Household HSBC Watch

What HSBC refuses to reveal now be in the hands of the U.S. government.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government gained sweeping access to international banking records as part of a secret program to choke off financial support for terrorism, officials said Thursday. Treasury Department officials said they used broad subpoenas to collect the financial records from an international system known as Swift. Stuart Levey, Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, called the subpoenas “a legal and proper use of our authorities.”

The program involved both the CIA and the Treasury Department.

Swift, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a cooperative based in Belgium that handles financial message traffic from 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries. The service mostly captures information on wire transfers and other methods of moving money in and out of the United States. The service generally doesn’t detect private, individual transactions in the United States, such as withdrawals from an ATM or bank deposits. It is aimed mostly at international transfers.

Previous attempts by the United States to track international HSBC banking transactions met with stonewalling by HSBC, citing laws in other countries. A full and complete audit will soon follow according to sources close to the investigation.