09.23.13
by wkchild
NSA Targets Bitcoin

by Justin, GoldSilverBitcoin:

New revelations in NSA-leaked documents show that the US security agency has interest in spying on Bitcoin and other decentralized digital currencies.

The revelations from Germany’s Der Spiegel implicate the US NSA in spying on banks and credit card transactions, oftentimes in violation of national laws and global regulations. According to internal NSA documents, the European SWIFT financial transcations has been tapped.

The documents state that the agency has in-depth knowledge of the internal processes of credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard. Further, even new alternative currencies like the Internet currency Bitcoin rank among the targets of the American spies, according to Spiegel.

The documents deal with the activities of the United States in the international financial sector, and they show how comprehensively and effectively the intelligence agency can track global flows of money and the store the information in a database.

The particular branch is called “Follow the Money” and it handles these matters. The name of the branch is harkens back to the famous catchphrase by former FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, the whistleblower known as “Deep Throat” who offered the information to Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein, the Washington Post reporters investigating the Watergate scandal in 1972.

Financial transfers are the “Achilles’ heel” of terrorists as NSA analysts note in an internal report. Further fields of activity for the branch deal with tracking illegal arms deliveries and keeping tabs on the increasingly lucrative domain of cybercrime.

Detecting international flows of money could lead to revelations regarding political crimes, exposing acts of genocide and monitoring whether sanctions are respected.

The documents state that the spies’ activities primarily focus on Africa and the Middle East, and their efforts often focus on targets that fall within their legal intelligence-gathering mandate.

In the financial sector, the NSA relies on across-the-board data collection – an approach that apparently leads to conflicts with national laws and international agreements.

Read More @ goldsilverbitcoin.com