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Spitzer was caught by simple banking security software
by White Noise
Eliot Spitzer was caught by simple banking security software which tracks accounts for anomalies. If he wasn't smart enough to be sensitive to this, good thing he's gone.
Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer got taken down by a bit of routine bank software, Technology Review reports.
In a fascinating piece by Wired contributor John Borland, TR explains that most banks now use automated systems to scan for anomalies that might be a tip-off to illegal activities or outright terrorism. All major banks, and many smaller ones, now use such systems to scan more than 50 million transactions per day.
What caught Spitzer was a series of three separate $5,000 wire transfers. Withdrawing large amounts of cash is one of the most obvious ways to trigger these alarms, and as the former head of the SEC, it's surprising Spitzer didn't know this. But, as Borland's article explains, the bank software has far more sophisticated tricks -- such as grouping customers by profiles, then comparing them to the baseline activity of similar customers. If you're a schoolteacher, and you bank like a drug dealer, sooner or later people are going to be asking questions.
Every single transaction by customers in these groups, and even
patterns of transactions stretching back as far as a year, are then
scrutinized for evidence of deviation from this norm using measures
such as the number, size, or frequency of transactions, among others.Yes, they are watching you.
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Comments (1)
at 09:20 on March 20th, 2008
It must be said that the powers to be had the skinny on Spitzer for a while now, they choose to drop the bomb on him a mere few hours before he drop da proverbial bomb on them as explained here…
THE REAL SPITZER STORY
Now with the complicit aid of Mindfuck Inc. all Joe Six pack will remember is that the deluxe bimbo that brought "Eliot" Spitzer to the mat has sold over a million copies of her song on My Space… Keeping the American dream alive and all of us a little bit more cynical about our institutions in the process... Now ain't life sweet ?
Mission accomplished !
"The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief." - Aristotle
As for our media as a source of...well...pretty much everything !
“At least 22 American news organizations had employed American journalists who were also working for the CIA, and nearly a dozen American publishing houses printed some of the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or subsidized by the CIA. When asked in a 1976 interview whether the CIA had ever told its media agents what to write, William Colby replied, ‘Oh, sure, all the time.”
PS : Check out Carl Bernstein’s 1970s Rolling Stone article on the CIA’s stranglehold on the US media, which has gotten far worse since then: http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/cia_press.html