Report: CIA gathering data on international money transfers

The CIA is secretly building a huge database of international money transfers both into and out of the US, including the financial and personal data of millions of Americans, despite concerns about surveillance programmes.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is secretly collecting bulk records of money transfers handled by companies such as Western Union under the same law used by the National Security Agency for its huge database of phone records of Americans, a report in The New York Times said.

“The CIA financial records programme, which the officials said was authorised by provisions in the Patriot Act and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, 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 report said.

Purely domestic transfers or bank-to-bank transactions appear to be kept out of the data collection, several officials said.

The officials 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.

Other US officials did not acknowledge whether the programme exists.

Several officials said more than one other bulk collection programme has yet to come to light, the report stated.

“The intelligence community collects bulk data in a number of different ways under multiple authorities,” one unnamed intelligence official was quoted as saying in the report.

While declining to confirm if such a programme exists, CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said the agency conducts lawful intelligence collection aimed at foreign and not domestic activities and this is subject to extensive oversight.

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