- I am really not sure why the National Security Aagency imagines that having tools to breach the international monetary system makes anybody (except the NSA and its Chosen Ones) “secure.” I’m really, truly not sure how they imagined that maintaining such sloppy “security” that details of their exploits got into the hands of hackers makes anybody “secure.”
- Will the last middle-class person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?
- Waco Wacko Backlash. Or what happens when you point out that the U.S. government didn’t hesitate to attack its own citizens with deadly gas.
- When even Arkansas puts a pause to the death penalty, you know the world is changing. What’ll it be next? Texas?
- I’ll believe it when I see it in real life: tiny solar-powered harvester that pulls water out of even relatively dry air.
- Nicki asks, “You want a civil war?”
- Hooray for Nevada for its continued part in eliminating some of the cruelest failures of the horrific War on Drugs.
- Ninja cats. 🙂
“When even Arkansas puts a pause…”
Arkansas didn’t “put the pause.” A federal judge stopped it. Reportedly a judge who attends anti-death penalty protests.
There’s a lot of interesting conjecture in the Reuters piece about SWIFT. Note it doesn’t actually make the claim that NSA penetrated or stole anything from SWIFT.
“likely used weaknesses in commercially available software to gain access”
“indicating NSA had accessed the SWIFT”
“SWIFT affiliates were using Windows servers that were vulnerable at the time”
“Reuters was not able to independently verify the authenticity of the documents released by the hackers.”
Now, the US government has an agreement with SWIFT.
Why?
Terrorist financing. The program is called TFTP – the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program.
https://www.swift.com/about-us/legal/compliance/tftp
Now, I’m not familiar with the specific programs referenced in this article, so I can’t speak to those. But I have to wonder – if we already have an agreement with SWIFT for the information, why would the USG need to hack them?
There is no legitimate reason for the NSA to hack the SWIFT system. It’s only used among banks, who already have to give details on financial transactions to the government basically on request. This has nothing to do with money laundering or the financing of terrorism; its only possible purpose is to be able to cause mischief. Can we all now agree that the NSA is no longer concerned with “national security” (although that’s a very handy justification for anything they want to do), and are all about 100% control over everyone and everything?
As to the solar-powered water harvester, I believe that the technology exists. There’s lots of water in the air, even relatively “dry” air. For me, the only question is one of economics: can the devices be made cheaply enough to have a meaningful impact? Time will tell.