Dark Market
Dark Market
Misha Glenny
Vintage, 2012
Dear Misha,
Fabulous book. You’ve found a red hot node, and in trying to wrestle its operation and operators into a narrative, you’ve set yourself a daunting task. The spectre of a police procedural novel helps to hold the shifting elements in motion for a while, but what you have to tell eventually blows that apart. It’s a monster – you have shifting grounds and thrashing tentacles to contend with.
You tell the story of the criminal operations very clearly; sketching in those who put a footprint down in the real word, but concentrating mostly on the upper part of the chain; you make it easy to understand how the various parts of the process work: skimmers, the Escrow system, etc.
Perhaps the thing I found most impressive and most gripping is the overlay with national (and sometimes nationalistic) politics. Just as you detect the crucial schism between the free exchange of programmes on the web and those who want to charge rent (to make cyberspace property), so you show the schism between virtual and political worlds – a contradiction for those who want to use a technology that transcends borders in order to enforce them, or to exploit them (for tolls, taxes, the production of national identity, etc.)
For the nation states the stakes are very high, when so much “critical national infrastructure” is under the control of complex computer systems that are porous in ways that their physical borders are not. The nation states are vulnerable to each other – Estonia attacked by Russians, Titan Rain from China hits the US Defense department, and governments can act by default through private operators, hackers, criminals, perhaps, freelance intelligence. Devoid of any public service ethos (that might be hanging around somewhere in the West). (Have the Russians learnt the lesson of the ‘stagnation’ period and are more ready to advance their interests through their economy and natural resources?)
So some of the agents may be criminals operating at arm’s length from governments, but what’s the difference if the governments are already criminal: mafia-states, deep state conspiracies, who criticise the geeks for their lack of socialisation when governments have little, or have yet to mature sufficiently to have a moral compass?
The state technology is awesome - SORM-2, TIA (divided up, harder to trace?), Encryption is illegal in Russia, and breakable in the US, by Echelon.Reading my notes, nation states ought to be able to enforce clean independent invasive surveillance and control of traffic, but your narrative is very different - far more entangled, lots of tails wagging a very small number of huge dogs. And neither drones nor massive surveillance machines win hearts and minds.
When it comes to the Stuxnet episode, which you flag up as perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the events covered, I’m not sure if many people didn’t breathe a sigh of relief – despite the gambling with a nuclear power facility – that a belligerent, vote-fixing, holocaust-denying autocrat had had his finger removed from the nuclear trigger without Israel dropping massive bombs on the Middle East. The episode fitted (for once) with the fictional intelligence narrative – mysterious, anonymous, deadly efficient.
The fuzziness around where the Stuxnet attack came from was useful to the perpetrators in the short term, but will it create problems in the future if what you describe as the overlapping of different layers of criminal and eccentric cyber-activity with intelligence begins to morph into its own novel practices?
If the actual programming for Stuxnet wasn’t carried out by hackers/criminals (or those on their fringes) then the innovations that informed it certainly came out of their world – and that move from criminal/hackers’ creativity and the military’s adopting it is an unusually quick transition from creativity to its draining (what Deluze and Guattari used to call a ‘war machine’). Putting the military so close to innovation is a major problem, because it gives the military huge influence over the technologies that change societies, and suggests that the hacker-crime-intelligence node is a supremely arid one.
This aridity is borne out by your descriptions of various places, events and mindsets: Google as The Prisoner, private companies awash with ex-government employees, social networks accessible to US government surveillance at the drop of a hat – and the psychology of the hacker-criminals themselves.
This minuscule elite of technical competence and empathic ineptitude, people who want to be with others as long as they can be alone. Events like Cha0’s dumb kidnap of Kier/Mert or that laughable diploma “given in the city of London in Cambridge”. The amassing a small fortunes, masters among their tiny peer group, reputation but not actually known... was that conference in Odessa partly a strange reaching out? From masters of the universe with girlfriend problems. The work upon their websites being grindingly boring. But sometimes requiring skills of remote manipulation. And sometimes entangling with other remote manipulators. The aridity is transcended, esoteric and ascetic – into the valley of lies...
While you give us an account of some good old-fashioned policing, very quickly any solid ground is turned to mush. There’s massive secret service frame around the whole thing, around which weave informants, Secret Service agents posing as cyber-criminals, and some are moving back and forward across the lines. There is almost something banal about asking “who are they?” Who is Lord Cyric? If they are going out with “dream women”, when their künstlername is more interesting than they are, ‘sob stories’, suffering, refugees, exiles, offering their services to the FBI, but then sloping off back to crime, those borders melting, loyalties never really formed, everything is opportunism, like Max Vision, sealing up gaping caverns in the USAF’s defences, but leaving a tiny chink for himself, this is asymmetry, tiny players able to compromise massive institutions (at the request of the institutions), but not have any real reason to, so the state gives Max Vision a reason – puts him in a fraudsters jail – and they create Iceman! It’s like a Marvel comic! But without the moral compass. How can there be – no one knows who anybody is - secret service keep criminal operations going so they can track the criminals, Iceman hacks into DarkMarket’s servers and finds an IP address for the National Forensic Training Alliance, when CarderPlanet hold their carders’ conference in Odessa, the SBU are both monitoring and landscaping the outcomes...
By the way you make the connections, but leave ends trailing, and the way that you open up planes of activity and then allows them to skew, you construct a powerful and queasy picture of a world you are putting together, but cannot define... and this ambiguity was for me more worrying, and I think will have a greater effect on how things pan out globally, than the more immediate (and warranted) concerns about cyber-warfare and invasions of privacy. Just as the cold war and then neo-liberalism infected the second half of the twentieth century, so are we seeing a recycling of postmodern culture into baroque constructions of identity (personal and pseudo-national), that distance and avatar as the best we can do for connection? That rather than through bio-manipulation or mind-control or whatever, it will be through a financial-intelligence-criminal-hacker complex that techno-culture is realised: aridity all the way through. Devoid of any cultural connection – black market trading of property in Second Life – god help us. Making money for that?
If someone can’t “identify in his own mind when he was speaking the truth and when not”, then how do they know when they are enjoying themselves. There is no end for the freelance agents; they are bound into a set of process and characters – as you say, part-gangsters, part-anarchists, part-Tolkein characters... This book would make a great film... but it’s already been made – ‘Zelig’. Actually, anyway it would make a great film.
But then, towards the end of the book I thought something else began to kick in – rather than the existential uncertainties of the players, something darker and bigger moved – Cha0 wasn’t another inadequate or persecuted individual, sectioning off one part of their personality from another, in order to keep the information moving, but a conglomerate, the industrialisation of character - was “an a amalgam of individuals with different skills” – the arrival of organised crime, posing as a poser, . geeking as a geek. That behind the Tolkein mush, it was organised. Going Corporate... a way back in for the big state, pioneering avatar-personality for a different level of exploitation.
What happens when aggregates of nations start to operate as the equivalent of Sim or Cha0?
How long before the first avatars stand for election? Maybe a few already have.
How long before phishing becomes orthodox business behaviour. Maybe it already is.
Copyright enforced without enforcement – the rent is collected.
Perhaps those organised powers – states, gangs, industries (the 34% you don’t address) – will now be able to turn the existential churn to their own advantage – playing on and profiting from cyber-psychosis – the Reverend who is irrationally perturbed when he has a problem with his bank account, refugees in the “desolate cyber-wilderness”, ripe for recruitment, stripped of judgement in the “desert of the real”... but this is no longer a postmodern adventure, but the ‘war machine’, the swift adaption of creativity into aridity.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews
Misha Glenny
Vintage, 2012
Dear Misha,
Fabulous book. You’ve found a red hot node, and in trying to wrestle its operation and operators into a narrative, you’ve set yourself a daunting task. The spectre of a police procedural novel helps to hold the shifting elements in motion for a while, but what you have to tell eventually blows that apart. It’s a monster – you have shifting grounds and thrashing tentacles to contend with.
You tell the story of the criminal operations very clearly; sketching in those who put a footprint down in the real word, but concentrating mostly on the upper part of the chain; you make it easy to understand how the various parts of the process work: skimmers, the Escrow system, etc.
Perhaps the thing I found most impressive and most gripping is the overlay with national (and sometimes nationalistic) politics. Just as you detect the crucial schism between the free exchange of programmes on the web and those who want to charge rent (to make cyberspace property), so you show the schism between virtual and political worlds – a contradiction for those who want to use a technology that transcends borders in order to enforce them, or to exploit them (for tolls, taxes, the production of national identity, etc.)
For the nation states the stakes are very high, when so much “critical national infrastructure” is under the control of complex computer systems that are porous in ways that their physical borders are not. The nation states are vulnerable to each other – Estonia attacked by Russians, Titan Rain from China hits the US Defense department, and governments can act by default through private operators, hackers, criminals, perhaps, freelance intelligence. Devoid of any public service ethos (that might be hanging around somewhere in the West). (Have the Russians learnt the lesson of the ‘stagnation’ period and are more ready to advance their interests through their economy and natural resources?)
So some of the agents may be criminals operating at arm’s length from governments, but what’s the difference if the governments are already criminal: mafia-states, deep state conspiracies, who criticise the geeks for their lack of socialisation when governments have little, or have yet to mature sufficiently to have a moral compass?
The state technology is awesome - SORM-2, TIA (divided up, harder to trace?), Encryption is illegal in Russia, and breakable in the US, by Echelon.Reading my notes, nation states ought to be able to enforce clean independent invasive surveillance and control of traffic, but your narrative is very different - far more entangled, lots of tails wagging a very small number of huge dogs. And neither drones nor massive surveillance machines win hearts and minds.
When it comes to the Stuxnet episode, which you flag up as perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the events covered, I’m not sure if many people didn’t breathe a sigh of relief – despite the gambling with a nuclear power facility – that a belligerent, vote-fixing, holocaust-denying autocrat had had his finger removed from the nuclear trigger without Israel dropping massive bombs on the Middle East. The episode fitted (for once) with the fictional intelligence narrative – mysterious, anonymous, deadly efficient.
The fuzziness around where the Stuxnet attack came from was useful to the perpetrators in the short term, but will it create problems in the future if what you describe as the overlapping of different layers of criminal and eccentric cyber-activity with intelligence begins to morph into its own novel practices?
If the actual programming for Stuxnet wasn’t carried out by hackers/criminals (or those on their fringes) then the innovations that informed it certainly came out of their world – and that move from criminal/hackers’ creativity and the military’s adopting it is an unusually quick transition from creativity to its draining (what Deluze and Guattari used to call a ‘war machine’). Putting the military so close to innovation is a major problem, because it gives the military huge influence over the technologies that change societies, and suggests that the hacker-crime-intelligence node is a supremely arid one.
This aridity is borne out by your descriptions of various places, events and mindsets: Google as The Prisoner, private companies awash with ex-government employees, social networks accessible to US government surveillance at the drop of a hat – and the psychology of the hacker-criminals themselves.
This minuscule elite of technical competence and empathic ineptitude, people who want to be with others as long as they can be alone. Events like Cha0’s dumb kidnap of Kier/Mert or that laughable diploma “given in the city of London in Cambridge”. The amassing a small fortunes, masters among their tiny peer group, reputation but not actually known... was that conference in Odessa partly a strange reaching out? From masters of the universe with girlfriend problems. The work upon their websites being grindingly boring. But sometimes requiring skills of remote manipulation. And sometimes entangling with other remote manipulators. The aridity is transcended, esoteric and ascetic – into the valley of lies...
While you give us an account of some good old-fashioned policing, very quickly any solid ground is turned to mush. There’s massive secret service frame around the whole thing, around which weave informants, Secret Service agents posing as cyber-criminals, and some are moving back and forward across the lines. There is almost something banal about asking “who are they?” Who is Lord Cyric? If they are going out with “dream women”, when their künstlername is more interesting than they are, ‘sob stories’, suffering, refugees, exiles, offering their services to the FBI, but then sloping off back to crime, those borders melting, loyalties never really formed, everything is opportunism, like Max Vision, sealing up gaping caverns in the USAF’s defences, but leaving a tiny chink for himself, this is asymmetry, tiny players able to compromise massive institutions (at the request of the institutions), but not have any real reason to, so the state gives Max Vision a reason – puts him in a fraudsters jail – and they create Iceman! It’s like a Marvel comic! But without the moral compass. How can there be – no one knows who anybody is - secret service keep criminal operations going so they can track the criminals, Iceman hacks into DarkMarket’s servers and finds an IP address for the National Forensic Training Alliance, when CarderPlanet hold their carders’ conference in Odessa, the SBU are both monitoring and landscaping the outcomes...
By the way you make the connections, but leave ends trailing, and the way that you open up planes of activity and then allows them to skew, you construct a powerful and queasy picture of a world you are putting together, but cannot define... and this ambiguity was for me more worrying, and I think will have a greater effect on how things pan out globally, than the more immediate (and warranted) concerns about cyber-warfare and invasions of privacy. Just as the cold war and then neo-liberalism infected the second half of the twentieth century, so are we seeing a recycling of postmodern culture into baroque constructions of identity (personal and pseudo-national), that distance and avatar as the best we can do for connection? That rather than through bio-manipulation or mind-control or whatever, it will be through a financial-intelligence-criminal-hacker complex that techno-culture is realised: aridity all the way through. Devoid of any cultural connection – black market trading of property in Second Life – god help us. Making money for that?
If someone can’t “identify in his own mind when he was speaking the truth and when not”, then how do they know when they are enjoying themselves. There is no end for the freelance agents; they are bound into a set of process and characters – as you say, part-gangsters, part-anarchists, part-Tolkein characters... This book would make a great film... but it’s already been made – ‘Zelig’. Actually, anyway it would make a great film.
But then, towards the end of the book I thought something else began to kick in – rather than the existential uncertainties of the players, something darker and bigger moved – Cha0 wasn’t another inadequate or persecuted individual, sectioning off one part of their personality from another, in order to keep the information moving, but a conglomerate, the industrialisation of character - was “an a amalgam of individuals with different skills” – the arrival of organised crime, posing as a poser, . geeking as a geek. That behind the Tolkein mush, it was organised. Going Corporate... a way back in for the big state, pioneering avatar-personality for a different level of exploitation.
What happens when aggregates of nations start to operate as the equivalent of Sim or Cha0?
How long before the first avatars stand for election? Maybe a few already have.
How long before phishing becomes orthodox business behaviour. Maybe it already is.
Copyright enforced without enforcement – the rent is collected.
Perhaps those organised powers – states, gangs, industries (the 34% you don’t address) – will now be able to turn the existential churn to their own advantage – playing on and profiting from cyber-psychosis – the Reverend who is irrationally perturbed when he has a problem with his bank account, refugees in the “desolate cyber-wilderness”, ripe for recruitment, stripped of judgement in the “desert of the real”... but this is no longer a postmodern adventure, but the ‘war machine’, the swift adaption of creativity into aridity.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews