The United Kingdom and the United States have at least four goals in going after terrorist finance: to deprive terrorists of resources, to track operatives, to chart relationships, and to deter individuals from supporting terrorist organizations. Although these aims are critical to the success of a state's counterterrorist strategy, both countries have tried to fulfill them – as they have other counterterrorist objectives – in ways that not only erode the civil rights of their citizens, weakening the standards meant to protect them, but involve significant political, international, and humanitarian costs as well.

In the United Kingdom, the powers to interrupt the flow of funds to paramilitary organizations held by the Northern Ireland executive, and later by the British government, had for decades gone largely unused.