the equalisaer conspiracy
The Equaliser Conspiracy
Back in 1989, several years before the blossoming of the Internet, Clifford Stoll published The Cuckoo’s Egg, a gripping but true story of espionage. When his student funding ran out, Stoll was sent to his university’s computer centre to see if they could find something useful to occupy him. The centre supervisor gave him the bizarre task of investigating why the time on the clocks of two linked computers differed by just one second. After extensive digging he found that one computer had been infiltrated by an Eastern European hacker. If you’ve time, read the book, it’s fascinating.
Now while the Cuckoo’s Egg held me enthralled, science fiction – which it was not – has never appealed. Somehow the future being described never matches up to later reality. So I surprised myself recently when, on waking in the middle of the night, I tried to put myself back to sleep by composing my own work of science fiction....
A shadowy group, the Equalisers, appalled at the notion that by 2030 the world’s richest one percent would own two thirds of the world’s wealth, sprang into action. Using Fortune’s list of the hundred wealthiest, they inveigled malapps onto the phones and computers of each list member which streamed back second by second video, voice and text. Now no one likes to watch bleary eyed celebrities brushing their teeth at night, so they employed an artificial intelligence based voice and image recognition system to scan the feeds and put aside juicy bits of information.
Three months later, at two in the morning, a remote signal switched on all the gas plates on the stove in the kitchen of number one on the list. An hour later a spark caused a massive gas explosion which killed number one and all his family. Two days later each of the other Fortune 100 members received their own list of one million bank accounts around the world with instructions to pay a huge amount into each or else they would suffer the same fate. Of course, they all ignored the warning. After all the police claimed the explosion was just an unfortunate domestic accident.
Exactly a month later the jet of number two crashed while coming in to land, the yacht of number three vanished without trace in the Bermuda Triangle and the Tesla X of number four inexplicably veered off the side of a bridge drowning the occupants in the river below. Now when each of the remaining ninety six received another instruction to transfer 90% of their assets to two million recipients each, they smartly fed the electronic lists into electronic trading systems and sat back, poorer but relieved to still be alive. The recipients of this largesse were overjoyed of course until they too received an SMS instructing them to hand out half their newfound wealth to local citizens too poor to own bank accounts.
Meanwhile the cybersleuths had roared into action. At first it seemed that the messages emanated from a computer in North Korea. Then it was found to be a Russian address masquerading as Kim. To their horror on investigating further they found that the source of all the action was not a person at all but an artificial intelligence based computer game called Robin Hood which was simultaneously running on millions of computers around the world. At this point I unfortunately fell asleep so I can’t tell you the outcome, but I can give you some inkling of the news reports I’d read recently that gave rise to this fantasy.
The 2030 wealth forecast was produced by the UK’s House of Commons library research team this month and fits with other wealth projections I have mentioned in the past. Today the Cuckoo’s Egg story is not unique; last month the city government of Atlanta, Georgia, ground to a halt as all its computers were stricken with ransomware. For the past few weeks we’ve been hearing stories about all the Facebook user data scraped by Cambridge Analytica – that data is insignificant compared to the data being amassed by the Chinese government and by America’s very own National Security Agency. Back in 2014, for instance, journalists found the latter had copies of every E-mail sent in Bermuda – and where else – during the previous year.
Research by Exodus Privacy and Yale University’s Privacy Lab found that more than 75% of Google Play apps, such as Uber, Tinder, Skype, Twitter, Spotify, and Snapchat, contain at least one of 25 known trackers of user behaviour. These are primarily used for targeted advertising, behavioural analytics and location tracking. Research by Quartz Magazine found Google was tapping cell phone locations even when a phone’s location services had been switched off. In addition, Google is being accused of bypassing iPhone security during 2011 and 2012 in order to collect personal information. Then just last week I found an article recommending I tape over the cameras on my phone and my computer; it seems there might be others surreptitiously using my cameras and microphones to take selfies and more of me and stream them back to goodness knows where.
Amazon, Apple and Google are in hot competition to provide the controlling devices for domestic Internets of Things – including of course stoves that can be switched on remotely using one’s cellphone. At an Internet security conference last year an eleven year old whizzkid demonstrated how he had hacked into his sibling’s Bluetooth enabled teddy bear. Now the German government is warning parents not to let their offspring buy Bluetooth enabled toys; maybe the government should be warning kids not to let their parents buy wifi enabled kitchenware!
We all know that many aircraft landings today are fully automated, controlled by an airport computer on the ground rather than the pilots sitting up front. Smart yachts are monitored by their makers so they can anticipate problems their wealthy clients might encounter and fix them remotely. After Hurricane Harvey, Tesla remotely updated the software on older models fleeing the storm so they could move faster and get away. What’s to stop determined hackers accessing any of these systems?
The computer systems at the Winter Olympics in South Korea were hacked into by persons purporting to be North Korean but who, on further investigation, were found to be Russian. Meanwhile Google has been crowing about an artificial intelligence based game playing computer that could beat any human being at the very complicated game of Go. Now, as you well know, Go and Chess, where a computer beat the world champion more than a decade ago, are quite complicated compared to a game which has just one simple rule – pay up or I will eliminated you! For some years now I’ve been reading warnings about software that sneaks onto your computer and wakes it up when you are asleep to perform tasks that need lots of computers running in parallel. The applications that come to mind of course are neural networks or one of the crypto currencies which requires blockchain software running on a maze of computers in parallel.
So, I like to think that my science fiction, albeit composed after midnight, is much more plausible than Aldous Huxley’s. What about yours?
Back in 1989, several years before the blossoming of the Internet, Clifford Stoll published The Cuckoo’s Egg, a gripping but true story of espionage. When his student funding ran out, Stoll was sent to his university’s computer centre to see if they could find something useful to occupy him. The centre supervisor gave him the bizarre task of investigating why the time on the clocks of two linked computers differed by just one second. After extensive digging he found that one computer had been infiltrated by an Eastern European hacker. If you’ve time, read the book, it’s fascinating.
Now while the Cuckoo’s Egg held me enthralled, science fiction – which it was not – has never appealed. Somehow the future being described never matches up to later reality. So I surprised myself recently when, on waking in the middle of the night, I tried to put myself back to sleep by composing my own work of science fiction....
A shadowy group, the Equalisers, appalled at the notion that by 2030 the world’s richest one percent would own two thirds of the world’s wealth, sprang into action. Using Fortune’s list of the hundred wealthiest, they inveigled malapps onto the phones and computers of each list member which streamed back second by second video, voice and text. Now no one likes to watch bleary eyed celebrities brushing their teeth at night, so they employed an artificial intelligence based voice and image recognition system to scan the feeds and put aside juicy bits of information.
Three months later, at two in the morning, a remote signal switched on all the gas plates on the stove in the kitchen of number one on the list. An hour later a spark caused a massive gas explosion which killed number one and all his family. Two days later each of the other Fortune 100 members received their own list of one million bank accounts around the world with instructions to pay a huge amount into each or else they would suffer the same fate. Of course, they all ignored the warning. After all the police claimed the explosion was just an unfortunate domestic accident.
Exactly a month later the jet of number two crashed while coming in to land, the yacht of number three vanished without trace in the Bermuda Triangle and the Tesla X of number four inexplicably veered off the side of a bridge drowning the occupants in the river below. Now when each of the remaining ninety six received another instruction to transfer 90% of their assets to two million recipients each, they smartly fed the electronic lists into electronic trading systems and sat back, poorer but relieved to still be alive. The recipients of this largesse were overjoyed of course until they too received an SMS instructing them to hand out half their newfound wealth to local citizens too poor to own bank accounts.
Meanwhile the cybersleuths had roared into action. At first it seemed that the messages emanated from a computer in North Korea. Then it was found to be a Russian address masquerading as Kim. To their horror on investigating further they found that the source of all the action was not a person at all but an artificial intelligence based computer game called Robin Hood which was simultaneously running on millions of computers around the world. At this point I unfortunately fell asleep so I can’t tell you the outcome, but I can give you some inkling of the news reports I’d read recently that gave rise to this fantasy.
The 2030 wealth forecast was produced by the UK’s House of Commons library research team this month and fits with other wealth projections I have mentioned in the past. Today the Cuckoo’s Egg story is not unique; last month the city government of Atlanta, Georgia, ground to a halt as all its computers were stricken with ransomware. For the past few weeks we’ve been hearing stories about all the Facebook user data scraped by Cambridge Analytica – that data is insignificant compared to the data being amassed by the Chinese government and by America’s very own National Security Agency. Back in 2014, for instance, journalists found the latter had copies of every E-mail sent in Bermuda – and where else – during the previous year.
Research by Exodus Privacy and Yale University’s Privacy Lab found that more than 75% of Google Play apps, such as Uber, Tinder, Skype, Twitter, Spotify, and Snapchat, contain at least one of 25 known trackers of user behaviour. These are primarily used for targeted advertising, behavioural analytics and location tracking. Research by Quartz Magazine found Google was tapping cell phone locations even when a phone’s location services had been switched off. In addition, Google is being accused of bypassing iPhone security during 2011 and 2012 in order to collect personal information. Then just last week I found an article recommending I tape over the cameras on my phone and my computer; it seems there might be others surreptitiously using my cameras and microphones to take selfies and more of me and stream them back to goodness knows where.
Amazon, Apple and Google are in hot competition to provide the controlling devices for domestic Internets of Things – including of course stoves that can be switched on remotely using one’s cellphone. At an Internet security conference last year an eleven year old whizzkid demonstrated how he had hacked into his sibling’s Bluetooth enabled teddy bear. Now the German government is warning parents not to let their offspring buy Bluetooth enabled toys; maybe the government should be warning kids not to let their parents buy wifi enabled kitchenware!
We all know that many aircraft landings today are fully automated, controlled by an airport computer on the ground rather than the pilots sitting up front. Smart yachts are monitored by their makers so they can anticipate problems their wealthy clients might encounter and fix them remotely. After Hurricane Harvey, Tesla remotely updated the software on older models fleeing the storm so they could move faster and get away. What’s to stop determined hackers accessing any of these systems?
The computer systems at the Winter Olympics in South Korea were hacked into by persons purporting to be North Korean but who, on further investigation, were found to be Russian. Meanwhile Google has been crowing about an artificial intelligence based game playing computer that could beat any human being at the very complicated game of Go. Now, as you well know, Go and Chess, where a computer beat the world champion more than a decade ago, are quite complicated compared to a game which has just one simple rule – pay up or I will eliminated you! For some years now I’ve been reading warnings about software that sneaks onto your computer and wakes it up when you are asleep to perform tasks that need lots of computers running in parallel. The applications that come to mind of course are neural networks or one of the crypto currencies which requires blockchain software running on a maze of computers in parallel.
So, I like to think that my science fiction, albeit composed after midnight, is much more plausible than Aldous Huxley’s. What about yours?
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