New terror bill seeks to give government more insight into bank records | 04.11.2005 | 12:04:15 | Views: 4363 | ID: April 11: Under a new anti-terror law being considered in Congress, banks and other financial institutions would have to allow the government greater access to people's account information in an attempt to help the Department of Homeland Security find terrorists and their financiers, the New York Times reported over the weekend. The BBC reported Monday that the focus of the bill would be in "seeking access to logs of international wires to try to track terror funding. ... Electronic transfers were used to send more than $130,000 to the 11 September 2001 hijackers." The Times reported that the bill, which was designed by the Department of the Treasury, "grew out of a brief, little noticed provision in the intelligence reform bill passed by Congress in December, [and] would give them the tools to track leads on specific suspects and, more broadly, to analyze patterns in terrorist financing and other financial crimes." Officials have said that more needs to be done to curb the money sources terrorists are using to help fund their violent acts. And the new bill, officials said, would be able to give the government the tools it needs to track and find terrorists, and their money sources. John Byrne, an official who works with the American Bankers Association, told the Times though: "It seems like the rules keep changing on us, and there's a lot of confusion and anxiety in the industry about what constitutes a proper compliance program." The BBC reported that funding for the 9/11 attack was anywhere from $400,000 to $500,000 and that al-Qaeda also spent about $50,000 or less to stage the embassy bombings in east Africa in 1998.
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