WOOPS… MAYBE THOSE DIGITAL IDs AREN’T SO SECURE…

Well, we were warned, by none other than the former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts: "There is no cyber-system that is secure," an aphorism that, with time, I expect to find in collections of such aphorisms like the Analects of Confucius: priceless wisdom for the times. My philosophical turn of mind is prompted by the following important article that was shared by M.D. (with our gratitude):

India's biggest data breach? Hacking gang claims to have stolen 815 million people's personal information

Now, in case you did not know, India is one of those countries more or less on board with the moves toward an all-digital society, including for things like personal documentation, and money (in the form of so-called "digital currency", which, as Fitts, I, and many others have noted, is not a currency at all, but a corporate coupon whose "value" can be adjusted to your "social performance", i.e., your conformity to the wishes, desires, and agendas of oligarchs and plutocrats).

So when India, whose population is a little over one billion has the personal information of 815 million of that billion - a substantial majority - stolen, then you know you have a teensy-tiny little problem on your hands:

The news of what is claimed to be such a significant data leak couldn't come at a worse time for the Indian authorities.

In September, security researcher Sourajeet Majumder uncovered a vulnerability on an Indian government website that had unwittingly leaked documents which included Aadhaar numbers, identity card details and even copies of residents' fingerprints.

By mid-October the website flaw had been fixed, thanks to Majumder's responsible disclosure. But it is, of course, possible that fraudsters and online criminals had been able to exploit it for nefarious purposes beforehand.

If data breaches like these keep happening, it's understandable why many people will feel increasingly reluctant to trust the authorities with their personally identifiable and biometric data.

You can change a password, and you can change your bank account. Hey, you can even change your name if you really feel you have to. But good luck changing your fingerprints.

In other words, if one can hack the unhackable "wallets" behind klepto-currencies (as has been done), and any digital database whatsoever, one can hack those digital IDs as well. (And, bad news, there are ways of concealing or even "changing" your fingerprints, too.)

And of course, if one can hack those things, then one can hack bank accounts, particularly if those accounts are full of nothing but digital currency.

And all of that introduces a measure of risk and instability into the financial markets (it's called volatility by the finance wonks, but perhaps a better analogy would be "California brush fire").

But the article raises an intriguing possibility for high octane speculation, and regular readers here know all-too-well that I simply cannot resist a run to the end of the speculation twig and a Wile E. Coyote nosedive into the canyon of speculation below. That possibility was raised in my mind by the following statement, italicized in the quotation above: "If data breaches like these keep happening, it's understandable why many people will feel increasingly reluctant to trust the authorities with their personally identifiable and biometric data."

Ya think?

Seriously, though, the speculation is simple: what if there is a group of computer nerds spread around the world, who see the looming crisis that this move to an all-digital financial-surveillance system entails, and are trying to wake people up, and simultaneously, fight "delaying actions" by such means? It may not be as goofy as it sounds. After all, the idea of such "cyber-warfare" has been around for a long time, even being popularized by the 1984 fiction novel Softwar. It became a reality during the infamous "Farewell" spy case, when a French government mole inside the KGB helped the Soviet Union "steal" software that had a back door planted into it by Western intelligence and software experts, who used it to create a gas pipeline explosion in the Soviet Union,  critically wounding the Soviet economy. (The resulting explosion was visible from space.) More recently, we have seen the computer hacking group Anonymous, and now a similar group active in India. Finally, we know various nations - China, Russia, and the USA among them - have whole covert divisions of government working on cyber warfare. And in countries pondering moves to more and more digital "currency", "equities" and so on, those cyber warfare departments can quickly become economic warfare components, as nations compete to develop various nasty means of disrupting their adversaries' economies, including outright theft and distribution of assets before the victim has time to react.

We'll know when we wake up to the headlines "Bank of International Settlements Accounts Hacked; Authorities in Search for Culprits."

Permit me to utter those four wonderful words: "We told you so!"

Time to butter the popcorn... Sleep well, Mr. Carstens...

See you on the flip side...

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