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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?
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!
"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.
"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?
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
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."
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the NSA has a whole office that does nothing but spy on Bitcoin sales, Bitcoin trading, infiltrating Bitcoin exchanges, etc. With 35,000 employees and God-like computing muscle, I imagine they've devoted no small amount of resources to monitoring (and perhaps sabotaging) Bitcoin and other grey market currencies.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
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!
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 ???
The Muslims have been right all this time, America IS the prime evil on the planet today.
I'm saying well done.
Ordinary crimes against non-wealthy victims.
All this is easily attainable with a few scripts on modern operating systems, Bitcoin, TOR and maybe some VPN accounts
If I had the resources and was really interested, I'd just make sure to run a large Bitcoin exchange and a ton of TOR endpoints. Just saying. Why try to hack it in code when you can set something up really simply and have malefactors come to you?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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.
Freedom cable connect to your nipples, Patriot cables are the ones that go to your testicles.
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.
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.
Because now it's gone from being an open secret to properly documented, which allows a lot more discussion over the exact methods of spying being used.
Obviously a WoW gametime key written down by Nostradamus.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
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
You replied to the wrong person.
No, I am pretty sure this is the right windmill and it was tilting at me.
I am well aware that paper checks are easily traceable. In fact, all transactions are, even cash when it hits the system. I am also aware that my obtuseness is but a pinprick in the hide of mega-corporations.
My aim is just to demonstrate that lack of trust is bad for the system. Maybe if everyone else did the same thing, business would stand up for their paying customers, instead of rolling over for faceless spies.
Terrorist culture-jamming has exceeded all expectations, now it is my turn.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
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.
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.
Which is the big problem. If it were my full-time job to spy on people online, and I had the resources of the NSA, that's exactly what I'd do. I'd just make everything a honeypot.
Bitcoin exchange? Honeypot.
VPN? Honeypot.
TOR exit nodes? Honeypots.
It wouldn't be tough. And what pisses me off? Before the NSA shit came out, I never used any of these things, because I never thought I had any reason to. I don't need to hide, because I generally don't do things I feel the need to hide. I am a good and conscientious citizen who cares about his family, his community, his country and his world. I'm a pacifist with no ill-will towards anyone. There is absolutely no reason to spy on me, because I have no desire to hurt anyone. I don't even have the ability. I'm a Catholic who tries to follow the biblical example of Jesus (that is, the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" part, not all the terrible atrocities that have been committed in his name for the past 2000 years), so I don't even have a moral framework whereby I'm allowed to hurt someone, even in defense of my own life or that of an innocent.
And yet I'm being spied on, because I'm on the internet. Ugh, so fine, I'll use a VPN, Tor, and bitcoins. And whereas before I was being spied on, despite there being no reason to spy on me, I'm now going to be scrutinized, simply because I don't want to be spied on.
It'll drive you crazy if you let it...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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
You don't cook steak. You show it a candle and listen for the MOOOOO.
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. . .
Yeah, come on. Look at some real stats. The US is solidly mid-table of the OECD in education rankings.
It's NSA that created Bitcoin in the first place. This is obviously true from the pseudonym, which in Japan would be written in the order Nakamoto SAtoshi.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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!