The United States continues to fight the war on terror - not with blood, but with zeroes and bytes and bank accounts.
The attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 launched a new kind of war, one waged with surveillance cameras and computer databases.
After 9/11, it became clear the terrorists needed more than ideology to launch their attacks. U.S. intelligence started combing through data - watching travel patterns, electronic communications, and the movement of money.
Fighting financing
Counterterrorism expert Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy says, it turns out that fighting the financing of transnational threats is an effective way of disrupting the activities of the enemy.
"If you send me money, that means something," Levitt explains. "It might not mean that you're important or I'm important, but that we are middlemen in something that is more important.”
And Levitt notes that finding the middlemen can lead to finding the major players in terrorist plots.
To do that, the U.S. created a new agency within the Treasury Department. Stuart Levey of the Council on Foreign Relations says it’s the only finance ministry in the world with a full-fledged intelligence office. “But,” he adds, “it reflects an important insight - which is that financial intelligence is highly reliable."
The agency has learned that about a half-million dollars used to carry out the 9/11 attacks was funneled through banks in Europe and the Middle East to the hijackers waiting in the United States.
The attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 launched a new kind of war, one waged with surveillance cameras and computer databases.
After 9/11, it became clear the terrorists needed more than ideology to launch their attacks. U.S. intelligence started combing through data - watching travel patterns, electronic communications, and the movement of money.
Fighting financing
Counterterrorism expert Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy says, it turns out that fighting the financing of transnational threats is an effective way of disrupting the activities of the enemy.
"If you send me money, that means something," Levitt explains. "It might not mean that you're important or I'm important, but that we are middlemen in something that is more important.”
And Levitt notes that finding the middlemen can lead to finding the major players in terrorist plots.
To do that, the U.S. created a new agency within the Treasury Department. Stuart Levey of the Council on Foreign Relations says it’s the only finance ministry in the world with a full-fledged intelligence office. “But,” he adds, “it reflects an important insight - which is that financial intelligence is highly reliable."
The agency has learned that about a half-million dollars used to carry out the 9/11 attacks was funneled through banks in Europe and the Middle East to the hijackers waiting in the United States.
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