Regulars at this site will be aware that I have previously blogged about the implications of the Snowden-NSA revelations, and I have spoken to these implications on some of my News and Views from the Nefarium as well. One of the recurrent themes that I have stressed - courtesy of an insight of Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts and an insight I myself developed in Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations - is that such electronic eavesdropping capability is the ultimate insider trading mechanism. It is, moreover, the ultimate data-mining operation to be able to game out "world prediction scenarios" with accuracy. No computer algorithm or program, even that of the massed and networked supercomputers doubtless at the disposal of agencies like the NSA, can spit out accurate scenarios if the data input is bad or non-existent. We'll get back to that point, because it concerns us in a major way here.

For how, however, our point remains focused on the "insider trading" aspects of this. Regular readers here will recall that I repeatedly noted that the BRICSA entente, if they were to be an effective weight and counterpoise to the enormous financial and political power of the Anglo-American power oligarchy, would have to develop its own international bank(s) and eventually its own competitive clearing systems, independent of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transfer) in Europe and CHIPS (Clearing House Interbank Payment System) in North America.

Now, in the wake of the Syria mess and Snowden revelations, Russia Today is reporting this:

NSA ‘Follow the Money’ branch spied on Visa customers, SWIFT transactions – report

Notice that the ultimate source here is Snowden, via Der Spiegel in Germany:

"Referring to information leaked by Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and NSA contractor, German Der Spiegel reports that the surveillance was carried out by a branch called "Follow the Money" (FTM). "After the information on transactions was obtained, it was redirected to the NSA's own financial database, called "Tracfin". "According to the leaked documents, in 2011 the database contained 180 million records, with 84 percent of those being credit card transactions details. "Among the millions of records, the NSA's Tracfin’s also contained data from the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). Used to conduct business operations “with speed, certainty and confidence”, this global financial service is used by more than 10,000 banking organizations in 212 countries. "The NSA spied on SWIFT on several levels, involving its "tailored access operations" division, according to the report in Der Spiegel. Reading 'SWIFT printer traffic from numerous banks,' was just one of the ways the NSA was accessing the information. One of the NSA’s goals was to 'collect, parse and ingest transactional data for priority credit card associations, focusing on priority geographic regions.' "According to documents dated 2010, the agency was spying on large credit card companies’ customers, Der Spiegel adds. In particular, the NSA was getting access to transactions by Visa Inc. customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Reportedly, speaking at an internal conference that year, NSA analysts described in detail how the search through the US company's complex transaction network for tapping possibilities was conducted."

At one level, of course, it could be argued that the NSA is simply doing its job and monitoring financial traffic in the regions most suspected to be coupled to international terrorism. But at the deeper level, the revelations of spying via SWIFT, is a tacit and roundabout confirmation of the implications raised on this website in earlier blogs and videos: such a mechanism would allow, in real time, an accurate picture of large scale international movements of capital, and therefore, constitute the ultimate insider trading mechanism.

The implications of this revelation - and their reportage in RT - would seem to be to be rather profound, and of a geopolitical nature, if we are allowed to indulge in our usual high octane speculation. To point out electronic spying via the vast system of international clearing will, in my opinion, only hasten plans of such nations in the BRICSA entente like Brazil, to severe their internet entirely from that of the USA, precisely in order to secure their citizens' communications and their own national security.

A competitive mechanism of international clearing for those nations will not be far behind, and with it, the temptation to expand their own electronic surveillance capabilities, for face it folks, those capabilities exist; almost every major power has them in some degree, and every major power will use them. The question is the extent of trust that the public will invest in their public institutions, and in the West, these are at all time lows.

Which brings us back to our first point: non-existent, or, in another scenario, bad data input. There are stupid voices out there -colossally stupid voices as we'll see in a moment - calling for a regulation of the Internet. But the ability of a command and control culture and economy decreases exponentially as the amount of accurate feedback and data decreases. It will not do to have your magnificent Five Year Plans reporting that a tractor factory in Pinsk is manufacturing 75 tractors per month(because that's what it was designed to do), when in fact, it is only making 12 per month, but, you don't report the vast difference, lest the apparatchiks come banging on your door in the middle of the night and haul you off to the Lubyanka for "slacking." Fear breeding corruption breeding inaccurate data, breeding collapse.

The whole point of having the Ultimate Insider Trading Mechanism, folks, is accurate data input. Regulation is that first step on the road to the tractor factory in Pinsk, and to the corruption of your wonderful money-making machine. When trust begins to crumble, and is reinforced through "regulation" of what ideas are safe, and what are not "convenient", then the process of decision-making changes, the data collection becomes skewed, and eventually, your World Sentient Programs are gaming out scenarios increasingly disconnected from reality...

... indeed, maybe that's ultimately why our leaders seem so insane, because the results being spit out from those Crays are already corrupted, like the officials for whom the reports are compiled.

See you on the - Oh... one more thing. I have no idea if there's a tractor factory at Pinsk (it's in the western Pripyat marshes, for those interested), but who else but a bunch of Marxist-Stalinist kookoos would build a tractor factory in a swamp? So it seemed as likely a place as any...

...See you on the flip side.