NSA Spies On International Payments 314
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."
The irony is too much (Score:3, Informative)
"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.
Just a FYI (Score:0, Informative)
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.
Re:wouldn't it be easier (Score:5, Informative)
Ordinary crimes against non-wealthy victims.
Re:American Exceptionalism and Moral Superiority (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Cancel Paperless Billing (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Sounds invasive, effective, often isn't (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:American Exceptionalism and Moral Superiority (Score:5, Informative)
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. . .