A Leviathan Rejuvenated: Surveillance, Money Laundering, and the War on Terror

Abstract

Efforts to prevent and preempt further terrorist attacks in the United States and other developed countries have intruded into many spheres of public and private life. This article provides a short assessment of the redeployment of anti-money laundering regimes to combat the financing of terrorism. This expansion of financial surveillance is directed by international organizations and domestic legislation in the belief that terrorists and their financiers may be found, identified and detained. After providing background to the antimoney laundering regime, the article looks at the domestic and extraterritorial application of the USA PATRIOT Act. One conclusion of this analysis finds that a financial panopticon has coalesced out of the wide range of financial and non-financial businesses now required to report "suspicious financial activity."A variety of actions, initiatives and programs began as a response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. These "counter-terror" movements comprise what the U.S. Administration identified as a global war on terror and they operate both in full public knowledge and in secret (until revealed to the public by the media). Many domestic measures introduced to counter terrorism at the same time serve to reduce civil liberties, again both visibly and invisibly. Some of them conduct searches to identify and reveal the Int J Polit Cult Soc (A respectful nod of acknowledgement must be made to an anonymous referee for suggesting that the presence of the Leviathan in this article should start with the title. The revised version of this article benefited greatly from work completed while I was a member of the London School of Economics team in the European Commission-funded project CHALLENGE (The Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security) and I remain grateful for the financial support received during that time. For more information on the scope and dimensions of the project, see <www.libertysecurity.org>.

Financial Surveillance

“…While critical academic studies on financial surveillance blossom (e.g. Amicelle 2011b; Amoore & De Goede 2008;Favarel-Garrigues, Godefroy & Lascoumes 2011b;Naylor 2006;Passas 2006;Vlcek 2008;Warde 2008), they hardly pay attention to the critical capability of those who are involved in the implementation of anti-money-laundering/countering terrorist financing (AML/CTF) policy. In this paper we attempt precisely this analysis of existing mobilizations which contest the everyday implementation of AML/CTF standards.…”

(Il)légitimité du renseignement financier

“…(Zarate, 2013, pp. 46-48) Une part significative des stratégies déployées en ce sens au cours des années 2000 a essentiellement renforcé et sensiblement reconfiguré des mécanismes préexistants tels que les dispositifs anti-blanchiment (Favarel-Garrigues, 2003 ;Levi, 2010 ;Sheptycki, 2000 ;Vlcek, 2008). À cet exercice somme toute classique de conversion-adaptation du déjà-là s'est ajoutée une série d'initiatives inédites, à commencer par la mise sur pied du programme de traque du financement du terrorisme sous l'égide du Trésor américain dès octobre 2001 (Terrorist Finance Tracking Program ; ci-après TFTP).…”

Competitive or Coercive? The Experience of Caribbean Offshore Financial Centres with Global Governance

“…The invitation to selected 'emerging' economies to participate in a subset of these organizations or the creation of a new forum intended to facilitate dialogue between the political/economic elites from developing states with developed state elites does not fundamentally change this situation. 5 A firm demonstration of the continued hegemonic role of the US in these emerging structures of global financial governance as security is found in the increased emphasis placed on combating terrorist financing since 2001 (Vlcek, 2008a).…”

“…It is necessary even in locations of a low risk from terrorism because surveillance results in displacement, thus high levels of surveillance here will lead to those seeking to avoid the surveillance to move their financial transactions to locations of reduced surveillance and to develop other 'avoidance of surveillance' measures (Schoofs, 2007;Vlcek, 2008a). In other words, in order to mitigate (reduce) the risk here, it has become necessary to control risks everywhere (Aradau and Van Munster, 2007).…”