CRIME PAYS: The Greatest Smash and Grab Fraud of All Time
We've never had data privacy or protection in any meaningful way, because crime pays, until it doesn't
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With Stripe down this morning and Meta paying fines more for its crimes against humanity, I thought about my first book, a collaboration with rapper Ice T. It was called The Ice Opinion, and it was the first meaningful rap book.
I thought about the section on smash and grabs — a common crime in the ‘80s, where thieves would break a storefront window, often a jewelry store, grab the goods and take off. But what Ice T explained is often these crimes were inside jobs — the shop owners would stage the crimes with members of street gangs as part of insurance scams.
I woke up thinking about the smash and grab fakes, because I was wondering how many hacks are actually inside jobs. Thanks to decades of deifying web developers, we are conditioned to believe these people are ever so magical. When in fact, in the case of the DOGE heist, they were just handed the keys.
The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro
Nearly three years ago, I was permanently suspended from Twitter for a day after publishing this report for Byline Supplement — The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro — in September of 2023.
Despite the global amnesia around tech funding, I remind people that it was Putin bag men who originally funded social media platforms — weapon’s of mass democratic destruction.
Reflecting back on this report, I now realize it was the genesis for my thesis that the oligarchs know global warming is real, and that’s why they’re funding a new feudalism, where they steal all of earth’s resources and relegate the great unwashed to peasant class. Or worse, gulag slave labor.
So why would the deified tech leaders care about our privacy, our livelihoods, our online safety — why would they protect us at all? It turns out, they don’t. It turns out these smash and grabs that we are led to believe are imbued with magical powers of magical beings are mostly inside jobs.
Before I prove my latest thesis, take a moment to read this excerpt from my 2023 The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro report, it’s a good primer for their moral malfeasance:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”—Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962
They were treated as special — tech wunderkinds who possessed magical powers.
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel etc…
Awe-inducing cover stories in polished tech periodicals, which existed to exalt them on high. The faces of these special boys appear in chiaroscuro to ensure their canonisation.
But what was Mark Zuckerberg, really? A troll who created a website twenty years ago that judged if someone was hot or not. FaceMash, as it was known, evolved into Facebook, and its ‘move fast and break things’ ethos nearly broke democracy when the social media platform allowed Cambridge Analytica to hoover up all our data and target minds.
“It started with the dream of a connected world,” said digital rights activist Professor David Carroll in the film The Great Hack. “These digital traces of ourselves are being mined into a trillion dollar a year industry… we are now the commodity.”
No one read the terms and conditions, or checked the box for the part where the world becomes a deeply divided wreckage site, he said.
And it wasn’t that long ago when Elon Musk was a deified ‘star man’.
The world thought he was really special.
Then he bought Twitter, and starting posting Hitler memes and neo-Nazi references.
Many were shocked. Those who knew him from Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, and the plethora of dewy deifying tech cover stories couldn’t believe it was the same guy.
But those who’d been paying closer attention saw it coming, as we did here in our report Unmusked: How Elon Musk is Using Twitter to Destroy the Concept of Truth.
The Bag Men
The origin stories of Twitter and Facebook always seem to leave out its initial funding. As the Guardian reported in 2017:
“Two Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin funded substantial stakes in Twitter and Facebook through an investor who later acquired an interest in a Jared Kushnerventure, leaked documents reveal.
“The investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.”
If money is coming from a mafia state — one that is consistently and relentlessly targeting the West with information warfare, that should be well-publicized in the terms and conditions that no one reads.
It was PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel who said in 2009 that he “no longer believed freedom and democracy are compatible”. To his point, he funds extreme anti-democratic candidates…
Both Thiel and Vance are behind the platform Rumble, which functions as a pro-Kremlin propaganda and radicalization outlet, and extremist presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has benefited from his friendship with Vance and Thiel’s investments in his businesses.
Ergo, if the tech bro is a genius, then it feels more like Dr. Evil than Einstein…
Because the tech scene exploded out of the progressive waters of the San Francisco Bay Area, there was a time when people thought that meant Silicon Valley was progressive, too.
Lol. Images of the tech titans lining up to kiss Trump’s ring in 2017 put that false notion to rest.
Tech Bros Killed My Hometown
No one was more deified than the man in black — Apple’s Steve Jobs. His product is ubiquitous and has absolutely changed the world, but I see his face in chiaroscuro, and I think of how my hometown went from a melting pot of immigrants who bought nice homes on lower middle class salaries to the explosion of tech pricing out the lower middle class. Houses bought in the 1960s on one blue collar salary for $20,000 now selling for multiple millions. Gig workers delivering overpriced food, taxis unaffordable — the haves have it all, the have nots get $15 an hour.
It’s not his fault — he helped revolutionize the world but his success and the success of others killed my hometown. The hippies of the sixties have been replaced with yoga babble-spewing cutthroats that gave us a post-privacy world without so much as an ‘I’m sorry.’
And for every Jobs, there’s a Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto exchange FTX, who was arrested last year in the Bahamas and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, campaign finance violations, securities and commodities violations, as well as other charges.
Or an Adam Neumann. Neumann — who was forced out of the collaborative office space company he co-founded, WeWork — told a reporter in 2019 he wanted to live forever, become a trillionaire, the president of the world, and expand WeWork to Mars.
Back to the Futurism
An Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published a manifesto in 1909 titled: The Manifesto of Futurism or Manifesto del Futurismo.
The poet’s philosophy — called Futurism — rejected the past, celebrated speed (‘move fast, break things’), machinery, violence, youth, and industry.
In a Medium report reprinted in the Guardian, Douglas Rushkoff — author of Survival of the Richest, Team Human, Program or Be Programmed, and host of the Team Humanpodcast, wrote about a personal experience he had with ‘Futurists’ when he was invited to lecture at half a year’s salary. He said he was brought to a room where five tech bros questioned him.
“That’s when it hit me,” he wrote, “at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
“Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures – something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.”
“This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities.”
Silicon Valley technologist Joshua C. Fidel, my co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, said any moral implications were always an illusion.
“Tech’s metastasizing amorality occurred because there were billions of dollars pumped into it to create the spectacle,” Fidel told Byline Supplement. “People see successful and wealthy people and idolize them, they want to be like them. And Silicon Valley was always a lie… If you look at everything they promised those two decades ago, nothing has come to pass.
“That Arthur C. Clarke comment — any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — that's what they offered us as amazing advancements in technology. Instead, what we got was smoke and mirrors — entire industries destroyed. Money sucked out from the working class, and deposited in the bank accounts of venture capitalists.”
He said the shiny front was to hide the malevolence.
“They gathered our data, they processed it. And they turned it around and used it against us to drive some of us mad, some of us into radicalized extremists willing to kill for a political figure.”
False Gods
Author Neil Gaiman — in his book American Gods — created New Gods to worship — the god of technology, the god of the internet — as the Old Gods’ curb appeal had waned.
But what are these tech geniuses really? Carnival barkers — clever lads who invented 50 new ways to steal a buck?
“They draw you into the tent to take your money, but not just your money, your data,” said Fidel. “They know where you live, how many kids you have, how you tend to vote, what TV programs you watch, the brand of toilet paper you like to buy.
“They know how to put people around you if you're on social media. ‘Here's a group that you should join. Hey, have you read this new website that might just be run by a bunch of f**king Russians pretending to be Americans?’”
It appears no tech platforms run by the Gods of the Internet appear to be operating in good faith or proving they can regulate themselves, and Section 230 of Title 47 of the US Code — part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — is weak tea, providing immunity for platforms from third-party content. So they go ahead and become accessories to global crimes against humanity — mass shootings are livestreamed, beheadings are uploaded, revenge porn continues to traumatise its intended targets, because… whatever… it’s the internet.
The most sensible thing I’ve heard is to move fast, and break up tech — turning these social media platforms into regulated public utilities. Like clean water, and clean air, we now rely on communications platforms, and rather than allow communication to be disrupted by Nazi trolls and bot farms or paid internet assassins hired to discredit reporters and politicians, we should be able to communicate without fear, emotional trauma, and death threats.
Yesterday, I was alerted that I was being targeted by a well-connected veteran abuse troll using AI and calling me ‘brainless’. (Author’s note: the abuse was coming from 8chan founder Fred Brennan.—hsc). After months of death threats and years of abuse for my work, I no longer care what is said about me by those with malicious intentions, but it leaves a lingering gray cloud that takes some time to pass…
Here's the thing, we shouldn’t have to live this way. The Gods of the Internet should never have been pedestalled. When Musk let all the troll farms back on Xitter, it made things harder for those committed to the labor of democracy.
Investigative reporter Carole Cadwalldr posed these questions in the Ted Talk she gave in Silicon Valley to the tech bros:
“Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism? Is this what we want? To sit back and play with our phones as this darkness falls.”
Crime Pays
In revisiting that report today, it seems obvious there’s no firewall between the false gods delivering democratic deathblows and those doing the break ins.
Turns out, 66% of data breaches involve an insider, but only 10% of security budgets focus on insider threats, according to a Cybercrime Magazine report, which cites malice, negligence, and the departing employee as common denominators.
According to the report, 63% of employees take data with them when leaving, citing weak data protection and privilege abuse, where users have access to sensitive information that do not need for daily tasks.
While these thieves should be easy to spot in their cubicles, they’re also easy to spot in the wild — like the photo of the tech billionaires who showed up to kiss the ring at Trump’s second inauguration — like a police line-up (Author’s note: odd that my former colleague, Lauren Sanchez, is in the middle of the photo. I used to produce segments for her in our broadcast news days).
Mark Zuckerberg Writes Checks
Recall when Facebook handed our data to the Russian-linked Cambridge Analytica/SCL operation, and how Facebook helped throw the 2016 election to Donald Trump, and then its CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to write company checks? In 2019, Facebook was fined $5 billion by the FTC for ‘improperly’ delivering the data of 87 million users. In the UK, Facebook was fined £500,000 for failing to protect users’ information.
And just last week, Zuckerberg was told his company had to write another check — for $375 million — by a court in New Mexico, which found META, which along with Facebook, owns Instagram and WhatsApp, “endangered children and exposed them to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators.”
Twitter Was Bad from the Start
Recall how Twitter was used to throw the election to Donald Trump in 2016, as Russian accounts were repurposed by Trump campaign staff and used to mislead voters?
Recall how Twitter was used in 2024 to throw the election to Donald Trump, as Musk let all the Nazis back on the platform and used his power to subvert the reach of journalists still practiced in the art of truth?
And then Musk was fined and had to write a check. In December, the EU Commission issued a fine of €120 million to X for “breaching its transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The breaches include the deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark’, the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers.”
I’m glad the EU fined Musk. I’m sure it hurt to part with .0172 percent of his wealth.
He wrote a bigger check to get Trump elected, $290 million in campaign donations.
According to Bloomberg’s billionaire index, four tech execs who attended and/or donated to Trump’s second inauguration got $288 billion richer, in his first year back — they are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen Huang.
DOGE Was An Inside Job
I know the amnesia is real — as I wrote yesterday, we are being inundated with daily horrors making it difficult to keep track of each attack on our institutions, which is by design.
But we can’t forget the greatest hack in US history was not even a hack — DOGE was an inside job. Among the latest claims, a former Musk twerp took private Social Security data on a thumb drive, which he planned to share with his new employer, according to a Congressional Social Security Subcommittee.
Recall the myths that were created about DOGE engineers — wunderkinds with amazing ‘big balls’ — and then, of course, the reality: a KGB grandpa and a group alarmingly reminiscent of Nazi youth, as deposition videos surfaced of cold, calculating, radicalized young men.
Have we already forgotten that Musk was in regular communication with Vladimir Putin in the run-up to Trump’s second election? Did we already forget that Musk was in regular contact with Putin's deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, who the Justice Department identified in 2024 as leading a “Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaign” when it seized 32 internet domains.
As I wrote in September 2024, according to court documents, “the Russians found Musk’s Twitter ‘user friendly’ when it came to creating ‘a network of 200 accounts… four in each of the 50 states: two active and two dormant.’ The ‘active’ accounts are fictitious personas make-believing they represent a community of local activists. The goal of that project was to reach a million people.”
Just one of the projects… just one.
So it appears crime pays, until it doesn’t.
French authorities raided Musk’s Twitter offices.
I hope they find the keys.
It would be the first example of a non-criminal with access to all our data.
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