Terrorist Finance Tracking Program

The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) is a United States government program to access financial transactions on the international SWIFT network that was revealed by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times in June 2006. It was part of the Bush administration's War on Terrorism. After the covert action was disclosed, the so-called SWIFT-agreement was negotiated between the United States and the European Union.

A series of articles published on June 23, 2006, by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times revealed that the United States government, specifically the Treasury and the CIA, had a program to access the SWIFT transaction database after the September 11th attacks.

According to the June 2006 New York Times article, the program helped lead to the capture of an al-Qaeda operative known as Hambali in 2003, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombing, as well as helped identify a Brooklyn man convicted in 2005 for laundering money for an al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan. The Treasury Department and White House responded to the leak the day before it was published, and claimed that the leak damaged counterterrorism activities. They also referred to the program as the "Terrorist Finance Tracking Program" ("TFTP"), similar to the Terrorist Surveillance Program in the NSA wiretapping controversy.

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