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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.
Please tell us instead what websites/activities are NOT monitored by NSA, thank you!
Is it really news that a spy agency is spying? "oh look at them doing their job!"
"oh look at them shitting on the US Constitution." FTFY
Yeah, look how they caught the boston bomber before he struck, after the KGB told us he was a danger.
"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.
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
Does this mean that the NSA is PCI Compliant?
No, they haven't had the required audit.
Which, given the revelations about how bad their data security is, they would have failed anyways.
They still don't know what Snowden took. Forget secrets or blackmailing politicians, if he wanted to Snowden could just use the data to steal a ridiculous amount of money. Thank goodness he seems to be a good person. The scary thing is somebody else might have done just that, and no one knows about it.
So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
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."
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 ???
I'm saying well done.
Ordinary crimes against non-wealthy victims.
Please show us where in the constitution it's forbidden to monitor international monetary transactions.
No seriously, I'll wait.
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.
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.
Googling certain items results in a visit from the FBI.
The one time I read of that happening it was on a work computer, the IT staff saw it and called the FBI. He googled for a backpack for hiking, his wife googled for a pressure cooker for cooking, and as it was right after the Boston bombing. It wasn't the NSA, it was his employer spying on him.
Free Martian Whores!
You think they don't monitor US transactions too? What about transactions that have one end in the USA? Or which are executed by banks which are active in the USA but technically headquartered in London? What about the data feeds they get from GCHQ?
Anyway, the constitution doesn't mention any such thing because it was inconceivable back then. There is plenty of language in the constitution that states the government should get a warrant for things that are like financial transaction data:
Note "the people". Not "US citizens" or "US persons" or "people who are geographically within the USA at the time a paper is made" but "the people". The constitution uses that language quite carefully because the authors were highly familiar with the ways governments wriggle out of rules using artificial reclassifications or redefinitions of common concepts.
Anyway, who cares? Everyone outside the USA doesn't want the NSA to watch their financial transactions, or any other foreign intelligence agency. Saying it's allowed by the law just tells everyone else that the law is inadequate. And yes that applies to the UK and other places that have industrial-scale programs that spy on ordinary citizens of other countries.
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
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. . .