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."
Remember that blow up doll in discrete package? (Score:5, Insightful)
NSA knows what you are up to with your credit card
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Of course they do, I'm sure they did even before the internet.
Pay cash !!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Pay cash !!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The patriot act made buying anything overseas without a credit card that's registered in your name very difficult. Yes, you can mail cash in an envelope but our crooked postal workers often just steal it. The best defense against this sort of thing is: Vote for someone that's not in the D/R parties. Anyone... I don't care if you vote for the fucking Nazis just get the current Reich out of office asap. There are plenty of alternative parties out there... Libertarian, Green, even the communist party. I'd rather not be governed by most of them but if we can get enough disagreement into congress things may change. It's basically our only hope short of an insurrection and I'm personally moving to Canada if that happens.
Re:Pay cash !!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've said for a long time that if you're liberal you should vote Green, if you're conservative vote Libertarian. Both are on enough ballots to get elected (but the Ds and Rs are financed by corporations, who own the mass media).
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Anyone... I don't care if you vote for the fucking Nazis just get the current Reich out of office asap.
Don't waste your time until Duverger's Law [wikipedia.org] is repealed. Since it's math, it's unlikely.
If you want to see change, push for Approval Voting [youtube.com] at your local/State level.
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However, this means potentially you'd be linked with what the last purchase was before the cash was returned "to the system". Which could be interesting...
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That makes no sense, you can't trace cash. When I hand you a twenty that twenty has no information about me whatever, nor does it have information on who handed it to me.
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Aside from the obvious point that when I pay for something with cash the entity I paid doesn't instantly return it to the bank. In fact when I bought an ice cream yesterday they gave the next guy in line the note I used to pay them amongst his change.
Re:Pay cash !!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Man, that's got to be the most boring job on the planet. Watching the insides of butt cheeks for weeks until you open the wallet, stuff the bill in the pop machine and then watching the inside of the machine for another week. Maybe a tiny glimpse of the hot bank teller for a sec until - back in the box.
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Consider: in the US, you generally get only $20 bills from the ATM. You go and spend these with retailers who usually get nothing larger than $20 bills. The $20 bill you spent thus is not recycled as change, and it gets deposited at the end of the day. That makes a nice short loop that's easy to analyze.
So if you want to buy something and not make it too easy to track the bills, use denominations under $20.
Now, as for things like making a drug buy, where you really wouldn't want the gov't to track it, that'
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Bayesian analysis of ATMs out versus store register in gives a pretty good model. They don't need to know for sure; they just need a good guess.
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True. Correlation does not mean causation, but it does mean you're gonna get spied on.
News? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please show us where in the constitution it's forbidden to monitor international monetary transactions.
No seriously, I'll wait.
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:News? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, look how they caught the boston bomber before he struck, after the KGB told us he was a danger.
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No, but it is certainly 'news' to the general public that the scope of spying has increased to include the common man.
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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.
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If you're talking about the family that got visited as reported on /. like 2 months ago, they were reported as 'suspicious' by an employer. Weird as it was, this wasn't a case of gub'ment spying, but a valid response to a tip from a citizen.
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That same logic could be applied to anything. "You were mugged on the way to work? That's what muggers do. Boring."
This is interesting because it shows:
1) How the internet changes spy craft.
2) How dangerous it is to aggregate data.
It raises interesting questions:
1) Have other countries infiltrated VISA as well?
2) Has VISA been infiltrated by organized crime as well? Would that be profitable?
3) What personal information is there?
4) Has the private data been used for black mail people in interesting ways?
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This one's something they SHOULD be monitoring and can legally do so since it's international.
This might be true according to U.S. law, but for instance not according to European law. In Europe, the NSA is still a law breaker. But on the other hand, most European secret services seem to be complicit with the NSA (which makes them law breakers too).
PCI Compliance (Score:4, Funny)
Does this mean that the NSA is PCI Compliant?
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Does this mean that the NSA is PCI Compliant?
Of course. Admittedly it is by definition, and the part where it says they are is secret so you're not allowed to know about what it exactly involves...
Re:PCI Compliance (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I dunno, but it would be nice if they were 404 Compliant.
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I know what PCI is you daffy duck! I was trying to make a nerd joke and i didn't even get 1 mod point for it *frown*
Backdoors in VPN boxes? (Score:2)
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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?
they get them directly from banks. for the american banks they can just tell them to give them and they had contracts made up to get the data from EU post 9/11. that is one of the major points of discussion post snowden.. since we can't exactly trust USA to not use the data for economical gain over EU since the fuckers obviously can't be trust to just use it for tracking terrorists.
Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Please tell us instead what websites/activities are NOT monitored by NSA, thank you!
Where do we draw the line? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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?
Write a test for control (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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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?
Maybe this is the test. It has just started to run. Wait and see what comes out.
And that's why (Score:2)
I may for things as much as I can in CASH. Cash is anonymous and won't snitch on you.
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Cancel Paperless Billing (Score:2)
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 i
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Those checks are equally traceable. They are nothing more than an instruction to initiate a bank transfer. The only way to pay anonymously is via hard cash. But this presents logistical and security problems - the same problems that make companies use electronic billing in the first place. Most utilities now won't even accept cash.
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.
Always Was (Score:2)
NSA Spies on EVERYTHING (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Belgacom hacked by the NSA (Score:2, Interesting)
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 servi
You Know The Funny Thing Is (Score:2)
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?"
Those crazy muslims (Score:2)
The Muslims have been right all this time, America IS the prime evil on the planet today.
Oooh, wait, do-over! (Score:2)
Yup, pretty sure I'm going to end up in a dark room somewhere with *cough* Freedom cables hooked up to my testicles.
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Freedom cable connect to your nipples, Patriot cables are the ones that go to your testicles.
OH NOES NOT THE NSA (Score:2)
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.
Hey NSA.... (Score:2)
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.)
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Obviously a WoW gametime key written down by Nostradamus.
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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
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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.
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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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:American Exceptionalism and Moral Superiority (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ???
Re:American Exceptionalism and Moral Superiority (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just like an overcooked steak.
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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.
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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. . .
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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 su
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.... 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).
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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
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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
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Re:American Exceptionalism and Moral Superiority (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:American Exceptionalism and Moral Superiority (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 econom
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.
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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.
Re:American Exceptionalism and Moral Superiority (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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You replied to the wrong person.
No, I am pretty sure this is the right windmill and it was tilting at me.
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Re:Bitcoin FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bitcoin FTW (Score:4, Interesting)
Bitcoin is not enough (Score:2)
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
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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?
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True, but trading on exchanges is not anonymous anyway, since NSA and other agencies already have access to all the personal data of customers' fiat money transfers. Not only that, but we should assume that they have access to all delivery information on all businesses, and all e-mail communication, etc.
I'm rather interested in creating enough disconnects to make profiling ordinary citizens practically impossible. Sure, they may be able to track transactions to determine with 35% probability that you bought
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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 conscientiou
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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?
Re:wouldn't it be easier (Score:5, Informative)
Ordinary crimes against non-wealthy victims.
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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.
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Considering that most things cost ten times as much as they did fifty years ago (a new VW bug was $900 in 1964, a McBurger, fries, and small coke was thirty two cents, a gallon of gas was a quarter, a candy bar was a nickle) a dime is now equivalent to what a penny was then.
The government doesn't issue checks down here, either. I still pay my bills with checks, almost everything else is cash.