US government hack of global banking system shows the necessity of Bitcoin

Golden Finance News - Today, the US government urgently needs a decentralized financial network like Bitcoin, as the government continues to monitor the global banking system and payment transfers on a large scale.

Government agencies and legal institutions need a long application process to access interbank financial communications. Image source: Golden Finance

In the past few months, some illegal activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) have been exposed by multiple organizations, including hacker groups. Recently, an NSA tool was leaked and sold on the dark web. This tool is the NSA's surveillance tool for the Swift global banking system.

The U.S. government’s motivation

U.S. government agencies and legal bodies need to go through a lengthy application process to access Swift, the global interbank financial communication service, to obtain necessary financial information about specific banking merchants for businesses and individuals.

However, with surveillance and hacking tools, the NSA was able to bypass the above application and directly access the Swift network without the system alerting the police. According to a representative of the hacker group Shadow Brokers, the NSA's hacking tool allows the US government to fully monitor financial transactions settled in the Swift network.

NSA allows the US government to fully monitor financial transactions settled in the Swift network. Image source: Golden Finance

Matt Suiche, founder of Comae, a UAE-based cybersecurity company, told Reuters:

"If you breach that service, that means you also have access to all of their customers and all of their banks."

Although some security analysts and companies including EastNets have denied the Shadow Brokers' claims, famous whistleblower and security expert Snowden explained that if the NSA hacking tool mentioned by the Shadow Brokers is true, it can be described as the king of cracking.

At the same time, Swift announced that its security and research teams had not found any surveillance activities by the US government.

"There is no evidence of any unauthorized access to our network or messaging services," a Swift representative said.

The necessity of Bitcoin

Whether or not the U.S. government actually used the NSA’s hacking tools to spy on the Swift network without a warrant is not the point. What is at issue is that such a hacking tool exists and is capable of spying on transactions around the world.

Any centralized financial network such as Swift, if not decentralized like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, faces the risk that any network, server or database connected to the internet will be subject to hacking, surveillance and data breaches.

All transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain are cryptographically proven and can be accessed on the Bitcoin blockchain. Most importantly, because the Bitcoin blockchain is public, it cannot be manipulated by sophisticated hacking tools used by government agencies such as the NSA.

Although most Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges around the world have strict anti-money laundering laws and know-your-customer systems, government agencies and law enforcement agencies must go through appropriate channels to obtain this data.