Berto Jongman: NSA Has Access to SWIFT – Ergo US Government Complicit in all Financial Crimes by All Financial Actors Subject to US Law

‘Follow the Money': NSA Monitors Financial World

By Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark

The NSA monitors banks and credit card transactions — sometimes in apparent violation of national laws and global regulations. The European SWIFT financial transaction network is being tapped on different levels, internal documents from the US spy agency show.

EXTRACT

Monitoring SWIFT

The classified documents show that the intelligence agency has several means of accessing the internal data traffic of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a cooperative used by more than 8,000 banks worldwide for their international transactions. The NSA specifically targets other institutes on an individual basis. Furthermore, the agency apparently has in-depth knowledge of the internal processes of credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard. What's more, even new, alternative currencies, as well as presumably anonymous means of payment like the Internet currency Bitcoin, rank among the targets of the American spies.

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Phi Beta Iota:  What is so very sad about this — and perhaps the reason Snowden was set up to “take down” NSA — is that it is quite obvious that the US Government has been complicit in enabling all of the financial crimes — financial terrorism and blatant multi-billion dollar a year money-laundering schemes that enable the massive drug trade and other forms of crime in cluding import and export tax avoidance.