by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star:
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):
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).
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
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?
