Found this on huffpo, hope it isn't a dupe
President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and White House spokesman Tony Snow may be in a tither about the New York Times story on the US monitoring of SWIFT financial transactions, but "The information was fairly well known by terrorism financing experts back in 2002," reports Victor Comras at his Counterterrorism Blog. In fact, though news coverage hasn't mentioned it, the barebones info has been available online since the UN Al-Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Group posted its December 2002 report (33-page pdf document). Comras quotes from paragraph 31 (on page 11 of the pdf):
The settlement of international transactions is usually handled through correspondent banking relationships or large-value message and payment systems, such as the SWIFT, Fedwire or CHIPS systems in the United States of America. Such international clearance centres are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. The Group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries.
more (with several links):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nellie-b/info-about-secret-bank-_b_23980.html