Secret Government Monitoring of Financial Transactions Revealed (No Executive Power Needed)

The NYT and WSJ report that the Bush Administration, specifically the CIA and Treasury Department, have been secretly monitoring financial transactions conducted through SWIFT, a Belgian firm that conducts most of the world’s financial traffic.

This is a pretty obscure area of law, but it strikes me that the President is in better legal shape here than in the NSA wiretapping controversy. First, he has pretty broad authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to investigate foreign transactions. Second, individuals do not have a strong (or maybe any) Fourth Amendment interest in the privacy of their financial records, according to the Supreme Court. Finally, there is no law here analogous to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which purports to strictly regulate this kind of surveillance. The President has not, as far as I can tell, claimed that he has inherent or exclusive power to conduct this kind of surveillance.

My initial reaction is that what the NYT and WSJ has mostly accomplished is to render this program essentially useless by revealing its existence to potential terrorists. Still, maybe I’m missing something here.