Trevor Timm of the Electronic Freedom Frontier dug up a very
interesting nugget. It was embedded in the heralded December 2013 White
House task force report on spying and snooping.
Under Recommendations, #31, section 2, he found this:
"Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to
change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate
financial systems."
Timm quite rightly wondered: why were these warnings in the report?
Were the authors just anticipating a possible crime? Or were they
reflecting the fact that the NSA had already been engaging in the crime?
If this was just a bit of anticipation, why leave it naked in the
report? Why not say there was no current evidence the NSA had been
manipulating financial systems?
Those systems would, of course, include the stock market, and all trading markets around the world.
Well, there is definite evidence of other NSA financial snooping. From Spiegel Online,
"'Follow the Money': NSA Spies on International Payments," 9/15/13:
"The National Security Agency (NSA) widely monitors international
payments, banking and credit card transactions, according to documents
seen by SPIEGEL."
"The NSA's Tracfin data bank also contained data from the
Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication (SWIFT), a network used by thousands of banks to send
transaction information securely...the NSA spied on the organization on
several levels, involving, among others, the [NSA] agency's 'tailored
access operations' division..."
The NSA's "tailored access operations" division uses roughly 1000 hackers and analysts in its spying efforts.
The next step in all this spying would naturally involve penetrating
trading markets and, using the deep data obtained, manipulate the
markets to the advantage of the NSA and preferred clients.
The amount of money siphoned off in such an ongoing operation would be enormous.
"Looking over the shoulder" of Wall St. insiders would be child's play for NSA.
Ditto for predicting political events that would temporarily drive
markets down and provide golden opportunities for highly profitable
short selling.
Like drug traffickers and other mobsters, the NSA could invest their
ill-gotten gains in legitimate enterprises and reap additional rewards.
And if the Pentagon, under which the NSA is organized, requires heavy
amounts of money for off-the-books black budget ops, what better place
to go than their own NSA?
All in all, when you operate the biggest spying and data-gathering
operation in the world, the opportunities abound. Yes, knowledge is
power, when the distinctions between legal and illegal are brushed off
like a few gnats on a summer day.
The Surveillance State has created an apparatus whose implications are
staggering. It's a different world now. And sometimes it takes a writer
of fiction to flesh out the larger landscape.
Brad Thor's novel,
Black List,
posits the existence of a monster corporation, ATS, which stands
alongside the NSA in collecting information on every move we make. ATS'
intelligence-gathering capability is unmatched anywhere in the world.
On pages 117-118 of
Black List, Thor makes a stunning inference that, on reflection, is as obvious as the fingers on your hand:
"For years ATS had been using its technological superiority to
conduct massive insider trading. Since the early 1980s, the company had
spied on anyone and everyone in the financial world. They listened in on
phone calls, intercepted faxes, and evolved right along with the
technology, hacking internal computer networks and e-mail accounts. They
created mountains of 'black dollars' for themselves, which they washed
through various programs they were running under secret contract, far
from the prying eyes of financial regulators.
"Those black dollars were invested into hard assets around the
world, as well as in the stock market, through sham, offshore
corporations. They also funneled the money into reams of promising
R&D projects, which eventually would be turned around and sold to
the Pentagon or the CIA.
"In short, ATS had created its own license to print money and had assured itself a place beyond examination or reproach."
In real life, with the NSA heading up the show, the outcome would be the same.
It would be as Thor describes it.
We think about total surveillance as being directed at private citizens,
but the capability has unlimited payoffs when it targets financial
markets and the people who have intimate knowledge of them.
"Total security awareness" programs of surveillance are ideal spying ops
in the financial arena, designed to suck up millions of bits of inside
information, then utilizing them to make investments and suck up
billions (trillions?) of dollars.
It gives new meaning to "the rich get richer."
Taking the overall scheme to another level, consider this: those same
heavy hitters who have unfettered access to financial information can
also choose, at opportune moments, to expose certain scandals and crimes
(not their own, of course).
In this way, they can, at their whim, cripple governments, banks, and
corporations. They can cripple investment houses, insurance companies,
and hedge funds. Or, alternatively, they can merely blackmail these
organizations.
We think we know how scandals are exposed by the press, but actually we
don't. Tips are given to people who give them to other people. Usually,
the first clue that starts the ball rolling comes from a source who
remains in the shadows.
We are talking about the creation and managing of realities on all
sides, including the choice of when and where and how to provide a
glimpse of a crime or scandal.
The information matrix can be tapped into and plumbed, and it can also
be used to dispense choice clusters of data that end up constituting the
media reality of painted pictures which, every day, show billions of
people "what's news."
It's likely that the probe Ron Paul was once pushing-audit the Federal
Reserve-has already been done by those who control unlimited global
surveillance. They already know far more than any Congressional
investigation will uncover. If they know the deepest truths, they can
use them to blackmail, manipulate, and control the Fed itself.
In this global-surveillance world, we need to ask new questions and think along different lines now.
For example, how long before the mortgage-derivative crisis hit did the
Masters of Surveillance know, from spying on bank records, that
insupportable debt was accumulating at a lethal pace? What did they do
with that information?
When did they know that at least a trillion dollars was missing from
Pentagon accounting books, as Donald Rumsfeld eventually admitted on
September 10, 2001, and what did they do with that information?
When did they know the details of the Libor rate-fixing scandal? Press
reports indicate that Barclays was trying to rig interest rates as early
as January 2005.
Have they tracked, in detail, the men responsible for recruiting hired
mercenaries and terrorists, who eventually wound up in Syria pretending
to be an authentic rebel force?
Have they collected detailed accounts of the most private plans of Bilderberg, CFR, and Trilateral Commission leaders?
For global surveillance kings, what we think of as the future is, in many respects the present and the past.
It's a new world. These overseers of universal information-detection can
enter and probe the most secret caches of data, collect, collate, cross
reference, and assemble them into vital bottom-lines. By comparison, an
operation like Wikileaks is an old Model-T Ford.
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