The paper deals with an issue that is understudied despite its growing importance for the field of transnational policing, namely financial intelligence. In order to contribute to the reflection on this key component of surveillance practices – or rather dataveillance – the analysis focuses more precisely on the American Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP). Based on a set of relations above, beyond and below the national, this security program contributes to the production of intelligence from a traceability apparatus of financial transactions. The paper aims to explain the conditions for the existence of such a mechanism, which consists of mobilizing large quantities of digital traces generated by a particular form of cross-border transaction. It also aims to challenge the legitimacy of the TFTP in terms of its justification and its ‘successes’.