Subpoenaing the Subpoenas

President Bush, along with Vice President Cheney and assorted members of Congress, launched a full throated attack on the New York Times, the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal for publishing stories about a secret data-mining project that monitors millions of international banking transactions, calling the stories "disgraceful" and saying they have caused great harm to the United States.

The program, started shortly after 9/11 in order to track terrorist finances, gets millions of records on international banking transactions from a little known consortium known as SWIFT that handles secure communications between financial institutions transferring money.† The records are fed into a huge database in the United States, which analysts can then sort through or analyze for links or suspicious behavior.

While the President said that the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the program, the head Democrat on the House side, Jane Harman, said that was only press-release truthful.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) said that she did not learn about the transaction-monitoring program until last month, even though it had been in operation since shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"They knew it was going to leak," Harman said. Because the program was hidden from most members of the committee for more than four years, she said, she had "significant concerns" about the lack of oversight.

Harman noted that the committee chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), had been informed of the operation before the full committee briefing. A spokesman said Hoekstra was told of the program shortly after he became chairman in 2004. Harman said she did not know why she had not also gotten an earlier briefing.

The Treasury Department, which runs the program, had briefed ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee periodically since shortly after the program was launched, according to a senior Senate aide. It had not briefed the full panel until last month, said the aide, who would not be quoted by name when discussing sensitive committee matters.

Link.

The other oversight included an outside auditor, consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which was charged with making sure the info was only used for terrorism investigations.† There seems to be no law or regulation that requires this limitation, nor is the legal status of the database clear, given that the Privacy Act prohibits secret databases containing information on American citizens.

The Administration says the program is legal because every month the Treasury Department issues an administrative subpoena, basically a subpoena you write yourself without seeing a judge.

As part of my job as a reporter to advance the story, I dug around a bit and found that the newspapers involved have not actually broken any law.†

Though no one at the papers involved would comment on the record, several high-placed media sources have confirmed that the newspapers acquired information on the program by issuing their own administrative press subpoenas (cheekily known as Administration subpoenas), which allow them to get sensitive information without having to talk with department flacks or file lengthy and usually futile Freedom of Information Act requests.