Data sharing deemed critical to tracking terrorist cash

A panel of federal officials on Wednesday told a House subcommittee that information sharing is critical to the reduction of funding to terrorists and said improvements have been made in the area since the terrorist attacks on the United States two years ago.

But an FBI official said law enforcement needs further powers to conduct electronic surveillance and other activities through an extension of a major anti-terrorism law now being sought by the Bush administration.

"We need the tools," John Pistole, assistant director of the FBI counter-terrorism division, told the House Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. "We would like to have additional tools [such as] we have for ordinary criminal acts."

He gave an example of agents being unable to obtain a hotel-registration list without a subpoena, which in one recent case it could not obtain at the time of a midnight investigation. The information would have been checked against FBI records and with the foreign intelligence service, he said.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Michael Oxley, R-Ohio, engaged Pistole in an exchange about the need to renew the so-called USA PATRIOT Act. Oxley supports the act, and Pistole agreed with him that the statute has helped law enforcers share information.

Anthony Wayne, assistant secretary of State for economic and business affairs, said diplomatic initiatives are being developed to get other governments to conduct audits and investigations, exchange information on records, and cooperate with law enforcement and intelligence efforts.

Marcy Forman, deputy assistant director of the financial investigations division in the Homeland Security Department's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said terrorist-related cyber-crime investigations are underway. The bureau's Virginia-based cyber-crime unit is developing several legal cases targeting Web sites that solicit funding for terrorists, she said.

David Aufhauser, general counsel at the Treasury Department, said 320 individuals and entities are publicly designated as terrorists or terrorist supporters by the United States, and nearly $140 million has been frozen since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Aufhauser chairs the interagency policy committee on terrorist financing, which reports to the National Security Council's deputy level on sensitive issues. He called the committee the "switching station" for the government's terrorist-financing strategy and said the group meets every Wednesday in the White House situation room.

"Nothing is more tragically ironic than the liberal use made by our enemies of our technologically advanced, borderless financial world," Aufhauser said. He is leaving Treasury in mid-October and has not decided where he will go next, he said.

On another front, officials agreed that most funding for Hamas, also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, goes toward social services. But Pistole asserted in his testimony that funding for Hamas that goes for social concerns frees other funding for terrorist activities.

When Subcommittee Chairwoman Sue Kelly, R-N.Y., pressed him on the source of that assertion, Pistole hedged. "It's kind of a roundabout answer, to say I have some information but there's a lot more out there," he said.