Political Punch

In my prior post, I guess I did miss the point: I assumed that everyone knew that electronic transactions could be tracked, but no one (at least until now) knew which transactions, how many of them, or how often they could be tracked, and those who wanted to avoid this could simply work outside the system. The New York Times and the other news organizations who published the information were probably making the same assumptions that I did. I'm now of the opinion that the disclosures did harm anti-terrorism efforts, although to what extent, I suppose we'll never know. But I do think the catcalls of "treason" from the administration and from its most ardent supporters are overly histrionic and excessive, in much the same way that the charges of sedition and treason were to Daniel Ellsberg.

The idea is you wait for your enemy to make dumb mistakes. It doesn't even have to be the top people, just lower people on the chain who are linked to top people.

The previous poster posits that terrorists should know about this because everything electronic is tracable, but fails to explain how we could possibly catch one of the top wanted guys in east asia using these methods if the terrorists "know" about the tracking.

Answer - they or their subordinates were careless or just didn't believe that needles could be whittled out of the massive haystack that is international banking.

Now that it has been splashed by the NYT, even dumber terrorists lower on the chain might get the message about not using Western banking to move money internationally. It's a hell of a warning.

Chuck. I think you're missing the point. Kean is saying that the terrorists didn't know that the transactions go through SWIFT. Now that they do, the fear is that they'll adjust their transactions so that they don't.

Of course what I don't know is whether that's actually possible.

They would assume electronic transfers could be monitored, but the Governor already answered this question for you: they had no idea what nations were participating or just how deep things went.

We already know we caught one major terrorist this way. Obviously, he knew he was taking a risk but he probably thought he was clever and had chosen a method that we wouldn't detect. He was wrong.

So now Al Qaeda not only knows that this is how the guy was nailed, they have more details on how to avoid this program in the future.

For God's sake people, give up this illusion that nothing important was revealed. Even Congressman Murtha, hardly a Bush fan, urged these papers not to go public with these details. Stop trying to excuse their despicable behavior by saying it doesn't matter, because obviously it does.

Because they know the US government does not have unlimited access to electronic transactions. We require the assistance of outside businesses and government and we have limited means of persuading them to cooperate. The terrorists cannot simply stop exchanging money. They have to use some means of doing so without a perfect knowledge of whether or not it is being surveilled. Now they know to avoid SWIFT. And if the Belgium government shuts down the surveillance due to bad publicity, the terrorists will then know that they can safely use SWIFT.

If Gov. Kean believes that the disclosure of the SWIFT organization was detrimental to our efforts against terrorism, by dint of what he and his commission have researched and accomplished, I must cede the argument to him. However, I have one misgiving: most everyone knows that financial transactions are electronic, and anything accomplished electronically can be tracked. Why would terrorists not assume that any transaction they conduct is under surveillance, and, therfore, susceptible to government review?