Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration started gathering financial transaction information from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) for short. SWIFT is a clearinghouse for international banking transactions, routing trillions of dollars a day between financial institutions.

While the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Treasury Department, which jointly operate the data-gathering program, have issued subpoenas for SWIFT data, those subpoenas are not for specific transactions. The Treasury Department, it has been reveals, at the same time is serving SWIFT broad 'administrative' subpoenas for millions of records at a time, a practice that troubles many civil liberties advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

In a Jun. 23 press release, the ACLU called the financial surveillance program "another example of the Bush administration's abuse of power." The statement went on to charge that "[t]he invasion of our personal financial information, without notification or judicial review, is contrary to the fundamental American value of privacy and must be stopped now."

However, the administration argues that safeguards have been put in place to protect privacy interests and the president has rebuked The New York Times for jeopardizing a valuable program by announcing its existence.

According to the Treasury Department, an outside auditing firm verifies that data searches are based on valid intelligence leads, and analysts must document the intelligence that justifies each search. In addition, the Treasury Department recently agreed to allow SWIFT representatives to be stationed alongside agency officials. This arrangement enables SWIFT representatives to block any search deemed inappropriate.

Safeguards notwithstanding, the administration's recent track record of sidestepping congressional oversight and expanding the scope of presidential authority to justify secret surveillance doesn't help its case for this latest clandestine ease-dropping program.

In May, it was revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) was secretly amassing the largest database ever created on the telephone calling habits of millions of Americans. News of the call history data mining program came as the NSA program of eavesdropping on international telephone calls without warrants remained, and remains, unresolved.