As NSA Pairs With Banks To “Fight Hackers”, Will It Also Gain Access To Every American’s Financial Secrets?
Just because there was not enough encroachment by the government into virtually every corner of private life, here is another “collaboration” that will further enmesh big brother into every aspect of private life, in this case private financial life, because as the WaPo reports, “major U.S. banks have turned to the National Security Agency for help protecting their computer systems after a barrage of assaults that have disrupted their Web sites, according to industry officials. The attacks on the sites, which started about a year ago but intensified in September, have grown increasingly sophisticated, officials said. The NSA, the world’s largest electronic spying agency, has been asked to provide technical assistance to help banks further assess their systems and to better understand the attackers’ tactics.”
And while we salute the great diversionary pretext that “Iranian hackers” pose a greater risk to the stability of the US financial system than, say, the ongoing monetization of US debt at a pace of $85 billion per month, which has made the Fed’s DV01 rise to a mindboggling $2.75 billion, or idiot pundits who claim all American problems can be resolved with one coin, we can’t help but wonder what happens when the most intrusive of US spy agencies, one which as reported last year is free “to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store” virtually every electronic communication in the entire world, now has full explicit access to all bank data, and, incidentally, every American’s financial snapshot at any given moment?
More on the official spin:
The cooperation between the NSA and banks, industry officials say, underscores the government’s fears about the unprecedented assault against the financial sector and is part of a broader effort by the government to work with U.S. firms on cybersecurity. Nonetheless, the assistance is likely to dismay privacy advocates, who say that the NSA has no business peering inside private companies’ systems, even if for the strict purpose of improving computer security.
U.S. intelligence officials said last year they believe the attacks against the banks and other companies have been carried out by Iran, although some experts have cautioned that it is difficult to accurately determine who is behind them.
The banks whose Web sites have been disrupted include Bank of America, PNC Bank, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, HSBC and SunTrust. In recent weeks, attackers have targeted up to seven banks a day, but only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
So Monday and Friday are holy days for Iranian hackers we take it?
Rest here…
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This is a must read:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
We’re talking about “web sites”, not private information. The NSA already has (we could easily assume) access to every American’s finances. We also need to assume there is a complete understanding of the housing crisis by law enforcement and the various “spook” agencies. Idiots are the ones who don’t understand the general concept behind minting a coin, and intentionally mislead on the concepts of debt and deficit, so that favorable outcomes to the FIRE sector are guranteed to be accepted by a dim-witted populace with relentless propaganda. Terrible article that once again tries to paint a picture of a nation as a debt laden household. Terrible article.
YEP!!! People take your money out of banks…..put in a credit union. Notice that the ones being hacked DO NOT include credit unions. Keep your insanity and your financial info safe!!! If you want to bring them down, take away their means…. They cannot survive without depositors.
Sure, the Too Big To Fails CAN survive without depositors – thanks to the Federal Reserve’s ZIRP, Twist, Fannie/Freddie backdoor bailouts, QE, etc. They don’t even need customers. I agree about switching to a solvent CU or local community bank though – just the principal of the whole thing – supporting drug-money laundering, RICO fraud, LIBOR fraud, corporate welfare to banksters, big bonuses to C-suite kleptocrats, illegal foreclosures, etc., sickens me – if you have your money in a TBTF you are condoning and supporting those practices by doing business with the white collar criminal financial parasite Too Big To Fails.