Neo-con propagandists allege SWIFT is secret. Neo-cons, once again, demonstrate their ability to lie with straight faces.

July 4, 2006 -- On the recent edition of the McLaughlin Group, New York Daily News and US News publisher Mort Zuckerman, in defending the White House response over the revelations in the New York Times about U.S. intelligence monitoring of the global banking electronic funds transfer network SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), made the wild and false claim that no one ever heard of SWIFT prior to the Times story. For the record, this editor published a technical paper in 1988 at the Carnahan Conference on Security Technology/Electronic Crime Countermeasures at the University of Kentucky dealing with global networks like SWIFT and suggested that U.S. intelligence agencies were "loathe to discuss" issues related to penetration of "trans-border data flows" by hackers and other outsiders. There was one simple reason for this avoidance of the issue -- agencies like NSA and the CIA were monitoring networks such as SWIFT in the 1980s and they did not want to bring attention to the fact that the networks were susceptible to such eavesdropping.


Neo-con propagandists allege SWIFT is secret. Neo-cons, once again, demonstrate their ability to lie with straight faces.

For the benefit of the Bush White House, which believes that history began with them in January 2001, WMR is providing a copy of the 1988 paper. It should also be stressed that this editor worked for NSA until 1986.

Trans Border Data Flow Security Paper
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4

Wayne Madsen Report