I have been hoping to wrap this series up on the SWIFT systems, how ever more data keeps coming to the surface..
This is the latest.. After 9/11/2001, the US Treasury filed some subpoenas with the Western SWIFT organization, headquartered in Brussels. This was to give them huge nearly unlimited access to global financial transaction data that they were using for surveillance. They used the justification to combat and track down terrorism,, but if you think they were using this data only for terrorism tracking, that would be very short sited. This program was called the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP). It looks like this program was virtually unknown outside of SWIFT and the US.
The Washington Post ran some articles about the TFTP program and the surveillance it was collecting. There was a huge uproar about this program, and it continued till the EU parliament passed a non-binding resolution calling on the EU Commission to suspend all data transfers according to the TFTP with the United States Treasury. I remember this and that it was a holy crap moment,, I had no idea the ramifications. Apparently data kept being collected by the NSA.
Now whats interesting,, I found two articles about the London bombings and the Paris bombings stating that the agents from the US Treasury dept could not access the data in the SWIFT system to help with the financial tracking. That it was time to rethink about opening up the TFTP program again. Hmm,, there are some very interesting implications in this piece. Also,, it would be hard not to believe that this kind of move was not planned and setup ahead of time before 9/11. Because not only would they have access to huge data, its not outside the realm of possibilities that some talented hacking could happen where some transaction information could be added, manipulated, and even deleted for agendas. This last paragraph is speculation, but is info to consider for possibilities..
I am not going into a lot of details,, but there are some significant pieces in the articles adding below..
Hope this is of benefit.
PS: The last link is a very detailed outline of what is going on with the US gaining access into the Western SWIFT system..
This is a WIKI overview about the TFTP program and some chronological events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_Finance_Tracking_Program
This is an article about the Shadow Brokers and the Western SWIFT system
https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2017/04/15/shadow-brokers-leak-reveals-the-nsas-deep-access-into-swift-banking-network/#3eb953474445
Article about one of the Paris bombings
http://www.newsweek.com/paris-attacks-have-forced-european-rethink-terror-finance-419733
This article is about Cyber thieves accessing the SWIFT global backbone system.
http://fortune.com/2016/05/20/cyber-thieves-are-exploiting-the-backbone-of-global-banking/
Hackers taking money through the SWIFT system,, this was in Russia.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-cyber-swift/hackers-stole-6-million-from-russian-bank-via-swift-system-central-bank-idUSKCN1G00DV
Hackers taking money through the SWIFT system,, this was in India 2 days ago.
https://qz.com/1210659/swift-the-messaging-system-at-the-heart-of-the-1-8-billion-punjab-national-bank-fraud/
This is the detailed and important dive deep article.. It can be downloaded as a PDF.
https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&httpsredir=1&article=4298&context=flr