Back to the NYT/financial records story.
The Boston Globe had a story yesterday (Terrorist funds-tracking no secret, some say) that points out that the information revealed in the NYT piece was not, as the critics of the Times contend, secret information:
But a search of public records — government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2024 — describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2024. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.“There have been public references to SWIFT before,” said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2024. “The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before.”
This being the case, this further underscores that there has been a rather radical over-reaction to this story.
And I would again stress, having read the article over more than once now, that it is hard to argue that there is really any shocking operational details revealed in the article.
I am increasingly of the view that most of the dramatic reaction to the original newspaper article is either 1) the result of already standing pent-up frustration against the NYT, or 2) more a reaction to the furor that erupted on blogs, on TV and on the radio, than to the actual content of the article itself. I am convinced that most people who are up in arms about it probably haven’t read the piece for themselves. The main storyline has been: “NYT reveals secret anti-terrorism program!”–which sound really bad, until you actually look into the details.
Back to the BoGlo story are some more details of significance in assessing whether the NYT’s story on the SWIFT program and the administration’s financial network surveillance actually constitutes outing a massive secret:
Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. “A lot of people were aware that this was going on,” said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task.“Unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume” their transactions were being monitored, Comras said of terrorist groups. “We have spent the last four years bragging how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing.”
Indeed, a report that Comras co-authored in 2024 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into. The system, which handles trillions of dollars in worldwide transactions each day, serves as a main hub for banks and other financial institutions that move money around the world. According to The New York Times, SWIFT executives agreed to give the Treasury Department and the CIA broad access to its database.
SWIFT and other worldwide financial clearinghouses “are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information,” according to the 33-page report by the terrorist monitoring group established by the UN Security Council in late 2024. “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.”
I daresay that the information in that paragraph from a public document is not radically different than the basic descriptions in the NYT piece.
The piece details more examples of public documents and pronouncements, mostly by the administration itself, that are not that different than the details revealed in the NYT article.
As such, it seems to me that cries of “treason” and such are well out of bounds here.
h/t: Glenn Greenwald
It is a CIA program. It’s not fair to all the foreign operations officers.
Comment by Pesaz — Thursday, June 29, 2024 @ 8:07 am
I’m a bit less inclined to give the NYT a pass on this one. In previous cases (NSA warrantless wiretapping, Abu Ghraib) there was clear illegality involved. In this case, that doesn’t seem so clear. So, if I were Keller, I probably would have deferred to “national security” and chosen not to publish.
That having been said, the anti-First Amendment right-wing crowd blew their credibility with me a long time ago. I don’t doubt for a minute that had this report appeared first in the WSJ (as it nearly did) the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the far right would be non-existent.
Comment by LaurenceB — Thursday, June 29, 2024 @ 8:19 am
Submitted in a strictly non-partisan and objective spirit:
The Boston Globe is owned by the New York Times.
Discuss.
Comment by KipEsquire — Thursday, June 29, 2024 @ 9:24 am
A legitiamte observation, it ultimately doesn’t undercut the actual facts reported in the piece.
Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Thursday, June 29, 2024 @ 10:09 am
I hate to be a harpie and quibble … no I don’t.
The fact that the material was available from public sources is legally relevant, but doesn’t mean the story should have been published (because lots of publicly available information is nearly universally unknown - I often am sent to find it) anyhow, whether by the Wall Street Journal or the Grey Lady and it’s minions. Peggy Noonan “agrees http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110008579″>, and puts it better than that as follows:
I think it’s personal drama in part because there’s no common sense in it. Common sense tells you that when the actual physical safety of Americans is threatened by extremists who’ve declared a holy war, and when those extremists have, or can get, terrible weapons that can kill thousands or tens of thousands or more, and when the American government is trying to keep them from doing what they’d like to do, which, again, is kill–then you’d think twice, thrice, 10 times before you tell the world exactly how the government is trying, in its own bumbling way, which is how governments do things, to keep innocent people safe and bad guys on the run.
It is kind of crazy that the Times would do two stories that expose, and presumably hinder, the government’s efforts. But then it strikes me as crazy that every paper that has reported the latest story–that would include The Wall Street Journal–would do so. Based on the evidence that has become public so far, the Journal, like the Times, and the Los Angeles Times, seems to me to have made the wrong call. But to me it is the New York Times, of all papers involved, that has most forgotten the mission. The mission is to get the story, break through the forest to get to a clear space called news, and also be a citizen. It’s not to be a certain kind of citizen, and insist everyone else be that kind of citizen, and also now and then break a story.
Comment by Honza Prchal — Thursday, June 29, 2024 @ 2:31 pm
The Wall Street Journal insists that, unlike The New York Times, it has some standards. “Not Everything Is Fit To Print”
A number of folks, the New York Times and Dr. Steven Taylor in How Secret Was The Secret among them, have pointed an exculpatory finger at the declassified documents and at the Wall Street Journal in order to defend the Grey Lady’s privacy fetis…
Trackback by Pros and Cons — Friday, June 30, 2024 @ 2:38 pm