L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM> One type of activity NSA needs to trace above all else, perhaps more than military threats, are financial transactions, and it is these types most fiercely protected against government access, whether business to business, person to person, org to org, and most especially financial op to financial op, the latter not limited to regulated banks. And no type of enterprise has the resources to giver NSA a run for its money in long-time, maybe forever, in concealing where the money is and where it is going and so the struggle goes between the two biggest consumers of comsec products, hardware and talent, along with and outpouring of dire threats and assured security. Deception in financial transcriptions is a given, as with spying, no matter the huge effort to trace them by the revenuers, competitors, and governmental and private spies. Off the radar, off the grid, off the earth, financial transactions worldwide are larger and more resourceful than all the governments combined. It is far easier to track military developments than where the money flows or is stashed or obscured by encryption and false tracking data. The steady promulgations of DoJ and the slew of financial crimes task forces indicate the visible tip of the iceberg; what is exceedingly hard to penetrate is the underside side of it. To be sure, if it was admitted that NSA was most interested in tracing financial transaction data, say to hand over to IRS, FBI and Justice, that might scare Americans, particularly American businesses with global customers good and evil, more than diddly-squat mining of phone data (although some of the consumer chatter might reveal clues about lesser known ways to transfer money, say, coded signals sent to order what to do for who). If NSA was to be confirme as a money cop far more adept and armed than IRS and FBI the wealth flight to more lenient havens might shake the foundations of democracy far more than knowing who is calling who. It was not for a petty protection of US Persons that NSA was formerly banned from telling other parts of the government what it was collecting. That was the consumer cover story. Wonderfully strange about the dramatic increase of FBI investigation of official corruption following the dropping of the ban on sharing intel data. Whether any of that was part of the flood of NSA data the FBI bitched about being worthless is thrilling to consider. If the PATRIOT Act leads to cleaning up government and business that would be justice. In contrast, other nations are deeply concerned, as with Echelon, that using the terrorist rationale NSA has boosted its collection financial data on business, persons and governments, pushing the frightened toward US financial sanctuary, while public attention is diverted with wails about invasion of personal privacy -- which to these nations means nothing more important than financial secrecy about cheating, lying, robbing, sweetheart government contracts, evasion of taxes. With the Swiss armtwisted into ratting on its banking customers, where can an evildoer or goodheart find a trusworthy ATM which does not databank everyone. We learned today of the Journalist Visa required by the US from one who has just come here from Italy, more restrictive than for an ordinary citizen on a visit. With this prejudicial practice the US joins the select freedom of speech rascals Russia and China. Is that special visa legit, and if so, what regulates the practice to demonize the press as if spies. ********************************************************************** For Listserv Instructions, see http://www.lawlists.net/cyberia Off-Topic threads: http://www.lawlists.net/mailman/listinfo/cyberia-ot Need more help? Send mail to: Cyberia-L-Request@listserv.aol.com ********************************************************************** ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]