Der Spiegel 15, September, 2013
The US National Security Agency ( NSA) is interested in international payments made by companies such as Visa , Der Spiegel reported today. The agency has even created its own financial databases to monitor money flows, through a “specialized department.”
The National Security Agency (NSA) is monitoring international credit card payments, banking and stock market transactions, according to documents published by Der Spiegel.
The information, of course, comes from Edward Snowden and shows that NSA agents have created a special department for this purpose that they have called “Follow the Money” or abbreviated FTM. The information collected is added to the NSA’s financial database, called “Tracfin”. This particular database in 2011 contained 180 million records. This is about 84% of the data from credit card transactions.
Documents published by the German magazine show that the NSA has been focusing on the transactions of major credit card customers such as Visa since 2010, monitoring everything that happens. NSA analysts in an internal presentation earlier this year detailed their successes as they monitored the US company's complex transaction network to exploit its capabilities.
Their goal was to gain access to VISA customer transactions from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to the documents leaked today. Their goal was to collect, analyze and store transaction data with an emphasis and priority on the above geographic regions.
The NSA’s Tracfin database also contains data from the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT. It’s a network used by thousands of banks to send information about secure transactions. SWIFT is referred to in NSA documents as a “target.” The agency spied on the organization at various levels. One of the ways it accessed the organization’s data is described as “SWIFT printer traffic from numerous banks,” or “printer traffic from numerous banks.”.
