Analyzing The European Fight Against Terrorism Financing

So, as I mentioned earlier, this thesis dives into the 'SWIFT affair' and the EU’s Third AML/CFT Directive. These are our case studies. And using case studies here is pretty spot-on for three reasons. First off, case studies are great when you're looking at a current topic in a real-life context (Yin, 2009, p. 2). That's exactly what we're doing by exploring how Europe is tackling the financing of terrorism. When the Data Wars project kicked off back in 2008, run by Durham University and the University of Amsterdam (which this thesis is part of), there wasn't much academic info out there on this topic. Focusing on these two case studies helped us gather a lot of detailed information.

Secondly, case studies are handy for looking into social processes (Swanborn, 1994, p. 316). By zeroing in on a specific case, you can analyze interactions at a micro level. This could be stuff like how meanings are created and reproduced, disagreements pop up, steps in decision-making, or mapping out different perspectives and motives of the participants. Analyzing the social processes in these two case studies has been key to studying the exercise of power in the name of Europe's fight against terrorism.

Thirdly, a case study lets you dig deep into a complex issue (Swanborn, 1996, p. 38). Unlike a causal model that measures specific pre-defined variables among lots of respondents at the time of the survey, a case study looks at a range of meaningful features or causes of one specific case over time. So, basically, case studies can offer a holistic approach (Swanborn, 1996, p. 26, Yin, 2009, p. 4). This holistic aspect is why case studies are often used in governmentality studies. The chosen case studies need to fit the core concepts of the research question (Klotz, 2009). The SWIFT affair and the Third Directive were picked because they show how Europe is tackling terrorism financing. Both are examples of using personal financial data for security and counter-terrorism purposes in Europe. They're also part of a bigger move towards using commercial databases for security purposes. But they also have key differences. The Third Directive is a legal framework about suspicious transaction reporting that hasn't stirred much controversy. It's a specific and detailed tool that mainly affects the banking and financial sectors. Because it's not very controversial and mostly affects the internal workings of certain businesses, it's been pretty invisible. On the other hand, the SWIFT affair has been very visible and controversial because it involved the transfer and surveillance of international wire transfers, which were initially illegal under European law. In this case, the US and European political scenes play an important role. The difference between these two cases helps provide a more complete understanding of the practices in the European fight against terrorism financing. The next section will discuss the qualitative research tools used to investigate the two cases.

Documentary Research and Textual Analysis

Besides studying academic literature, this thesis is based on a lot of documentary research. This includes analyzing official reports from public and private authorities, press releases, political statements, laws, policy documents, transcripts of parliamentary hearings and debates, international press articles, internet blogs, and journalistic books. These sources have been super valuable for seeing how the European fight against terrorism financing has been defined and represented. Documentary research helps in reconstructing events, tracing decision-making processes, and examining the range of arguments and opinions of the participants in this fight. It also helps shed light on the techniques of governing. For example, legislative texts outline the actions required from banks and financial service providers, and banks' annual reports often mention what steps they've taken to comply with the law. Journalistic works were crucial for reconstructing the practices developed in the Terrorism Finance Tracking Program (TFTP). In Chapter 4, documents have been systematically used for textual analysis to investigate how participants in the field governing terrorism financing supported or contested the TFTP. This section discusses the potential pitfalls of documentary research and the adopted methodology for textual analysis.

Although official documents seem to be stable and objective evidence, they are actually socially produced for a certain purpose based on certain ideas, theories, or principles (Atkinson & Coffey, 2004, Bryman, 2008, Gilbert 2008). So, it's important to reflect on the interpretation and meaning of documents. Scott (1990) outlines four criteria for assessing the quality of documents. First, the authenticity of the documents needs to be established. Since most documents used in this thesis are recent and available through libraries or official websites of the investigated public and private authorities or media outlets, it's unlikely they are falsified or wrongly copied. So, authenticity hasn't been a big concern. Authenticity can also be an issue when the authorship of the articles is unclear (Bryman, 2008, p. 525). However, in this thesis, this hasn't been a problem.

Secondly, the credibility of the texts is important. You might wonder if quotes from anonymous sources in journalistic books or articles are reliable. But even official statements by politicians and government officials can be biased and contrast strongly with the actual legal arrangements. The credibility of the text can be assessed by asking: Who produced the document? Does the author have an interest in distorting the truth? And why, when, and in what context was the text written? (Gilbert, 2008, p. 294). While it's important to know if statements or documents can be attributed with certainty to a person or organization, the aim in this thesis isn't to establish the credibility of texts in terms of being representative of the truth. Instead, it's through the confrontation of differences in the presentation and interpretation of arguments and facts that the rationalities underpinning the European fight against terrorism become visible and can be understood.

A third criterion is the representativeness of the document or the set of documents. This issue has been especially important for the textual analysis discussed below. Generally, with the help of Internet search engines and public databases, a wide range of documents published by public and private actors have been consulted on each of the case studies. However, only official and publicly available documents have been consulted. Internal or confidential correspondence, minutes, and memos fall outside the scope of this research. Lastly, Scott (1990) states that the meaning of the document needs to be established. Here, a distinction can be made between the literal meaning and the interpretative understanding. According to him, ‘interpretation requires an understanding of the particular definitions and recording practices adopted and of the genre and stylization used in the text’ (p. 30). The hermeneutic process of interpretation goes further as it also involves an understanding of individual concepts, the social and cultural context in which the various concepts are related in a particular discourse, and a judgment on the meaning and significance of the text as a whole (Scott, 1990, p. 31). So, to interpret the meaning of the text, it's important to investigate the situation and the intentions of the author as well as the societal context in which the text was written. This kind of interpretative research can be done through textual analysis.

Chapter 4 offers a textual analysis of the debates concerning the SWIFT affair in the US and the EU. There are various approaches to textual analysis, ranging from semiotics to more quantitative forms of context analysis. In Chapter 4, the approach followed by Huysmans and Buonfino (2008) has been adopted. In their article, they investigated how and in what instances British politicians represent or contest connections between terrorism and immigration. For their analysis, they selected all parliamentary debates on terrorism that took place in the House of Commons and the House of Lords during a certain period. They chose the dates following 9/11 and the Madrid bombings. They also included some key debates held in 2005, especially those after the London bombings, to see if any important changes had occurred. In the first stage, Huysmans and Buonfino searched the written transcriptions of the parliamentary debates through Hansard, the edited verbatim reports of the proceedings of the British parliament, using the keyword ‘terrorism’. Then, they refined their search using words related to immigration. Next, debates containing both themes were read for meaning, structure, and connection with other themes. They analyzed how certain dangers were politicized and how insecurity was framed around the migration/terrorism connection (2008, p. 768).

Chapter 4 looks into how and when the SWIFT affair was (de)politicized in the US and the EU. The main sources for this analysis are newspaper articles. Two reasons explain this choice. First, journalists initially revealed the SWIFT affair, and most information has been published by the press. Plus, newspaper articles are where the multiple participants involved (political leaders, privacy groups, law-enforcement officers, and spokespeople from SWIFT) interact and different opinions can be traced. While other sources, including parliamentary debates, international agreements, court rulings, and the study of the relations between participants in the field, are also considered and enhance our understanding of the SWIFT affair, they are less comprehensive in terms of the quantity of information and often offer a less all-round view of the affair. However, the importance of investigative journalism for our analysis of the SWIFT affair brings up some reflection on the value and risks of using media sources. Gilbert emphasizes that the media are selective in what they decide to publish and from what angle they report on issues (2008, p. 289). This selectivity and even self-censorship is illustrated in the discussion of the revelation of the SWIFT affair in Chapter 4 and is also discussed in the context of the discussion of the SWIFT program as a black box in Chapter 5. Additionally, it's important to remember that newspaper articles may contain errors in the facts they present, they may be subject to distortion at the level of the editor, the journalist, or the initial source, and they are written with a specific audience in mind (Gilbert, 2008, p. 289). These potential risks have been carefully considered in the examination of newspaper articles. The textual analysis of the debates on the SWIFT affair in the US and the EU is based on newspaper articles available in the Lexis-Nexis newspaper database from 23 June 2006—the revelation of the SWIFT affair—to 31 August 2010, the month during which the latest US-EU agreement was adopted. This database contains all major and regional American and European newspapers as well as Canadian, Australian, and Asian newspapers. All English, French, and Dutch newspapers offered in the database have been included in the search and systematically investigated (for a complete overview see Annex 2). I believe that this comprehensive approach, yet with a focus on the leading US and EU newspapers, constitutes a representative selection for the analysis of newspaper articles. The articles on the SWIFT affair have been selected by searching for the acronym “SWIFT.” Subsequently, all articles containing the word ‘swift’ but referring to, for instance, a specific car, football clubs, or doing something rapidly instead of the SWIFT affair were filtered out. Additional searches were made using the words “banking data.” The next stage involved reading the articles and searching for and listing the arguments made in relation to the SWIFT affair. Which words were used? Which themes were raised in the debate? Which arguments were used to defend the various views held in the SWIFT affair? Which solutions were proposed to ‘solve’ the SWIFT affair?

One last thing about document research is that organizations' official documents usually leave out social interaction and struggles, as they are seen as irrelevant or undesirable for the final version of the document. For this reason, Atkinson and Coffey (2004) argue that documents have a distinctive ontological status, in that they form a separate reality, which they call a “documentary reality.” To complement and question this “documentary reality,” interviews with key persons have been conducted.