Wednesday, June 28, 2006

The so-called "leak" of government monitoring of "terrorist" banking activity

Friends,

By now you've probably heard some version of this story. It seems the Bush administration and its political allies are claiming that the New York Times has revealed vital secrets--namely that the government has been watching banking transactions to identify terrorist activity.

I can tell you as a lowly church treasurer that I've known this "top secret" since shortly after 9/11. You see, it was my task to wire several thousand dollars from our church's account to missionaries in Central America. The clerk at the bank (apparently in on this top secret) told me she needed to have the names and addresses of the signers on the bank account in Guatemala to which we were wiring the money. She explained that since 9/11 they needed to collect this information on wire transfers over a certain size (I believe it was $3,000.00).

Independent conservative thinker, Andrew Sullivan has this to say.

1 comment:

John said...

So when the NYT reported that these monitoring activites were secret, were they incorrect?