http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-15/swift-takeover-follow-money-nsa-knows-all-about-your-spending-habits
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/15/2013 12:29 -0400
The SWIFT Takeover: With "Follow The Money", NSA Knows All About Your Spending Habits
With the NSA already tracking and recording every form of communication and electronic data exchange, it would hardly come as a surprise that the final piece of the puzzle was also actively being intercepted and collected by General Keith Alexander's superspy army:money, or rather tracking the global flow thereof.
Which is why we were not surprised to learn just this, following the latest report from Germany's Spiegel that "The National Security Agency (NSA) widely monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions" and has even created an internal branch titled appropriately enough "Follow The Money" (FTM). Once collected, the data 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.
Stated simply: every time you "charge it" and a credit card is swiped, literally or metaphorically, the NSA knows all about it and if it triggers a specific filter, congratulations: the NSA will be tracking your every transaction in perpetuity.
Further NSA documents from 2010 show that the NSA also targets the transactions of customers of large credit card companies like VISA for surveillance. NSA analysts at an internal conference that year described in detail how they had apparently successfully searched through the US company's complex transaction network for tapping possibilities.Their aim was to gain access to transactions by VISA customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to one presentation. The goal was to "collect, parse and ingest transactional data for priority credit card associations, focusing on priority geographic regions." In response to a SPIEGEL inquiry, however, a VISA spokeswoman ruled out the possibility that data could be taken from company-run networks.
Odd: we fail to recall smartphone makers admitting the NSA has full back door access to their products, and only got confirmation following yet another report from Spiegel last weekend. Which is why we tend to take VISA's "ruling out" of any possibility with a grain of salt, and would rather be far more curious what if any backdoor funding channels exist between credit card processors and the espionage service to the US government. You know, to help soothe their consciences and what not.
But while collecting credit card data was to be expected, what is even worse is that the NSA has also secretly planted itself in the nexus of the entire global USD-intermediated financial transactions system courtesy of SWIFT.
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. SWIFT was named as a "target," according to the documents, which also show that the NSA spied on the organization on several levels, involving, among others, the agency's "tailored access operations" division. One of the ways the agency accessed the data included reading "SWIFT printer traffic from numerous banks," the documents show.
What is curious is that while the NSA and its henchmen, in this case the GCHQ, had no qualms about violating personal privacy at every level, it is only when banks were threatened that someone feel like perhaps a line was crossed:
But even intelligence agency employees are somewhat concerned about spying on the world finance system, according to one document from the UK's intelligence agency GCHQ concerning the legal perspectives on "financial data" and the agency's own cooperations with the NSA in this area.
In other words, America's unsupervised uber spies, when not checking in on their former significant others, spend the bulk of their time tracking who is buying what, where, and with whose money.
They also know how much anyone in the world has spent on credit card-based purchases, what the source of that money is, and what the purchase was. In other words: absolute monetary and financial surveillance.
And since SWIFT is involved, it likely also means a full blanket coverage of who buys what stock, and furthermore, leaves open to abuse the knowledge of which equities or FX pair the Fed, for example, is buying ahead of time in order to prevent yet another daily stock market plunge.
Which means that not only everyone would be fascinated in gaining access to the NSA's $29.95/month stock-picking newsletter, a bigger issue is that suddenly all money laundering on the global arena may grind to a halt. How this could impact capital flows in a world in which parking oligarch capital in assorted "free markets" is the only recourse for concerned billionaires who have no desire to be Cyprused, and where oligarch money laundering is one of the main drivers behind the US housing recovery for example, remains to be seen.
and the lies to try to keep the lid on what NSA has been doing from the Government ....
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/untruths-in-snowdens-wake/
6 Whopping Government Misstatements About NSA Spying
- 09.12.13
- 9:30 AM
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is among many government officials uttering misstatements in the wake of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA spying have set off a fierce global debate about security and privacy in the internet age.
The revelations of the United States performing mass surveillance on an international scale have also unleashed an avalanche of government misstatements aimed at defending, or even denying, the NSA’s dragnet surveillance. We’ve gone through them and picked out some of the biggest whoppers.
“… NSA takes significant care to prevent any abuses and that there is a substantial oversight system in place,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), said August 23.
The statement was clearly contradicted Tuesday by James Clapper, director of national intelligence. Clapper said that the reason why the NSA illegally accessed phone call metadata on thousands of targets was because the NSA was unable to conduct any oversight of itself.
“The compliance incidents discussed in these documents stemmed in large part from the complexity of the technology employed in connection with the bulk telephony metadata collection program, interaction of that technology with other NSA systems, and a lack of a shared understanding among various NSA components about how certain aspects of the complex architecture supporting the program functioned,” Clapper said in a blog post.
NSA chief Keith Alexander was either speaking untruths or was delusional when he gave a June 25 speech to his spy network:
“The ongoing national dialogue is not about your performance. The NSA/CSS work force has executed its national security responsibilities with equal and full respect for civil liberties and privacy.”
A 2009 order by a secret court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), declassified Tuesday said that, “since the earliest days” of the NSA phone-call spying program’s 2006 inception, the agency has carried out thousands of inquiries on phone numbers without any of the court-ordered screening designed to protect Americans from illegal government surveillance.
Attorney General Eric Holder must not have remembered or been familiar with that order when speaking June 15 to a U.S.-European Union ministerial meeting in Dublin, Ireland.
“The government cannot target anyone under the court-approved procedures for this program unless there is an appropriate and documented foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition, such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities or nuclear proliferation,” he said.
President Barack Obama, too, has said everything was hunky-dory and that the spy powers were “not abused.”
“Now part of the reason they’re not abused is because they’re — these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC,” the president said August 9.
A key function of FISC is to ensure the NSA’s activities target communications of those “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.” The surveillance must also be designed to “prevent the intentional acquisition of any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States.”
All the while, in a 2011 FISC opinion the government declassified August 21, the court said the NSA misrepresented the reach of its “upstream” internet surveillance, where it has tapped into the internet to vacuum up electronic communications as they travel through the internet’s backbone.
“Indeed, the record before this court establishes that NSA’s acquisition of internet transactions likely results in NSA acquiring annually tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications, and tens of thousands of non-target communications of persons who have little or no relationship to the target but who are protected under the Fourth Amendment,” according to the 2011 opinion. (.pdf)
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said at a June 6 press conference, however, that the NSA’s actions were lawful.
“The administration is obeying the law, but the fact is we want more oversight.”
Perhaps the biggest lie to date came three months before the Snowden leaks.
Consider this exchange between Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Clapper during a March 12 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing:
Wyden: “So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
Clapper: “No, sir.”
Wyden: “It does not?”
Clapper: “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”
Reporter’s note: Government officials have uttered plenty of other untruths in the wake of Snowden’s revelations. In the comments section, cite us your favorite ones we didn’t mention today.
One if by land , two if by sea updated ?
DARPA’s Plan to Flood the Sea With Drones, Carrying More Drones
- 09.13.13
- 6:30 AM
Image: DARPA
DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency, has recently revealed its plans to boost the Navy’s response to threats in international waters by developing submerged unmanned platforms that can be deployed at a moment’s notice.
Hydra, named after the serpent-like creature with many heads in Greek mythology, would create an undersea network of unmanned payloads and platforms to increase the capability and speed the response to threats like piracy, the rising number of ungoverned states, and sophisticated defenses at a time when the Pentagon is forced to make budget cuts. According to DARPA, the Hydra system ”represents a cost effective way to add undersea capacity that can be tailored to support each mission” that would still allow the Navy to conduct special operations and contingency missions. In other words, the decreasing number of naval vessels can only be in one place at a time.
“The climate of budget austerity runs up against an uncertain security environment that includes natural disasters, piracy, ungoverned states, and the proliferation of sophisticated defense technologies,” said Scott Littlefield, DARPA program manager, in a statement. “An unmanned technology infrastructure staged below the oceans’ surface could relieve some of that resource strain and expand military capabilities in this increasingly challenging space.”
The Hydra system is intended to be delivered in international waters by ships, submarines or aircraft with the integrative capability of communicating with manned and unmanned platforms for air, surface, and water operations.
Unlike the Upward Falling Payloads (UFPs) program DARPA announced in January that would submerge massive waterproof containers intended to store weapons, drones and supplies for years at a time, Hydra is a highly mobile platform that can be deployed for a few weeks or months in relatively shallow international waters.
“By separating capabilities from the platforms that deliver them, Hydra would enable naval forces to deliver those capabilities much faster and more cost-effectively wherever needed,” said Littlefield. “It is envisioned to work across air, underwater, and surface operations, enabling all three to perform their missions better.”
Proposals are due October 22, but it may well 2018 before Hydra lands in the ocean.
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