WSJ On Why They Joined The Times On SWIFT Story

Annie

Diamond Member
Nov 22, 2003
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I think they were wrong. At the same time, as the following points out, they have excercised better judgement in the past. A pass, no. An acknowledged mistake, yeah:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008585
REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Fit and Unfit to Print
What are the obligations of the press in wartime?

Friday, June 30, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

"Not everything is fit to print. There is to be regard for at least probable factual accuracy, for danger to innocent lives, for human decencies, and even, if cautiously, for nonpartisan considerations of the national interest."

So wrote the great legal scholar, Alexander Bickel, about the duties of the press in his 1975 collection of essays "The Morality of Consent." We like to re-read Bickel to get our Constitutional bearings, and he's been especially useful since the New York Times decided last week to expose a major weapon in the U.S. arsenal against terror financing.

President Bush, among others, has since assailed the press for revealing the program, and the Times has responded by wrapping itself in the First Amendment, the public's right to know and even The Wall Street Journal. We published a story on the same subject on the same day, and the Times has since claimed us as its ideological wingman. So allow us to explain what actually happened, putting this episode within the larger context of a newspaper's obligations during wartime.

We should make clear that the News and Editorial sections of the Journal are separate, with different editors. The Journal story on Treasury's antiterror methods was a product of the News department, and these columns had no say in the decision to publish. We have reported the story ourselves, however, and the facts are that the Times's decision was notably different from the Journal's.

According to Tony Fratto, Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, he first contacted the Times some two months ago. He had heard Times reporters were asking questions about the highly classified program involving Swift, an international banking consortium that has cooperated with the U.S. to follow the money making its way to the likes of al Qaeda or Hezbollah. Mr. Fratto went on to ask the Times not to publish such a story on grounds that it would damage this useful terror-tracking method.

Sometime later, Secretary John Snow invited Times Executive Editor Bill Keller to his Treasury office to deliver the same message. Later still, Mr. Fratto says, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, made the same request of Mr. Keller. Democratic Congressman John Murtha and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte also urged the newspaper not to publish the story.

The Times decided to publish anyway, letting Mr. Fratto know about its decision a week ago Wednesday. The Times agreed to delay publishing by a day to give Mr. Fratto a chance to bring the appropriate Treasury official home from overseas. Based on his own discussions with Times reporters and editors, Mr. Fratto says he believed "they had about 80% of the story, but they had about 30% of it wrong." So the Administration decided that, in the interest of telling a more complete and accurate story, they would declassify a series of talking points about the program. They discussed those with the Times the next day, June 22.

Around the same time, Treasury contacted Journal reporter Glenn Simpson to offer him the same declassified information. Mr. Simpson has been working the terror finance beat for some time, including asking questions about the operations of Swift, and it is a common practice in Washington for government officials to disclose a story that is going to become public anyway to more than one reporter. Our guess is that Treasury also felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times, which was pushing a violation-of-privacy angle; on our reading of the two June 23 stories, he did.

We recount all this because more than a few commentators have tried to link the Journal and Times at the hip. On the left, the motive is to help shield the Times from political criticism. On the right, the goal is to tar everyone in the "mainstream media." But anyone who understands how publishing decisions are made knows that different newspapers make up their minds differently.

Some argue that the Journal should have still declined to run the antiterror story. However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information. And while Journal editors knew the Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn't mind seeing in print. If this was a "leak," it was entirely authorized.

Would the Journal have published the story had we discovered it as the Times did, and had the Administration asked us not to? Speaking for the editorial columns, our answer is probably not. Mr. Keller's argument that the terrorists surely knew about the Swift monitoring is his own leap of faith. The terror financiers might have known the U.S. could track money from the U.S., but they might not have known the U.S. could follow the money from, say, Saudi Arabia. The first thing an al Qaeda financier would have done when the story broke is check if his bank was part of Swift.

Just as dubious is the defense in a Times editorial this week that "The Swift story bears no resemblance to security breaches, like disclosure of troop locations, that would clearly compromise the immediate safety of specific individuals." In this asymmetric war against terrorists, intelligence and financial tracking are the equivalent of troop movements. They are America's main weapons.

The Times itself said as much in a typically hectoring September 24, 2001, editorial "Finances of Terror": "Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities." Isn't the latter precisely what the Swift operation is?

Whether the Journal News department would agree with us in this or other cases, we can't say. We do know, however, that Journal editors have withheld stories at the government's request in the past, notably during the Gulf War when they learned that a European company that had sold defense equipment to Iraq was secretly helping the Pentagon. Readers have to decide for themselves, based on our day-to-day work, whether they think Journal editors are making the correct publishing judgments.

Which brings us back to the New York Times. We suspect that the Times has tried to use the Journal as its political heatshield precisely because it knows our editors have more credibility on these matters.

As Alexander Bickel wrote, the relationship between government and the press in the free society is an inevitable and essential contest. The government needs a certain amount of secrecy to function, especially on national security, and the press in its watchdog role tries to discover what it can. The government can't expect total secrecy, Bickel writes, "but the game similarly calls on the press to consider the responsibilities that its position implies. Not everything is fit to print." The obligation of the press is to take the government seriously when it makes a request not to publish. Is the motive mainly political? How important are the national security concerns? And how do those concerns balance against the public's right to know?

The problem with the Times is that millions of Americans no longer believe that its editors would make those calculations in anything close to good faith. We certainly don't. On issue after issue, it has become clear that the Times believes the U.S. is not really at war, and in any case the Bush Administration lacks the legitimacy to wage it.

So, for example, it promulgates a double standard on "leaks," deploring them in the case of Valerie Plame and demanding a special counsel when the leaker was presumably someone in the White House and the journalist a conservative columnist. But then it hails as heroic and public-spirited the leak to the Times itself that revealed the National Security Agency's al Qaeda wiretaps.

Mr. Keller's open letter explaining his decision to expose the Treasury program all but admits that he did so because he doesn't agree with, or believe, the Bush Administration. "Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress," he writes, and "some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight." Since the Treasury story broke, as it happens, no one but Congressman Ed Markey and a few cranks have even objected to the program, much less claimed illegality.

Perhaps Mr. Keller has been listening to his boss, Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who in a recent commencement address apologized to the graduates because his generation "had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.

"Our children, we vowed, would never know that. So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way," the publisher continued. "You weren't supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights," and so on. Forgive us if we conclude that a newspaper led by someone who speaks this way to college seniors has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it.

In all of this, Mr. Sulzberger and the Times are reminiscent of a publisher from an earlier era, Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. In the 1930s and into World War II, the Tribune was implacable in its opposition to FDR and his conduct of the war. During the war itself, his newspaper also exposed secrets, including one story after the victory at Midway in 1942 that essentially disclosed that the U.S. had broken Japanese codes. The government considered, but decided against, prosecuting McCormick's paper under the Espionage Act of 1917.

That was a wise decision, and not only because it would have drawn more attention to the Tribune "scoop." Once a government starts indicting reporters for publishing stories, there will be no drawing any lines against such prosecutions, and we will be well down the road to an Official Secrets Act that will let government dictate coverage.

The current political clamor is nonetheless a warning to the press about the path the Times is walking. Already, its partisan demand for a special counsel in the Plame case has led to a reporter going to jail and to defeats in court over protecting sources. Now the politicians are talking about Espionage Act prosecutions. All of which is cause for the rest of us in the media to recognize, heeding Alexander Bickel, that sometimes all the news is not fit to print.
 
TOO LATE WSJ, as far as I'm concerned....
hummmmm. Compare the two paragraphs below... One is from the Journal and the other is from the NYTs....




As most of our readers know, there is a large wall between the news and opinion operations of this paper, and we were not part of the news side's debates about whether to publish the latest story under contention — a report about how the government tracks international financial transfers through a banking consortium known as Swift in an effort to pinpoint terrorists. Bill Keller, the executive editor, spoke for the newsroom very clearly. Our own judgments about the uproar that has ensued would be no different if the other papers that published the story, including The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, had acted alone.

Do these two paragraphs look similar?? The one above is from the NYT that was posted here a couple of days ago. The one below is from the WSJ posted here today.........
Pass the buck baby...


We should make clear that the News and Editorial sections of the Journal are separate, with different editors. The Journal story on Treasury's antiterror methods was a product of the News department, and these columns had no say in the decision to publish. We have reported the story ourselves, however, and the facts are that the Times's decision was notably different from the Journal's.


CALL, WRITE, CANCEL
Hit them where it hurts...In their WALLET
 
Stephanie said:
TOO LATE WSJ, as far as I'm concerned....
hummmmm. Compare the two paragraphs below... One is from the Journal and the other is from the NYTs....




As most of our readers know, there is a large wall between the news and opinion operations of this paper, and we were not part of the news side's debates about whether to publish the latest story under contention — a report about how the government tracks international financial transfers through a banking consortium known as Swift in an effort to pinpoint terrorists. Bill Keller, the executive editor, spoke for the newsroom very clearly. Our own judgments about the uproar that has ensued would be no different if the other papers that published the story, including The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, had acted alone.

Do these two paragraphs look similar?? The one above is from the NYT that was posted here a couple of days ago. The one below is from the WSJ posted here today.........
Pass the buck baby...


We should make clear that the News and Editorial sections of the Journal are separate, with different editors. The Journal story on Treasury's antiterror methods was a product of the News department, and these columns had no say in the decision to publish. We have reported the story ourselves, however, and the facts are that the Times's decision was notably different from the Journal's.


CALL, WRITE, CANCEL
Hit them where it hurts...In their WALLET
I already cancelled my print version. I've been ticked with them on the immigration issue for a long time. One thing I'll say for the WSJ, they don't just print the truly nativist responses, but really go for the more reasoned ones. They still keep hammering their POV, but they let the other side present their arguements also.
 
Cyberthieves usin' SWIFT to launder money?...
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Special Report: Cyber thieves exploit banks' faith in SWIFT transfer network
Fri May 20, 2016 | Shortly after 7 p.m. on January 12, 2015, a message from a secure computer terminal at Banco del Austro (BDA) in Ecuador instructed San Francisco-based Wells Fargo to transfer money to bank accounts in Hong Kong.
Wells Fargo complied. Over 10 days, Wells approved a total of at least 12 transfers of BDA funds requested over the secure SWIFT system. The SWIFT network - which allows banks to process billions of dollars in transfers each day - is considered the backbone of international banking. In all, Wells Fargo transferred $12 million of BDA's money to accounts across the globe. Both banks now believe those funds were stolen by unidentified hackers, according to documents in a BDA lawsuit filed against Wells Fargo in New York this year. The two banks declined requests for comment from Reuters. BDA is suing Wells Fargo on the basis that the U.S. bank should have flagged the transactions as suspicious.

Wells Fargo has countered that security lapses in BDA’s own operations caused the Ecuadorean bank’s losses. Hackers had secured a BDA employee’s SWIFT logon credentials, Wells Fargo said in a February court filing. SWIFT, an acronym for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is not a party to the lawsuit. Neither bank reported the theft to SWIFT, which said it first learned about the cyber attack from a Reuters inquiry. "We were not aware,” SWIFT said in a statement responding to Reuters inquiries. “We need to be informed by customers of such frauds if they relate to our products and services, so that we can inform and support the wider community. We have been in touch with the bank concerned to get more information, and are reminding customers of their obligations to share such information with us."

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SWIFT says it requires customer to notify SWIFT of problems that can affect the "confidentiality, integrity, or availability of SWIFT service.” SWIFT, however, has no rule specifically requiring client banks to report hacking thefts. Banks often do not report such attacks out of concern they make the institution appear vulnerable, former SWIFT employees and cyber security experts told Reuters. The Ecuador case illuminates a central problem with preventing such fraudulent transfers: Neither SWIFT nor its client banks have a full picture of the frequency or the details of cyber thefts made through the network, according to more than dozen former SWIFT executives, users and cyber security experts interviewed by Reuters.

The case - details of which have not been previously reported - raises new questions about the oversight of the SWIFT network and its communications with member banks about cyber thefts and risks. The network has faced intense scrutiny since cyber thieves stole $81 million in February from a Bangladesh central bank account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It’s unclear what SWIFT tells its member banks when it does find out about cyber thefts, which are typically first discovered by the bank that has been defrauded. SWIFT spokeswoman Natasha de Terán said that the organization “was transparent with its users” but declined to elaborate. SWIFT declined to answer specific questions about its policies for disclosing breaches.

MORE

See also:

SWIFT tells banks to share information on hacks
May 20, 2016) - International financial messaging service SWIFT told clients on Friday to share information on attacks on the system to help prevent hackings, after criminals used SWIFT messages to steal $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank.
Earlier on Friday Reuters reported that Wells Fargo, Ecuador’s Banco del Austro and Citibank, whose Managing Director, Franchise Risk & Strategy, Yawar Shah, is SWIFT's Chairman, did not inform SWIFT of an attack last year in which over $12 million was stolen from BDA. The banks and Shah all declined to comment. Banks use secure SWIFT messages for issuing payment instructions to each other. The network is considered the backbone of international finance but faith in its security has been rocked by the theft from Bank Bangladesh’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

SWIFT said in a communication to users on Friday that they should “immediately inform SWIFT of any suspected fraudulent use of their institution’s SWIFT connectivity or related to SWIFT products and services.” SWIFT is especially concerned about the use of malware to access interfaces with the SWIFT network. The Belgium-based co-operative, which is owned by its user banks, said it needed technical information from systems which have been compromised with malware to better understand the risks of attack.

Malware was used in the hacks on Bank Bangladesh in February and in the BDA case in January 2015. "It is essential that you share critical security information related to SWIFT with us, "SWIFT said. SWIFT told clients it would notify them as soon as possible of cases where malware had been used to attack systems “so that you can better target your preventative and detective efforts”. SWIFT did not inform clients about the BDA theft because it was unaware of it, a spokeswoman told Reuters.

SWIFT tells banks to share information on hacks
 
Rocket Boy's Lazarus cybergang robbin' banks...
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Cybersecurity Firm: North Korea Likely Behind Taiwan SWIFT Cyber Heist
October 16, 2017 — Cybersecurity firm BAE Systems Plc said on Monday it believes the North Korean Lazarus hacking group is likely responsible for a recent cyber heist in Taiwan, the latest in a string of hacks targeting the global SWIFT messaging system. "The likely culprit is Lazarus," BAE cyber-intelligence chief Adrian Nish told Reuters by telephone.
The British firm has previously linked Lazarus to last year's $81 million cyber heist at Bangladesh's central bank, as have other cyber firms including Russia's Kaspersky Lab and California-based Symantec Corp. BAE's claim that Lazarus is likely responsible for the hack on Taiwan's Far Eastern International Bank demonstrates that North Korea continues to seek to generate cash through hacking.

Nish said he expects the group to continue to target banks. "They are not just going to go away. They've built the tools. They are going to keep going back," he said. Still, he noted that the group appears to have had difficulty in pulling funds out of the banking system, after the massive Bangladesh heist, which prompted SWIFT and banks to boost security controls.

25839D27-6694-43BE-B437-FB16041B2E6E_w1023_r1_s.jpg

A man takes part in a hacking contest during the Def Con hacker convention in Las Vegas, Nevada.​

Taiwan's Central News Agency reported last week that while hackers sought to steal some $60 million from Far Eastern Bank, all but $500,000 had been recovered by the bank. BAE previously disclosed that Lazarus attempted to steal money from banks in Mexico and Poland, though there is no evidence the effort succeeded.

A security executive with SWIFT, a Belgium-based co-operative owned by banks, last week told Reuters that hackers have continued to target the message system this year, though many attempts have been thwarted by the new security controls. SWIFT declined comment on the findings, which BAE detailed in a report on its website. The report provides technical details on malware samples that BAE believes were likely used to target the Taiwan bank.

Cybersecurity Firm: North Korea Likely Behind Taiwan SWIFT Cyber Heist
 

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