Washington ? The Bush administration said Friday an anti-terrorism program that taps into an immense international database of confidential financial records has adequate safeguards to protect Americans’ privacy.

Democrats and civil liberties groups said the effort had disturbing similarities to another controversial anti-terrorism program of warrantless spying on telephone calls and e-mails.

Treasury Secretary John Snow called the financial records effort “government at its best” and said it was “entirely consistent with our democratic values, with our best legal traditions.”

The program, kept secret until it was revealed Thursday by news organizations, has been going on since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Using broad government subpoenas, the program allows U.S. counterterrorism analysts to obtain financial information from a vast database maintained by a company based in Belgium. It routes about 11 million financial transactions daily among 7,800 banks and other financial institutions in 200 countries.

“By following the money, we’ve been able to locate operatives, we’ve been able to locate their financiers, we’ve been able to chart the terrorist networks and we’ve been able to bring the terrorists to justice,” Snow said. “If people are sending money to help al-Qaida, we want to know about it.”

The existence of the program was first reported Thursday night on the Web sites of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. The administration had argued for the media to withhold details.

Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking at a political luncheon in Chicago, denounced the decision to reveal the existence of the financial monitoring program and the earlier-disclosed National Security Agency surveillance program.

“What I find most disturbing about these stories is that some of the news media take it upon themselves to disclose vital national security programs, thereby making it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people,” Cheney said. “That offends me.”

The news organizations defended their decision. Dean Baquet, editor of the Los Angeles Times, said the government’s arguments were considered carefully but in the end the newspaper thought it was “in the public interest to publish information about the extraordinary reach of this program.”