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I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the financial dealings of Top Secret personnel is under some level of surveillance. It's not about where to move

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the financial dealings of Top Secret personnel is under some level of surveillance. It's not about where to move it to, but moving it in the first place.

officemonkey 13y ago
OTOH, it would not be hard to play the "paycheck-to-paycheck game" and withdraw all his cash, spend very little of it, and launder it through his trusted friends who could very well have imported it to Hong Kong (at $9,999 per flight) before he flew the coop.
- mseebach 13y ago
  I'd say that's exactly the kind of behaviour that gets flagged. Why did you shift from spending on your credit card and saving in your account to taking out almost all your money in cash every month? The guy made $100k+, that's a lot of money. Drug problem, trying to pay a blackmailer off? Also, I wouldn't overestimate how many of his friends he could successfully enlist in what technically (if not morally) was a conspiracy to commit treason. For something like this to be successful, it needs to come out of the blue.
  - pwnna 13y ago
    Reading through this comment chain and seeing all the plausible speculations about how these guys' banking info are monitored for red flags.. a) Why are we not mad about that kinda thing? b) Doesn't the law of large numbers say that even if someone does something that looks weird, it might just be for random fluctuations? Or is the financial system too.. regular?
  - officemonkey 13y ago
    I think you're overestimating the capacity of the security apparatus to monitor the security apparatus. They have so much work that they have to hire contractors to do it. They rely on the clearance process to weed out the untrustworthy. Re-investigations are typically at 5 year intervals. It would not surprise me that any person they have watching the store is someone who is being chided for not doing "real" work. Basically "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Nobody, apparently.
    - mseebach 13y ago
      So the same NSA that we believe to monitor all private, public and encrypted communications on the internet, and expect to render the privacy features Tor ineffective, does not have the competence to keep an eye on its own employees?
      - officemonkey 13y ago
        Snowden is proof of that.
        lightbritefight 13y ago
        Snowden is proof of part of that. The part that monitored him having access to and making copies of TS data failed. It doesn't mean any other part of the apparatus is incompetent. Put another way, I have a friend who couldn't run a mile in less than an hour. He could easily put a bullet into an apple on your head at a couple hundred yards however. If we were to consider him an adversary, dismissing him because he cant run worth a damn would be unwise.
      - aetherson 13y ago
        It's a different competency. The NSA tries to monitor all communication. If it fails to monitor 10% of the communication, or 5%, or 1%, it is still problematic that it monitors the other 90-99%. If it retains control of the information it has captured at a 90-99% efficacy rate, on the other hand, that still basically means that it leaks information like a sieve.
  - Pitarou 13y ago
    If they were that good, Snowden would have never exfiltrated all that data in the first place. Judging from this report, they seem to have a misplaced faith in the ability of the almighty polygraph to root out insiders. I quote: If you've been cleared and especially if you've been polygraphed, you're an insider and you are presumed to be trustworthy <http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9A703020131108?irpc=932> http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9A703020131108?irpc... In any case, if you're financially well-disciplined (that's a very big if), it's easy to hide money somewhere and pretend you're blowing it on useless junk.
vinceguidry 13y ago
There's actually a lot of people with TS clearances. When I was in the military, I and everybody I worked with had one. Just as how more information gets classified than is really necessary due to CYA, more personnel than strictly necessary gets processed for TS clearances simply due to the ubiquity of TS-classified information. You're talking tens of thousands of personnel. I doubt you could monitor them all any more closely than the rest of them.
- mpyne 13y ago
  There's a difference between eligibility for a clearance (which is the screening process you refer to) and actually having a clearance. You have a clearance when you're at a job where one is required. When you depart that job your clearance is revoked (but the eligibility screening remains). So you don't need to monitor everyone with a screening, just those with an actual in-use clearance.
  - jsight 13y ago
    True, but that is still tens of thousands of people.
  - vinceguidry 13y ago
    I just went on Wikipedia to check my rough estimates. I was off by a few orders of magnitude. A WaPo article in 2010 claims 854,000 people had an active clearance. That's a lot of potential leakers. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/24/AR2010082406545.html?hpid=topnews http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08...

officemonkey 13y ago

OTOH, it would not be hard to play the "paycheck-to-paycheck game" and withdraw all his cash, spend very little of it, and launder it through his trusted friends who could very well have imported it to Hong Kong (at $9,999 per flight) before he flew the coop.

mseebach 13y ago
I'd say that's exactly the kind of behaviour that gets flagged. Why did you shift from spending on your credit card and saving in your account to taking out almost all your money in cash every month? The guy made $100k+, that's a lot of money. Drug problem, trying to pay a blackmailer off? Also, I wouldn't overestimate how many of his friends he could successfully enlist in what technically (if not morally) was a conspiracy to commit treason. For something like this to be successful, it needs to come out of the blue.
- pwnna 13y ago
  Reading through this comment chain and seeing all the plausible speculations about how these guys' banking info are monitored for red flags.. a) Why are we not mad about that kinda thing? b) Doesn't the law of large numbers say that even if someone does something that looks weird, it might just be for random fluctuations? Or is the financial system too.. regular?
- officemonkey 13y ago
  I think you're overestimating the capacity of the security apparatus to monitor the security apparatus. They have so much work that they have to hire contractors to do it. They rely on the clearance process to weed out the untrustworthy. Re-investigations are typically at 5 year intervals. It would not surprise me that any person they have watching the store is someone who is being chided for not doing "real" work. Basically "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Nobody, apparently.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    So the same NSA that we believe to monitor all private, public and encrypted communications on the internet, and expect to render the privacy features Tor ineffective, does not have the competence to keep an eye on its own employees?
    - officemonkey 13y ago
      Snowden is proof of that.
      - lightbritefight 13y ago
        Snowden is proof of part of that. The part that monitored him having access to and making copies of TS data failed. It doesn't mean any other part of the apparatus is incompetent. Put another way, I have a friend who couldn't run a mile in less than an hour. He could easily put a bullet into an apple on your head at a couple hundred yards however. If we were to consider him an adversary, dismissing him because he cant run worth a damn would be unwise.
    - aetherson 13y ago
      It's a different competency. The NSA tries to monitor all communication. If it fails to monitor 10% of the communication, or 5%, or 1%, it is still problematic that it monitors the other 90-99%. If it retains control of the information it has captured at a 90-99% efficacy rate, on the other hand, that still basically means that it leaks information like a sieve.
- Pitarou 13y ago
  If they were that good, Snowden would have never exfiltrated all that data in the first place. Judging from this report, they seem to have a misplaced faith in the ability of the almighty polygraph to root out insiders. I quote: If you've been cleared and especially if you've been polygraphed, you're an insider and you are presumed to be trustworthy <http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9A703020131108?irpc=932> http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9A703020131108?irpc... In any case, if you're financially well-disciplined (that's a very big if), it's easy to hide money somewhere and pretend you're blowing it on useless junk.

vinceguidry 13y ago

There's actually a lot of people with TS clearances. When I was in the military, I and everybody I worked with had one. Just as how more information gets classified than is really necessary due to CYA, more personnel than strictly necessary gets processed for TS clearances simply due to the ubiquity of TS-classified information. You're talking tens of thousands of personnel. I doubt you could monitor them all any more closely than the rest of them.

mpyne 13y ago
There's a difference between eligibility for a clearance (which is the screening process you refer to) and actually having a clearance. You have a clearance when you're at a job where one is required. When you depart that job your clearance is revoked (but the eligibility screening remains). So you don't need to monitor everyone with a screening, just those with an actual in-use clearance.
- jsight 13y ago
  True, but that is still tens of thousands of people.
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  I just went on Wikipedia to check my rough estimates. I was off by a few orders of magnitude. A WaPo article in 2010 claims 854,000 people had an active clearance. That's a lot of potential leakers. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/24/AR2010082406545.html?hpid=topnews http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08...