■"Expanding in an Age of Terror, Western Union Faces Scrutiny: As Fund-Transfer System Grows In Risky Parts of the World, U.S. Questions Oversight," by Glenn R. Simpson, Wall Street Journal, 20 October 2004, p. A1.
Western Union has become a huge conduit of money from Core to Gap in terms of remittances by immigrants and guest workers. Almost 90% of Western Union's money transfers begin in the Old Core of Europe and North America (not including Mexico), and some unclear chunk of those transfers end up in regions defined as Gap (an exact definition here is really hard because Mexico, India, and China are big targets and aren't broken out in the data).
Nowadays, roughly 75% of Western Union's agents work outside the U.S., with 25k alone in China and India, representing the powerful financial flows that bond New Core to Old.
But numbers are skyrocketing in the Middle East too, where 2k units were added last year alone, with a sizeable portion located in Pakistan, which is simultaneously a source of legitimate labor flow to the U.S. and the current HQ of al Qaeda.
In the past, Western Union has—very casually—set up relationships with banks known to be involved in the financing of terrorist networks. They say they "don't need the bad money to make money," but it's clear that code has not kept up with connectivity here. In short, security rule sets have fallen behind technology rule sets.
But guess what? All that connectivity has been abused by transnational terrorist networks as well.
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