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. [More...] Philosophers stone - selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk



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