They can read your e-mail and listen to your phone calls—but could the National Security Agency also be snooping into your finances? The German magazine Spiegel, citing new details from the Edward Snowden files,
reports today that an NSA program called Follow the Money tracks records of international payments, banking, and credit-card transactions.
NSA analysts said at an internal conference in 2010 that they had successfully searched Visa’s credit-card transaction network to target customers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, Spiegel reported. Their goal was “to collect, parse, and ingest transactional data for priority credit-card associations, focusing on priority geographic regions,” the magazine said, quoting what it said was an NSA document from 2010.
