CIA using same law as NSA to secretly monitor money transfers
Intelligence agency using same law as NSA deploys for its huge phone database, suggesting government surveillance is more widespread
The CIA is secretly collecting bulk records of international money transfers handled by companies like Western Union - including transactions into and out of the United States - according to current and former government officials.
The agency is using the same law that the National Security Agency uses for its huge database of phone records - provisions in the Patriot Act overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court - they say.
The CIA financial records programme offers evidence that the extent of government data collection programmes is not fully known and that the national debate over privacy and security may be incomplete.
The data does not include purely domestic transfers or bank-to-bank transactions, several officials said. Another, while not acknowledging the programme, suggested that the surveillance court had imposed rules withholding the identities of any Americans from the data the CIA sees, requiring a tie to a terrorist organisation before a search may be run, and mandating that the data be discarded after a certain number of years. The court has imposed several similar rules on the NSA call logs programme.
Several officials also said more than one other bulk collection programme had yet to come to light. "The intelligence community collects bulk data in a number of different ways under multiple authorities," said one intelligence official.
Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the CIA, declined to confirm whether such a programme existed but said that the agency conducted lawful intelligence collection aimed at foreign - not domestic - activities and that it was subject to extensive oversight.