In an effort to trace and deter terrorist financing, the Bush administration is developing a plan to give the government access to possibly hundreds of millions of international banking records.
If put in force, the plan, as conceived by a working group within the US Treasury Department, will the government access to logs of international wire transfers into and out of American banks, a media report said.
Such overseas transactions were used by the September 11 hijackers to wire more than $ 130,000, officials said.
Government officials said the effort, which grew out of a brief, little-noticed provision in the intelligence reform bill passed by the Congress in December, would give them the tools to track leads on specific suspects and, more broadly, analyse patterns in terrorist financing and other financial crimes.
They said they were mindful of privacy concerns that such a system is likely to provoke and wanted to include safeguards to prevent misuse of what would amount to an enormous cache of financial records.
The provision authorised the Treasury Department to pursue regulations requiring financial institutions to turn over 'certain cross-border electronic transmittals of funds' that may be needed in combating money laundering and terrorist financing, 'The New York Times' reported.
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