Newsweek: FBI Using Patriot Act to Snoop Your Financial Records

NEW YORK--PRNewswire-- A little-known provision in the Patriot Act is being used by the FBI in cases that aren't tied to terrorism, which the Act was designed to stop, Newsweek reports in editions out this week.

The provision allows the Feds to quickly obtain financial records of suspected terrorists or money launderers, reports Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff in the December 1 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, November 24).

In effect, the Patriot Act allows the Feds to search every financial institution in the country for the records of anybody they have suspicions about -- the very definition, critics say, of a fishing expedition.

Law enforcement agencies can submit the name of any suspect to the Treasury Department, which then orders financial institutions across the country to search their records for any matches.

If they get a "hit" -- evidence that the person has an account -- the financial institution is slapped with a subpoena for the person's records.

Whisked through Congress in the weeks after 9/11, the Patriot Act-which gives federal law enforcement wide-ranging powers to track and eavesdrop on suspected terrorists-was promoted as an urgently needed law to thwart future attacks.

"It's an extraordinary power," says David Aufhauser, a former general counsel at the Treasury Department, who insists the Act is being used responsibly. But in one recent case, "Operation G-String," the Feds used the provision to see the financial records of local officials in Las Vegas that they believed were being bribed by the city's biggest strip-club baron.

It's the Patriot Act's money-laundering language that has allowed the Feds to stretch the way the law can be used. Essentially, money laundering is an effort to disguise illicit profits.

But it's such a broad statute that prosecutors can use it in the pursuit of more than 200 different federal crimes, Isikoff reports. Treasury Department figures reviewed by Newsweek show that this year the Feds have used the Patriot Act to conduct searches on 962 suspects, yielding "hits" on 6,397 financial records. Of those, two thirds (4,261) were in money-laundering cases with no terror connection.

Among the agencies making requests, Newsweek has learned, were the IRS (which investigates tax fraud), the Postal Service (postal fraud) and the Secret Service (counterfeiting). One request came from the Agriculture Department -- a case that apparently involved food stamp fraud.