpoenas, but claiming that "SWIFT received significant protections and assurances as to the purpose, confidentiality, oversight and control of the limited sets of data produced under the subpoenas"."Swift Press Release on the Program , LA Times, June 22, 2006. Accessed June 23, 2006. The central bank of Belgium, the National Bank of Belgium, was revealed on June 27, 2006, to have known about the U.S. government's access to the SWIFT databases since 2002.NBB 'aware' of Swift's actions since 2002 , Expatica, June 27, 2006. Accessed June 27, 2006. Belgian political party CD&V claimed on June 28, that the actions of the CIA with SWIFT were in breach with Belgian privacy laws. The Belgian parliamentary committee (Comité I), that deals with the workings of the Belgian State Security Service, will report on its findings in three weeks.

Controversy regarding The New York Times' decision to publish

There have been discussions on whether The New York Times should be prosecuted for its actionsDevlin Barrett. "Lawmaker Wants Times Prosecuted ", The Washington Post, June 26, 2006. Accessed July 3, 2006.O’Connor, Patrick and Allen, Jonathan.
"GOP bill targets NY Times ", The Hill, June 28, 2006. Accessed June 28, 2006. for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and other related federal statutes. In response, some have questioned why The New York Times alone should be singled out for discipline, since The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal divulged information about the TFTP at the same time.Editors. "Bush's hypocrisy once again comes into focus ", The Albuquerque Tribune, June 29, 2006. Accessed June 29, 2006.The New York Times itself argued in a June 28, 2006 editorial that its reporting about the TFTP is protected by the First Amendment and serves a vital role, providing "information the public needs to make things right again." The New York Times editorial further argued that terrorists would have to be "fairly credulous" to believe their finances were not being tracked and that the reporting bore "no resemblance to security breaches, like disclosure of troop locations, that would clearly compromise the immediate safety of specific individuals.Editors. "Patriotism and the Press ", The New York Times, June 28, 2006. Accessed July 3, 2006.

Some have also questioned whether the information in the original June 23, 2006 newspaper articles was even secret, despite its U.S. government classification, because of previous newspaper articles discussing SWIFT. Specifically, a 1998 Washington Post article, in the wake of the U.S. embassy bombings, mentioned that the "CIA and agents with Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network also will try to lay tripwires to find out when bin Laden moves funds by plugging into the computerized systems of bank transaction monitoring services – operated by the Federal Reserve and private organizations called SWIFT and CHIPS – that record the billions of dollars coursing through the global banking system daily." Also, a December 21, 2001 Baltimore Sun article mentioned SWIFT "headquartered in Belgium" and conjectured about the ability of the U.S. National Security Agency "to follow the money through its electronic intercepts of such transactions." Still others have questioned the secrecy of the TFTP because the Bush administration has made public announcements that it planned to track terrorist-related finances. For example, in a speech shortly after the September 11th attacks, George W. Bush elaborated on the Administration's intention to track terrorist funding, saying "if institutions fail to help us by sharing information or freezing accounts, the Department of the Treasury now has the authority to freeze their bank's assets and transactions in the United States".http://web.archive.org/web/20041014200657/http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010924-4.html

However, critics of the decision to disclose the classified program's existence, including U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, responded by arguing that there is a vast difference between stating general intentions to track terrorist finances and actually revealing the exact means employed to do so. Some of these critics called attention to The New York Times itself making no mention of either SWIFT or the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program in a November 29, 2005 article ironically detailing the Bush administration's apparent lack of progress in tracking terrorist finances. Moreover, Secretary Snow disagreed with executive editor of The New York Times Bill Keller's claim that terrorists are now exclusively using "other means"Keller, Bill. "Letter From Bill Keller on The Times's Banking Records Report " The New York Times, June 25, 2006. Accessed June 25, 2006. to transfer funds, by stating that terrorists "have continued to use the formal financial system, which has made this program incredibly valuable."Snow, John W. "Letter to the Editors of The New York Times by Treasury Secretary Snow ", June 26, 2006. Accessed June 26, 2006 Testifying before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on July 11, 2006, Stuart Levey, the Department of the Treasury’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, stated the following: "Since being asked to oversee this program by then-Secretary Snow and then-Deputy Secretary Bodman almost two years ago, I have received the written output from this program as part of my daily intelligence briefing. For two years, I have been reviewing that output every morning. I cannot remember a day when that briefing did not include at least one terrorism lead from this program. Despite attempts at secrecy, terrorist facilitators have continued to use the international banking system to send money to one another, even after September 11th. 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. Tracking terrorist money trails is difficult enough without having our sources and methods reported on the front page of newspapers."Levey, Stuart "Testimony of Stuart Levey, Under Secretary Terrorism and Financial Intelligence U.S. Department of the Treasury Before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations ", July 11, 2006. Accessed July 23, 2006

Notes

See also

*Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
*Value transfer system
*ISO 9362, the SWIFT/BIC code standard
*Electronic money
*Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
*Bilateral key exchange
*MA/CUG

External links

* Official SWIFT website
* List of SWIFT codes (wiki)
* WIFE: Open Source Java based library for SWIFT messages parsing
* SWIFT codes search

Category:Payment systems
Category:Stock market
Category:Technical communication
Category:George W. Bush administration controversies