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NSA Spies On International Payments
jones_supa writes "The National Security Agency (NSA) widely monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions, according to documents seen by SPIEGEL. Information acquired by the former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, show that the spying is conducted by a branch called Follow the Money (FTM). The collected information then flows into the NSA's own financial databank, called Tracfin, which in 2011 contained 180 million records. Some 84 percent of the data is from credit card transactions."
NSA knows what you are up to with your credit card
And my wife ask me why I don't like to pay with any plastic cards (credit and/or debit)... I always pay cash whenever i can. Even if all my transactions are legal, some could be frowned upon but not illegal (not yet), I don't like my bank or any other private corporation to know what I do and what i like.
Is it really news that a spy agency is spying? "oh look at them doing their job!"
Does this mean that the NSA is PCI Compliant?
Large country with large economy has large national debt. News at 11.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Since, to my knowledge, the financial networks use multiple levels of encryption, I wonder if the VPN boxes used have NSA-prescribed backdoors in them. Is it in fact possible to buy a VPN box without backdoor?
Don't you mean reasonably sized country, over inflated economy, and massive national debt?
Oh wait! you must be American and have no clue what's past your own borders.
Please tell us instead what websites/activities are NOT monitored by NSA, thank you!
Another reason why Bitcoin and services accepting it rock.
"Follow the money" is exactly what one should do if one wants to know the true motives of those who run the spying business. It's ultimately nothing but a justification for billions in spending -- and billions in profit for the elite few at the top. As usual, power is merely a stepping stone to the real goal: money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-sdO6pwVHQ
to report on the two or three things the feds DON'T have their noses in (legally or otherwise)?
extra credit points: name those things..
"The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice."
This is a quote, not mine, but a quote nonetheless that holds relevance. When do we tear down the walls and regain our country?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
If a nation were like a computer programming project, we would write tests to continually ensure its correct operation. One test would be to ensure that voters, not the government, are in control of their own nation.
What kind of test would make sure it is so? Maybe successfully voting a new party in power, one that has never before been on top?
sent to my work address ... now will look even more suspicious.
The 3rd largest country in the world is not a large sized country? I am an American and apparently know what is outside my own boarders better than you do.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
I'd be VERY worried if the only powerful multicultural country on Earth wasn't watching what racist groups the Chinese and Japs are supporting financially. I'd give them more funding!
I may for things as much as I can in CASH. Cash is anonymous and won't snitch on you.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I have a bunch of CDs that I've ordered, and the arrival rate is rather spotty over here in Oz....
Now they know I bought keys to open dominion lockboxes in Star Trek Online.
You are right. I am completely unaware of other examples around the world, like Europe's debt crisis, China gargantuan housing bubble, or Dubai's great model economy of sitting on flare without matching substance. I am also completely ignorant to the fact that the US does *not* have the highest debt to gdp ratio. Good thing too, because in this simple black and white world we live in, if I knew these facts then I must not care about or acknowledge our debt or economy issues. Either I must think everything is fine or dandy, or that our economy is the worst and we're evil for it. Some how.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Many companies with which I do business (insurance, bank, utilities, medical, credit card, etc.) asked me to switch to paperless billing and notifications. In the spirit of progress I did so.
But now, with all the government snooping, I am changing back, forcing all these companies to snail mail all their paperwork. And I mail them paper checks. It my small protest against their collusion with the NSA.
If they can assure me that they are not willing to share my data with the government, and that my https interactions are not being hacked, I might relent.
Also, I have noticed that they want to send you all legal communications over the internet, but will not reciprocate and allow you to do the same with them.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I'm sick of these NSA stories. They're breaking the law, but Obama doesn't have the balls to send their ass to prison.
FTFY.
NSA was set up from the start to spy on foreign transactions. Its purpose was to provide inside information to Wall Street from its beginning. Spying on people is just a sideline.
Don't stop where the ink does.
Going on a rant where random words are in bold or italics is a shortcut to having everyone quickly dismiss you as another random crazy person ! It's just one of those heuristics that people develop to weed out bullshit on the Internet.
In the scale of credit card transactions, 180 million, the number of records referenced in the article, is not a large number. Does this imply that there is very specific targeting going on? If so, FTM is doing some filtering before passing on the data.
And, yes, I'm pretty sure that the NSA's Tracfin would pass a PCI audit. It does, however, mean that a lot of QSRs have not been considering if companies' and processors' environments are vulnerable to government agencies as part of their audits.
Relatively speaking, our national debt isn't too bad compared to our GDP. Many European countries have considerably higher ratios. That's not to say it isn't a concern, but there are many in much worse states than we are.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I am pretty sure, terrorists and spies have sex too, so additionally, lets monitor all bedrooms.
Why not just get it over with and use that headline instead? Let's face it, they're either Big Brother at this point, or they're trying VERY HARD to be.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
"The NSA's Tracfin data bank also contained data from the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a network used by thousands of banks to send transaction information securely. "
EU Commission GAVE them Europe's Swift data, on promise they wouldn't misuse it. I suspected NSA had political leverage over the EU Commission because the EU Commission can enforce the privacy right but has not right to *waive* the privacy right. Yet that was exactly what they did. They decided it was proportionate to hand the EU Bank data to the US on condition they pretended not to misuse it. You are unlikely to see a reversal of this policy, despite the new revelations because there is something wrong with the EU Commissioners, I suspect political leverage.
Watch SEPA, the European bank transfer system, this was largely driven by Germany to replace SWIFT. Just as its due to become mandatory in Europe, we have marketing for data exchange among G20 countries. I bet you'll see the EU Commission find a way to hand that SEPA data to the UK, which in turn hands it to the NSA, or perhaps they'll have the balls to hand it directly to NSA.
That data will contain all Europes commercial transactions, every euro cent spent by companies to employees, suppliers, every sale, every order. That's just the commercially sensitive data.
It means they have a track record of every card purchase on every potential political candidate, campaigner, reporter, politician, civil servant, judge, jury member, lawyer, teacher, everyone. If you donate to a political party or a cause the NSA doesn't like, they have record of that donation. I bet US transactions are in there too, they're the easiest to grab. It will be like the phone meta data, all grabbed, all data mined.
Tracfin (Traitement du renseignement et action contre les circuits financiers clandestins) is a service of the French Ministry of Finances. It fights money laundering. Tracfin is a unit of French Ministry for Economy, Finance and Industry and the Ministry for the Budget, Public Accounts, the Civil Service and State Reform with a state-wide reach. Since its foundation in 1990 its aim is to fight against illegal financial operations, money laundering and terrorism financing. Annual report 2010 brings an interesting overview of the Tracfins activities.
I'm pretty sure the sexual relations of terrorists or spies has nothing to do with national security so your analogy is stupid. Also monitoring all bedrooms implies that you think they're monitoring all financial transactions. I'm confident if they were monitoring all transactions there would be a lot more than 180 million records.
May I suggest that you go back to being home-schooled by granny where you can learn all about creationism and on the weekend you can go to church and dance with snakes in the hope that you'll get closer to god. Because, there is only one fucked up place on this planet that considers that shit the "social norm".
Hmmm, sounds more like some parts of India or Africa to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_worship
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
You're wrong. Because things like the European debt crisis was fed by the GFC which was originally fueled by fuckups caused in the US market.
Don't allude yourself. The US is no shining pillar because any of this. The US is an international loan shark fed by its military muscle. Take Syria for example. Your president has shown weakness to the world for not indiscriminately bombing the shit out of it. As a result the USD has fallen. Now why is that? Is that because you guys know how to run a successful economy and offer true value to the world? Or is it because of the international perception of the US and how it bullies the middle east and other nations?
Unless you show me a clear example of the former. I'll stick to believing the latter thank you very much!
Here in Canada, we've phased out the penny, and are in the process of phasing out printed cheques for government payments. Curious to see how long it will take for physical cash in its entirety to make its way into obsolescence, thus opening the gates for controlled/monitored transactions...
http://www.deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws.english/News/130916_Belgacom
Belgium's federal public prosecutors have said that the bugging of the Belgian telecom giant was probably the work of 'international state-sponsored cyber espionage'. Earlier it emerged that Belgacom's internal systems had been hacked for a period of two years.
The former state telecom monopoly and Belgium's largest telecommunications operator has confirmed the news of the hacking. The daily De Standaard believes that the US intelligence service NSA is behind the espionage.
The hacking came to light after Belgacom enlisted the services of a specialised Dutch firm to check its operations. It emerged that the company's communications infrastructure had been infected with sophisticated malware. As a result outsiders have been able to listen in to Belgacom's systems.
You have an unusual view of the states, to consider minority religious practices as the norm.
And I'll note, that WE home-schooled, due to the totally inadequate results of the local elementary and middle schools.
Hell, **I** had a larger and more varied library than the local elementary and middle schools combined.
As for homeschooling results, both daughers passed their GED at 15, the earliest age allowed at the time, and both are 3.5 GPAs or better in college. Both can code, know history (American and World), and speak several languages (English, Spanish, French, German, and smatterings of Russian and Japanese. . . ),
And as for religion: I'm agnostic, wife is a Spiritualist, and the daughters are Pagan and Atheist, respectively.
So, you were saying ???
So according to your logic if there was 7m countries on the planet, each having 1000 people average, but one of them having 2000, it would not be a large country because your lose grasp on relative terms only allows you one option? When we deal with relatives there are many different things you can be relative to. Relative to all the other countries on the planet (except India and China) the USoA is a Very large country, with 50% more people than number 4
Also I will stick with my math and science. Also as to your last sentence, there are logs of fucked up places on the earth where that is considered the social norm, most of them are in the middle east, but there are plenty elsewhere.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Why is "spying" continually on /. front pages???? We know. We knew this. This has been known for decades. This is not new behavior for the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other foreign and domestic intelligence and law enforcement agencies. I don't see them stopping any time soon.
How about some REAL news fro a change /.? Ah, here's one. NEWSFLASH - America IS NOT the only country spying! OMG! What do we do? Wait, most people already knew that. How about going back to nerd news instead of naive activist brain candy?
Then fuck off. CNN has a story on the front page about Hilary running in 2016. Maybe you should go show your support over there instead.
I'm sure they'll bring this post up when they have me in a dark room with jumper cables hooked up to my testicles."Not so funny now, is it, bitch?"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The Muslims have been right all this time, America IS the prime evil on the planet today.
Bitcoin, by itself, allows freedom of transaction, but not necessarily privacy. It is attainable, but not in a fool-proof way.
We need to get used to separating our different trading identities, just like we do for communicating identities. We also need to get used to obfuscating our location, either constantly, or again by exiting from different IP's for different identities.
All this is easily attainable with a few scripts on modern operating systems, Bitcoin, TOR and maybe some VPN accounts. What we don't have is systems that do this out of the box, so that we have different GPG keys, Bitcoin wallets, IP's, e-mail accounts, etc. for our different identities as a basic operating principle. I would love to see such a system implemented; it should be fairly straightforward to do as a Linux distro.
I'm saying well done.
Yup, pretty sure I'm going to end up in a dark room somewhere with *cough* Freedom cables hooked up to my testicles.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So according to your logic if there was 7m countries on the planet, each having 1000 people average, but one of them having 2000, it would not be a large country because your lose grasp on relative terms only allows you one option? When we deal with relatives there are many different things you can be relative to. Relative to all the other countries on the planet (except India and China) the USoA is a Very large country, with 50% more people than number 4
Split hairs in whatever way makes you feel better. Reasonable is not small but saying that you have a large population compared to other nations is bullshit. You even named the two countries that boast countries exponentially larger than the US population wise.
Also I will stick with my math and science. Also as to your last sentence, there are logs of fucked up places on the earth where that is considered the social norm, most of them are in the middle east, but there are plenty elsewhere.
Yes the middle east I was hoping you'd bring that up. You might want to ponder that comparison for a while ...
Many more three-letter agencies are known to monitor international payments. I would have been surprised if the NSA wasn't monitoring them.
The company my dad works at has a very generic, uninspired name and it happens to be the same as one of the front companies used by the Iranian nuclear programme. Equipment purchases are often blocked and won't be allowed through until someone has a chat with US authorities to remind them that they're still not smuggling parts for Iran's reactors.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And yes, spies having sexual relationships is a common way for them to get access classified data, so you just didn't get my analogy. Who is stupid now?
My taint.
That I know of.
Firstly, the dollar, like any other currency, rises and falls for whatever reason the markets see fit.
It's "Don't delude yourself" not "Don't allude yourself" as allude means to indirectly refer to.
Don't delude yourself by thinking that the market crisis of the last 5 years was the U.S. fault in entirety. It was the fault of banks around the world who sucked at the teet of bad debts. Look at what the international banks did to Greece and Spain.
65033 54423 98954 12195 66564 14332 76775 48442
If you can crack that, I'll give you a cookie. (60 year old encryption that the NSA's best can never crack.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm saying that the fact you felt the need to home school due to the "totally inadequate results of the local elementary and middle schools" says how fucked up your country is.
So not only do you have a loose grasp on relatives, but exponential as well, or can you tell me which of those 2 countries boast more than 90,000,000,000,000,000? That would be tough since that would be much larger than the population of earth, Or do you mean exponential as in it is larger than that of the US, but does not really reach a square or larger? A more apt statement would be by a factor, of about 4 really.
Yes, what about the middle east statement was factually inaccurate? a lot of those countries require worship of specific religions or you can be killed, or are you disputing that most of the countries that do what you state are in the middle east? Or are you make an idiotic assertion that I dislike the middle east for some reason?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
That's really trivial!
All those data are already in electronic format, possibly a standard format, along with all the users' details.
Amounts of money and timestamps, transaction IDs, shop and ATM codes (with GIS data)...
It's just like the call metadata the telcos are providing to them.
I would have be puzzled in case the NSA was not colecting them ...
"Exponentially larger" isn't a sensible phrase. What you would probably look for here would generally be 'order(s) of magnitude' larger. However, the largest country is China, with ~1.25 billion, which is not even a single order of magnitude larger than the US and it's ~300 Million.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Wait, do you want us to show our military muscle or not? Most countries including our own dont like war.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
...to hear how HSBC managed to launder money for drug cartels and transfer money to Iranian banks without the NSA knowing about it. And how about that LIBOR-rigging scandal? Must've slipped under the radar, I guess.
So you've come on to /. to discuss violations of the US constitution enacted by the NSA, which is really at the end of the day, a government agency. And you're leaning on figures released by a government agency as your point to a discussion?
It is another point of association that allows a person to be connected to others. I don't know about them, but it would seem that with the right memory and compute power it would be possible to model the entire society like weather. It would be a simpler task than weather as it is very granular. I could even imagine some type of Navier Stokes / finite element analysis that would tell you what might happen tomorrow.
It is only worrisome if the people who do it are crooked and politicians are known for their honesty and commitment to people's interest above all possibility of personal gain. Just look at , um, okay I will think of an example, give me a minute.
And that made me think of something that would be excluded and that seems wrong. If I am tracking money and I find that a large amount of money flows from company "A" through a dozen twisty little passages and ends up in a politicians pocket and that next day they vote to give them a specific contract, that would be an indicator of graft and I would bet that it would be excluded as a matter of course as those same people decide how much money the NSA will get to play with. Sounds like a great tool. Senator, we need another trillion, and by the way, nobody will ever pick up on how you paid for your secretary's abortion, who really owns her condo or where she bought that whip, without the type of technology we have.
What are the odds that the amount of money flowing from the banks to congress would be made public. I did a quick Markov matrix of it and it came up with NaN. Who is Nan? Perhaps it is too small and fails, because it couldn't be too big and fail.
Large country with large economy has large national debt. News at 11.
My neighbor is up to his knees in debt, and thus it is okay for me to do the same. I am sure there is something about "if your friends jump off a cliff", that my mother used to say, but I don't recall.
the market crisis of the last 5 years was the U.S. fault in entirety. It was the fault of banks around the world who sucked at the teet of bad debts. Look at what the international banks did to Greece and Spain.
Please read the following Wikipedia articles ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Banking_Facility
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman_Brothers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman_Brothers#Collapse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_International_Group#Financial_crisis
You replied to the wrong person.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Of course it does, it's one way they make more terrorists!
Ever watch a James Bond movie? That territory is extremely well traveled.
They know it when the tax and purchase records are sent from stores to government.
It doesn't matter what you do - the whole community is monitored.
And their operations are solely funded by you American citizens.
So a local issue, as in local elementary and middle school, shows how fucked up the entire country is? Do you even understand logic?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
.... the totally inadequate results of the local elementary and middle schools.
So, you were saying ???
I was think you agree with us, then: The social norms place the USA in the middle of the list (not near the top as most of the residents like to believe).
No sig today...
Just read the GP's post in the voice of The Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started A Conversation With At A Party.
"Don't allude yourself, Seth!"
Lets see... 7 billion people / 206 countries is an average of 33 million people per country, so YES, 300+ million people is in fact a large country. Nobody said we are a majority of the worlds population, just a large country. You should perhaps work on your basic math skills and reading comprehension prior to speaking in public.
AJ Henderson
Sorry to say tho, but the US debt is an issue cause the US GDP is dominated by high income entities, rather than the middle class. As such there's no tax-able base to repay.
You replied to the wrong person.
No, I am pretty sure this is the right windmill and it was tilting at me.
NSA should be monitoring their use. When sharpened they could cause a death by million cuts at any time, any place.
[Citation Needed] So far, the US debt, just like the number of people in jail per capita are still #1 by a factor of 10. Don't forget health care costs per capita too.
Bonus points if one can spell "flair" properly.
Please only inform me when it's something NSA doesn't spy on!
No, the US debt is not, the UK has more than half the debt the US has. In fact to get to factor of 10 we would have to go all the way doen to number 11, as Luxembourg, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Germany, France, and the UK all are within that factor.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Freedom of the press to expose this crap means little if the corporate overlords owning the media get to play the very same role we the people fear the government itself taking.
Whether it's from the government or the corporate elite, censorship is censorship.
Just like an overcooked steak.
They spy on national money transfers as well.
Or do you think they draw the line just when things don't end up in the same country?
SWIFT does a LOT of transactions between banks.
When you do a payment in Belgium to a company, it takes 2 to three days (even at the same bank) because they need that much time to prevent terrorism.
It would be great if the people reading those messages would work on the weekend as well, because it takes 2 to 3 WORKING days. No transactions on the weekend.
And in Europe when they say 'because of terrorism' they mean 'We hand it over to the USofA.' (Insert joke about the USA being the real terrorists.)
Interesting part at the end
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
My stats teacher would fail me for even asserting such nonsense. with over 67000 elementary schools in the US 1 school by itself would be the worst kind of sample used for a statistical analysis. Even still your arguments problem has everything to do with logic. You made the claim that something messed up locally was indicative of a national issue , without any supporting base for such an argument.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
You can google debt gdp, and it will usually be in the top results. But put together, here you go: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703789104576272891515344726.html . As you can easily see, we *are* not #1. Up there, yes, but still close to much of the western world. We have a very big economy compared to the average country. Obviously our raw national debt is going to be higher. Basic math. It's like complaining that your friend takes out a bigger loan than you, but you neglect to mention that he also has a bigger salary. Now if said friend takes on a bigger loan relative to his salary than you, then that's another story.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Also, I used flare correctly.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I used to write finance software for a living, so I've actually been responsible for putting the hooks into systems that alert and in some cases silently block these transactions. There are actual federal regulations stating we need to do this, and this isn't a new thing - this predates modern banking. The difference is that more and more international names are landing on the list.
The funny thing is that most of this tracking is astoundingly, mind numbingly bad.
I have the most experience with banking (as opposed to credit card transactions), so here's a quick explanation that works:
1) The feds provide us a list, occasionally updated. Format is a plain text file with names of suspects, 1 per line, all caps.
2) We have to do an exact match - if the name of the sender or recipient exactly equals one of the lines, then we tag it, and it's up to the bank manager to deal with it from there. They authorize or not the transaction during the end of day clearing house, or alert the feds or whomever.
That's it. It's sort of like setting up a spam blocker for an explicit email address. It's hilariously trivial.
Now, once transactions go over a certain size, those are independently reported right to the federal reserve, so those may be subject to much more analysis, but evasion is as simple as keeping transfer size low and adding an extra letter to the recipient's name.
There are some caveats; transaction often have to bounce through many entities, but tracking this way is often very difficult since there's no guarantee which ACH a given transaction is bouncing through - each bank uses it's own set based on contracts and legal agreements between countries. Reconciling source and target becomes painful, to say the least.
To recap: 1) they've always done this, 2) they don't seem to be very good at real time tracking
Is it just me or does that name seem inspired by 1984?
Shall we start calling the NSA "Minipriv" (Ministry of Privacy)?
Come on people, don't fall for NSA shills who try to derail the conversation. They don't want us to talk about their domestic and international spying. Actually, before this story even broke I had resolved to pay with cash as much as possible. I'm thinking of getting one of those visa prepaid cards and occasionally putting $$$ on it (using cash, of course). It's one of the few privacy things I can do.
What sucks major donkey balls is my medical records are now electronic, which means they're now in nsa's HealthInt db, I can only presume.
You don't cook steak. You show it a candle and listen for the MOOOOO.
if it was "It was the fault of banks around the world who sucked at the teet of bad debts" than you cannot also make the claim that it was the US' fault in entirely, since those 2 statements would be contradicting.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
And, in reality, it was due to several rather f-ed up teachers who couldn't be fired due to union rules.
Example: 8th Grade Earth Science: Homework for one entire week: a word-search puzzle.
Example: 2nd Grade Science: Animal-rights indoctrination with "guest speakers" from PETA. No countering opinions,
That was ONE week. Another was an English teacher who told my oldest that "Tom Sawyer" was an inappropriate choice for a book report, said book report assignment was "Write a book report on a classic piece of American Literature". When I pressed for examples of "appropriate" books, none were given, but my suggested alternatives of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" and "The Wizard of Oz" were "too anglo-centric". . . /boggle.
About three months of similar experiences, and we decided we could do better ourselves. I cannot speak for others, just relating why WE did it. I will note that MOST of the parents in the local homeschooling group were NOT Evangelical Christians, but generally college-educated techies and professionals. Your mileage may, of course, vary. . .
"Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix." - Harry Truman
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Yeah, come on. Look at some real stats. The US is solidly mid-table of the OECD in education rankings.
Don't allude yourself.
Did you mean "don't indirectly suggest or call attention to yourself" or did your spell checker incorrectly "repair" a misspelling of "delude"?
Free Martian Whores!
Uh, no. The word you were looking for is FLAIR.
You really didn't use "flare" correctly. Next time you make a special post about how you have used language correctly, consider checking your facts on Google first.
And this is important, how? Are you harboring thoughts of overthrowing the regime?
While I think the NSA has totally blown it's wad and the current effort at security-through-haystack-searching will turn out to be a failure on multiple levels, being part of the statistical noise is likely the best way of being ignored. Jumping up and doing something different is likely to get the magnetometer ramped up on your little spot of Paradise.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Well, sucks to be you then.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'm sick of these NSA stories. They're doing their job. I'm pretty sure terrorists and spies used credit cards so it is probably important for the President and other national security personnel to know what they are buying.
What? You want Slashdot to put up another Apple story? This is refreshing (and all tingly scary like).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't see a problem with the NSA monitoring International payments. How else will they track money transfers for illegal arms sales? At least, for those who use the banking network...
What I would have a problem with, is if they set the lower boundary for their monitoring too low. For example, if they're monitoring anything lower than say, $5.000, they're wasting their fucking time.
The other problem I have with this is economic modeling they are likely doing, and using that for active and changing foreign policy. I'm betting some real-time economic trade forecasting based on geopolitics is in play, and there are a good many people who are getting rich off that data.
What I would really like to see, is someone to run the math on just how much computing, network, and storage it would take to monitor, collect and analyze all the data the NSA appear to be slurping up. I want some hard numbers on this, both domestically and internationally. I'm well aware of the massive data sites they have domestically, but with the volume they are doing overseas, they must have equivalent size, or larger, sites stashed somewhere. Which in turns means Government cooperation on fairly large scale. Or, they bought off said Gov. officials which isn't out of the question.
Read the first wiki article and continue to read the lunatic levels of logic portrayed in subsequent paragraphs within that article.
The US is the lender for the rest of the world (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVO39NZgAEU please ignore the crazy doomsday stuff look at the content rather). Who cares if you put the words "international" in front of the word "bank".
Done already - all those internet cam sites are really honey pots...
I checked the bloody dictionary, it's even used similarly in one of the bloody examples. Stop being pedantic when you're factually wrong.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Given what we know about the extent of NSA data gathering, it seems reasonable to presume that they do have the ability to track financial transactions and transfers of all types across the globe.
They can watch transfers in and out of accounts in countries which refuse to provide information to international police agencies; they can follow the money trail from origin to destination; they know who has the millions and billions of dollars (or whatever) derived from illegal activities.
They know who the bad banks are. They know who the bad countries are. They know who they bad people are. They've untangled and mapped the web of interconnected banks, countries, corporations, and individuals who provide financial services for drug lords, dictators and tax evaders.
Sharing that information with international law enforcement should make it possible to use existing laws to make massive seizures of ill-gotten wealth.
So, the questions is: why do the bad guys still have any money?
Discuss among yourselves.
If there's a power outage on the east coast, the NSA can download this information for safekeeping.
And that made me think of something that would be excluded and that seems wrong. If I am tracking money and I find that a large amount of money flows from company "A" through a dozen twisty little passages and ends up in a politicians pocket and that next day they vote to give them a specific contract, that would be an indicator of graft
Modern politicians are sneakier than that, it's hard to find direct examples of deposits from donors. Usually you will have something more subtle, like giving them insider information so they can trade on the stock market.
Another example is Rick Perry, who somehow managed to know exactly where Dell wanted to buy property next, and bought it before Dell could and sold it to them at a markup.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In Soviet Russia, windmills tilt at you?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yeah, right.
Another 9/11 could easily be funded by a rich Saudi prince 'losing' a bunch of money in Las Vegas over a weekend. And they still can't find what happened to much of Bernie Madoff's take?
This isn't about crime or terrorism, its about conducting commercial and industrial espionage to benefit US corporations.
Have gnu, will travel.
Wrong intelligence agency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Crimes_Enforcement_Network
The constitution grants limited powers to the government; it's not intended to be an exhaustive list of all of the things the government is not allowed to do. Those powers not explicitly granted to the government belong to US citizens. The constitution would never say it's forbidden for the government to monitor international monetary transactions -- if the founders had intended to allow the government to be arbiter of all financial transaction data, they would have expressly listed that as a power granted to government. They didn't.
Plus I'm pretty sure the Bill of Rights (you know, those ten amendments to the constitution that were included out of fear that the constitution was too silent on privacy and civil liberty issues) says something like "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause", and "The right of the people to be secure in their .. papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated".
So, in summary: It doesn't need to say it, but it does anyway. It's not a power granted to the government by the constitution, and it's explicitly clarified as forbidden by the 4th amendment to the US constitution.
Basic math. It's like complaining that your friend takes out a bigger loan than you, but you neglect to mention that he also has a bigger salary.
No it's not basic math. It's deficit economy spending on an over inflated fiat currency system. It doesn't work. It never has worked historically and we are headed for the same repetitive bullshit because of idiot/delusional thinkers working on the same vein of semantics which have dreamed up this fantastic kaizen system which (like many) you've bought into.
Here is a little graph to wrap your head around.
http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/purchasing-power-of-the-us-dollar-1913-to-2013_517962b78ea3c.jpg
Your debt has a little thing called interest which augments the overall value and preserves it's debasement. Your income DOES NOT you must rely on the things like CPI to keep your overall value on par with the debasement of the value of the dollar.
You do remember what a bank note actually means don't you? It's supposed to represent an IOU. Now it represents an IOU with a "shelf life" of value.
Yeah. Funny that this guy is saying Americans can't do math or geography when he can't even figure out what the 3rd largest country in the world is...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Maybe he should have home schooled. He might have gotten a better education. And with the "loving others" message taught by Evangelical Christianity, he might have presented it in a nicer way as well.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Yes. The European debt crisis is CLEARLY more related to the USA than to Greece, Spain and Cyprus... :rolleyes:
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I don't believe that one bad school district can entirely explain why you homeschooled your children. I'm not arguing with your assesment of your local school, nor am I putting down your abilities to teach your kids yourself. If what you say is true you did an excelent job! However, educating your children must have been years of hard work. Surely it would be easier to move to a different district! Even if you or your spouse had the perfect job and wouldn't leave it, lot's of people commute to work.
I suspect you must have also enjoyed it and/or the time with them and/or wanted more control over what your children are taught and/or some other combination of reasons.
Good for you!
...please ignore the crazy doomsday stuff look at the content rather
Ignore all the crazy stuff that is irrational and doesn't make any sense and this video tells the truth!! Pfft.
Speaking of India, NSA must be going crazy with transactions when Indian Rupee weakens.
Are you kidding, what failure?
No doubt it has made a lot of politically well connected contractors a lot of money. Even if it ended today (fat chance) the money is never going back.
Meanwhile, having access to everybody's personal lives has made a lot of penile size challenged people at the NSA feel much bigger and more powerful.
The only failure is in the other government organizations that don't get to control their own (obviously compensating for something) domestic peeping tom programs and have to kiss up to the NSA to get their fix.
Oh.. you thought this BS was ever actually about security... ha ha
Whose the bigger fool, the fool or the fool that follows?
or Dubai's great model economy of sitting on flare without matching substance.
No. You did not use the word correctly. Again, the word you were looking for was FLAIR. If you meant to say that Dubai's great model economy would be a "flare-up", you would have been correct. You said that Dubai's model economy sits upon its' flare value without an equivalent amount of substance...read below since your dictionary is apparently broken.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flare
flare
noun \fler\
: a light that shines brightly and briefly
: a very bright light that is used to give a signal, to light up something, or to attract attention; also : a device that produces such a light
: a sudden expression of anger
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flair
flair
noun \fler\
: a natural ability to do something
: an unusual and appealing quality or style
You were looking for the second version of flair - Dubai's economic model relies on its unusual/appealing quality/style instead of the actual substance behind it.
Unless they're sitting with a torch up their ass (either US or UK definition works for this, though in the UK it'd be up their arse) or their pants are splitting open (stretching it), they are not "sitting on flare". The transitive verb form has a definition that could be related, but I'm pretty sure you can't sit on it.
What, if my friend takes out a bigger loan then I do get to complain about it? Actually, I think that either way it is none of my F#$%ing business!
Feel free to insert a uck or an app in there as your own culture prefers. See, Americans aren't all ignorant of the rest of the world!
I would point out that if Evangelical Christians are simply teaching a message of "loving others" they are missing the most important commandment that preceded it to love God, but yes, a part of a valid Christian world view should be loving others and seeing that they have no more issues than we do.
AJ Henderson
the perfect job and wouldn't leave it, lot's of people commute to work.
Maybe the next school district over taught punctuation like that....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
GP didn't say that it was the US' fault entirely. You cut out his "Don't delude yourself by thinking that.." at the beginning of the sentence, which turned the meaning of the sentence into the opposite of what was originally posted.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I'm alluding to the fact that this AC is ignorant eurotrash. Oh, no, I'm not... I'm stating it explicitly.
Actually, we started THINKING about it when we started asking the girls what they learned today, and got replies of "Nothing much". Investigating, we found that it pretty much was the case: about half the teachers were just drilling kids on the answers to standardized tests.
We complained. We got nowhere. About that time, being a "Web Designer" started to go away, and the wife decided to work from home, doing free-lance computer graphics. 3 or so months into that, we talked about maybe home-schooling on tech, as the schools weren't teaching it. (BTW, Hacker High School and Python for Kids FTW. . . . )
Full-time home-schooling started several months after that. . . .
Looks like somebody's upset about failing that basic math class . . .
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
It was just an analogy. Calm down.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I'm not going to be distracted by derailing trolls anymore. Don't like my word usage? Tough.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
My favorites were coloring leafs and molecules in highschool science.
I come from a public school in France, msot of my friends and colleague also do come from public school in France and germany. I never , ever, heard of such a bad teaching in any public school. But then again the program (books) and what needs to be learned is decided on the national level. You can't really do bad stuff as you mention, because then you would be kicked in the butt rapidely and thrown out. The reverse of the medail, is that you can't do great stuff either, youa re constrained by the program. All in all it sounds to me the public school system in the US is so bad, because it is neither directed nor united on the fed level, making it a crapshot on what you will get taught.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Okay. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXlxBeAvsB8 feel better now?
Or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njW-6rUdCHE
"The National Security Agency (NSA) widely monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions"
This could be interpreted to mean that the NSA monitors international payments and ALL (international + domestic) banking and credit card transactions.
Can you provide a counterexample?
http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domain-name-services/registry-products/tld-zone-access/index.xhtml?loc=en_US sites are ALWAYS monitored by NSA.
Casteism
I didn't say the U.S wasn't at fault, I said that the entire banking industry throughout Europe and the Americas was as fault.