Financial Intelligence Collection
FININT involves scrutinizing a large volume of transactional data, usually provided by banks as part of regulatory requirements. Transactions made by certain individuals or entities may be studied. Alternatively, data mining or datamatching techniques may be employed to identify persons potentially engaged in a particular activity.
Where financial institutions are required to make manual reports of certain financial transactions, obtaining this information is a type of HUMINT, just as the reports of military police in a combat zone is HUMINT. Not all HUMINT comes from espionage. Many industrialized countries have such reporting requirements.
It may be possible for the FININT organization to obtain access to raw data at a financial organization. From the collection standpoint, if the data are in computer-readable format, this is a type of SIGINT. From a legal standpoint, this type of collection can be quite complex. For example, the CIA obtained access to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) data streams, but this violated Belgian privacy law.
Reporting requirements do not affect Informal value transfer systems (IVTS), the use of which may simply be customary in a culture, and of amounts that would not require reporting if in a conventional financial institution. IVTS also can be used for criminal purposes of avoiding oversight.
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