Some of my thoughts:
Tracking cash currency is certainly interesting from many standpoints... actually doing it seems outrageous. Leaking this data intentionally is extremely outrageous - no matter the target's value the laundering can not warrant the backlash. As a politically minded shake-up-leak, this one is the most daring so far, and would most likely be the most effective at dismantling the espionage engine. It almost seems too good (and in a way terrifying*) to be true...
I have some idea the truth will be both far from what we think it is, and, depending on who you are, far more terrifying. Let's imagine your an espionage guy, and you have clear evidence of something the world needs to know. Like say that those high-frequency trading 'bugs' were actually backdoor cash payments/bribes, which is my favorite conspiracy theory. Now you have a clear indication that the guys you know are making bribes are off bribing the right people to make a political shitstorm that will dismantle the most beautiful technological achievement you've ever seen or heard of in history to root out bad guys and corruption. Okay, granted, maybe I'm giving too much credit for idealism. But what the hell else are we here if not a bunch of idealists? Besides, I think the above is just as plausible as a global currency-tracking sigint engine that's not a blockchain.
Is dear Wilfred pulling our legs? How would we know at this point?
By getting some archives of the data, and studying it.
* I'd actually really like to know where I've been in the past, and I know *they *know but won't tell me. And the amount of exceedingly valuable scientific (census) data one could parse from such a database.... Still, we'd move rather suddently from panopticon to omniopticon (a term I thought of to describe "everyone watches everything" instead of "they watch everything". I know it's not a flawless name but it works).
Hell, if I could tape a few dollar bills to my planter and get free 1-inch location tracking, this would substantially increase agricultural productivity world-wide, as well as tracking & logistics. Why bother with package tracking when you just tape a dollar on the outside? We've already got an opticon, let's make the best of it and have it be an omniopticon, and figure out how the hell to live with it.
** I realize there's no way we're going to store or transfer this much data - but there should be something that can be done to preserve this dataset!
The physics community built a global network to handle data coming from CERN. The network and the computers are all there. The hard part will be convincing physicists that discovering the true nature of money & surveillance is more imporant than the true nature of the higgs boson, at least for a few weeks. http://wlcg.web.cern.ch/ What's the data rate of this sigint thing? Does it exceed 30 Gigabytes/sec? What are the chances we could just pick it up with a decent software defined radio? Or is someone just baiting us to do some free work for their next dystopian summer blockbuster movie? -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Troy Benjegerdes 'da hozer' hozer@hozed.org 7 elements earth::water::air::fire::mind::spirit::soul grid.coop Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, nor try buy a hacker who makes money by the megahash