Pathfinders: Dark capitalism (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers may have noticed that phishing emails have increased to almost epidemic rates lately. These are no longer badly spelled with wonky grammar. They are sophisticated efforts with corporate logos and plausible small print, purporting to be from banks or internet service providers, or even from your own club or organisation. Like Dracula, they can’t get into your system unless you invite them across the threshold, in this case by clicking the provided link. Once in, they aim to drain your bank account dry. A simple rule is to assume that anything asking you to click or open something is a scam unless you’re absolutely sure it isn’t. You can find some other good advice here.

There are phone scammers too, who are as annoying as they are persistent. In an effort to fight back, some computer scientists have set up honeytrap accounts, supposedly belonging to innocent and confused old ladies, but really controlled by an AI bot with the sole function of keeping scammers tied up in long phone calls answering silly questions.

But all that is a drop in the bucket compared to what’s really going on in that shadowy criminal dimension of the profit system, which we might call ‘dark capitalism’. Scamming is just one facet of this, but it’s not just a grubby little cottage industry anymore, it’s a multi-billion dollar global industry on the scale, by some estimates, of the illegal drug trade.

A deep and deeply disturbing analysis of this industry was provided recently in an 8-part podcast series called Scam Inc. by the Economist‘s South-East Asia correspondent Sue-Lin Wong. Since most of the series is paywalled it’s worth briefly recapping here. Just as AI can be used to fight scams, it is also being used to create them. There are two main types, love scams and crypto investment scams. Love scams target single, often older people, drawing them into a heady and convincing online or phone relationship until they are completely convinced it is real. AI is used to research and identify likely marks, and then deep-fake face and voice calls, as well as web and social media ‘histories’. The victim is cultivated over months, and then invited to make a small investment which sure enough sees a profitable return, reinforcing their sense of trust. When they are later invited to make a big investment, with huge returns, they have no reason to think it’s not genuine. And then, nothing. All the calls stop, the number is unobtainable, the scammer has vanished and so has the money. This, in the trade, is chillingly referred to as ‘pig butchering’.

Crypto scams target people, perhaps with retirement savings, who are persuaded that they can’t lose. Smart people are often at particular risk, largely because they overestimate their own sceptical faculties and underestimate how devious and tech-savvy the scammers are. One corporate finance manager paid over $21 million of company funds after his board of directors, all of whom he knew personally, told him to in a teleconferencing meeting. What he didn’t know was that the ‘board of directors’ were all deep-fake computer voices, and so convincing that he couldn’t tell the difference. How can anyone defend themselves against that? Sue-Lin Wong’s own solution has been to give all her family members a secret password, so that if ‘she’ ever phoned them asking for large amounts of money, they would have a way to verify it was really her.

You might think, at this point, that these scammers are the amoral jackals of capitalism, the worst of what Marx called the ‘lumpenproletariat’. But the truth is even more horrible than that. Having interviewed one love-scam victim in Canada who lost $75,000, Sue-Lin performed the almost miraculous feat of tracking down the very scammer who did it. And what she found would chill anyone’s blood.

This is where dark capitalism turns darkest of all. The guilty scammer wasn’t some ruthless money-grabbing parasite, she was a helpless kidnap victim terrified for her life. She had applied for what seemed like a promising job in Thailand, on the advice of a supposed friend, then was bundled into a car at Bangkok airport, trussed and blindfolded and driven across the border to a ‘scam compound’ in Myanmar, a barbed-wire fringed mini-city patrolled by dogs and armed guards. Her passport was taken away, and she was ordered to use the phones to scam westerners, on pain of physical beating, or even execution. Only if she scammed enough money would she ever be set free, they told her. In her compound were hundreds of other kidnap victims, all forced to do the same thing. And hers was only one of many such compounds.

Who are the gang lords behind all this? Very likely Chinese former Triad (mafia) bosses, kicked out of China by Xi Jinping’s crackdowns but able to operate scams from anywhere. Under pressure from China, Myanmar’s rebel forces recently broke open some of these scam compounds, releasing hundreds of trafficking victims. But such compounds exist in other places across the world. One was even uncovered on the Isle of Man.

Even socialists, who think they know the depths of capitalism’s depravity, must quail at its darkest criminal side, where no laws inhibit its drive to make a profit no matter who suffers. Here is where you see what money does to people, how low it makes them sink. Here is where the need to abolish capitalism screams, as loud as in any warzone, any overcrowded hospital, any sink estate, any overdose or private numb despair.

And yet, decent humanity shines through even in such circumstances. When told the full story about the Myanmar scammer who took $75,000 from him, the Canadian offered to meet her to assure her that he didn’t blame her for anything, and that he wished her well in the future. She, sadly, was too traumatised to agree to the meeting.

Paddy Shannon

Proper Gander: Hacked off (2024)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

For some journalists, the ‘freedom of the press’ has meant the ‘freedom’ to get information for a scoop by any unscrupulous method, especially tapping phones. ITV’s documentary Tabloids On Trial was a reminder that the ‘phone hacking scandal’ is still being played out in the courts, over eighteen years since it first became public. Much of the programme is taken up with ITV News’s Rebecca Barry interviewing people involved, such as ex-journalists and celebrities. Footballer Paul Gascoigne, now looking older than his years, talks about the damage done by newspaper exposés of his personal life and how reporters learned the details. Actor Hugh Grant alleges that The Sun used information about him gathered through microphones in window boxes, medical records ‘blagged’ from the NHS and burglary. Singer Charlotte Church tells of how she was targeted by the press from when she was a teenager, and says they became an ‘inescapable abuser’. Ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown says that when his phone was hacked, this risked the leak of state secrets to the press. Even Prince Harry is interviewed, telling us that the surveillance and mistrust it led to ‘sucks’. When he won his civil court case against Mirror Group Newspapers in December 2023, the judge ruled that phone hacking and illegal information gathering was ‘habitual and widespread’ in the company.

The spare heir isn’t the only royal to have been affected. In 2005, the royal family (or their staff) noticed that some of the details in News of the World articles about them could only have come from voicemails, so they contacted the police. A reporter and private investigator were subsequently convicted of phone hacking, and the investigation closed after a few months with the Metropolitan Police claiming there was ‘insufficient evidence’ of any other wrongdoing at the newspaper. As Nick Davies, an investigative journalist who uncovered the scandal, says in the documentary, they ‘very very nearly got away with that’. Then, in 2011, it was revealed that News of the World journalists had also hacked into the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler while she was missing. The resulting backlash led to the newspaper closing down.

The Leveson Inquiry began the same year, collating reports from thousands of people who had information about them gained surreptitiously by journalists and contracted private investigators. At the hearings, senior newspaper staff and reporters all denied knowledge of phone hacking, except James Hipwell, who said that it happened daily on The Mirror’s showbiz desk, then overseen by Piers Morgan. Interviewed for the documentary is Paul McMullan, previously of the News of the World, who admits that phone hacking was commonplace and accepted, opining that privacy was something that people may want, but don’t need.

Many of the celebrities and others have won damages in court, and civil cases are ongoing, including that raised by Prince Harry. Cases have been or will be against behemoths Mirror Group Newspapers, News UK Newspapers (part of News Corp, which owns The Sun and now-defunct News of the World) and Associated Newspapers, which includes The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. As pointed out by ex-broadsheet editor Baroness Wheatcroft, considering that this is an industry-wide crime with thousands of victims, there have been few criminal convictions. Only eight journalists or private investigators and one senior figure (News of the World editor Andy Coulson) were found guilty of hacking-related crimes. An explanation for this low number suggested by the documentary is that the police were reluctant to investigate because of their connections with the press, described by ex-newspaper editor Paul Connew as ‘almost a mutual backscratching relationship’. Hugh Grant remarks that the police were ‘as dangerous as the reporters’ because they would tip off journalists. An undercover police officer working at a private investigator firm says that what he reported back to the Met was ignored because their senior staff were friendly with those at The Sun. The Tories dropped the Leveson Inquiry before any links between the police and the papers were investigated. The documentary is careful not to go too far here, raising more questions about how close those links between parts of the establishment have been.

The suggestion that phone hacking is part of a bigger issue in a more fundamental way is made by Prince Harry, of all people, in calling the claimants including himself the ‘Davids’ to the Goliath of the ‘vast media enterprise’. He seemingly recognises that even his own status and wealth is dwarfed by the clout of the media industry, with its central role in the capitalist economy. The phone hacking scandal is notable in that it has wronged some of those at the top of capitalism’s hierarchy, also including Gordon Brown. The capitalist class and its representatives benefit from how the system – including the media industry – exploits people, but because they are newsworthy, they’re subject to being exploited by the media themselves. And it appears to be only the very richest victims – like the prince and the ex-PM – who can afford what’s called justice. Even Hugh Grant hasn’t got the money to cover the £10 million in legal fees which a victory in court would cost him, hence him agreeing an out-of-court settlement with The Sun.

Of all those interviewed for the documentary, investigative journalist Nick Davies has the widest and clearest view of the scandal. As he explains, the ‘ruthless determination’ for profits has driven tactics such as phone hacking, ‘blagging’ and stealing, regardless of the welfare of their targets. If these tactics provide information for salacious stories which sell more newspapers, creating more profit, then those tactics will be used. As Paul McMullan states, the illegality of phone hacking didn’t prevent journalists using it as ‘almost an industry standard technique’. Now that this practice has been exposed, the backlash against it has made it no longer feasible, and therefore no longer profitable.

The media industry has changed since the years when phone hacking was widespread. Then, printed newspapers weren’t as seriously threatened by the proliferation of online news providers as they are now. Changes in how we consume news have eroded the prominence which newspapers once had, and the disgrace of the phone hacking scandal has helped speed up their decline. What hasn’t changed, though, is the ‘ruthless determination’ for profits which drives the media industry and those who work within.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Hack To The Future (2022)

The Proper Gander Column from the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A thread which runs through the work of film-maker Peter Kosminsky is exploring how people relate to ideologies which defend power structures. For example, his 2017 drama The State described the journeys of extremist British Muslims joining ‘Islamic State’ in Syria, while his latest series The Undeclared War (Channel 4) takes a different angle by examining how cyber-warfare is used to drive political agendas.

The drama is a high-tech take on the Cold War thriller genre, set in 2024 when a cyber-war between the UK and Russian governments is escalating. The lead character is Saara, a student on work experience at GCHQ who discovers what her colleagues miss when fighting on the cyber-front against the Russian state’s hackers and opinion-makers. Much of the plot relies on characters staring at rows of code on computer screens, which is livened up by being represented as Saara searching through dreamlike tunnels and rooms. Otherwise, the script goes for verisimilitude, unusually referring to many real organisations, not only GCHQ and its Russian counterpart the Federal Security Service (FSB), but also the BBC, Twitter, BT’s Openreach, Swift and the main political parties.

It’s one of those dramas set in under-lit rooms with tense conversations underlined by sombre music, but it’s convincingly acted, carefully structured and grounded in research into cyber-warfare. The fictionalised activities of GCHQ, the FSB and their associates are based on what’s been reported in the real world, and given some dramatic licence by the near-future setting. While The Undeclared War’s plot is driven by hacks and counter-hacks into the Russian and British state’s infrastructure, along the way we see strategies used by Russia’s authorities which aim to mould people’s views and behaviour. The result is an uneasy reminder that events and how they are reported can be manipulated to suit the narrative of power-hungry states. Ironically, this feeling of doubt about what’s real is mentioned in the drama as part of what the Russian government wants to encourage.

With social media being a conduit for many people’s interpretations of events, it’s also an opportunity to shape perceptions. Two of the drama’s main characters meet when working at the Glavset ‘troll farm’ in Russia, sending at least 80 tweets a day, chipping in to chats about British politics to stir up trouble. These places do exist, and not just in Russia. In 2017, Freedom House (a think tank funded by the US government) found that 30 states worldwide hired people to ‘spread government views, drive particular agendas, and counter government critics’ on social media (tinyurl.com/4tdsevez). As anyone who uses Twitter will recognise, its discussions can be easily derailed by crass or provocative comments of the kind knowingly spread by troll farms.

How television is used to push a particular agenda is shown in the drama through the activities of Russia Global News (RGN), with a studio in London and reporters in the open. This isn’t a real TV channel, and if it were, it wouldn’t be allowed to operate in that way during a cyber-war, given that its closest real-life counterpart, RT UK, had its licence withdrawn by Ofcom following the invasion of Ukraine. One of RGN’s staff makes the fair point that criticisms that it’s a ‘propaganda mouthpiece’ are hypocritical when they come from journalists told what to say by the media corporations which employ them. RGN’s broadcasts aren’t obviously pro-Russian, but convey their message through more devious tactics. Its back-office staff set up two bogus Facebook groups (the lefty ‘Luton For Labour’ and fascist ‘Take Back Control Of Luton’), wait for people to join and then post details of a demo at the same time and place on both groups’ pages. RGN’s reporter and camera crew turn up and record the subsequent violence when far-right numbskulls meet leftist demonstrators. This plot-point has a reportedly actual precedent. In his 2016 documentary Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis described how pro-Russian state ‘Political Technologists’ sponsored fascist groups, anti-fascist groups and parties opposed to Putin, then let it be known that this had happened so no-one could tell how real those organisations were. As one of RGN’s staff explains, the point isn’t that their news is false, ‘the point is to get people used to the idea that everything’s a lie, that there is no truth. And once they accept that, well, biggest liar wins’.

The Undeclared War is set around a future general election, another target for the Russian state’s FSB. Databases are hacked, distorting exit poll results reported by the BBC and taking people from ethnic minorities likely to vote Labour off the electoral register. RGN reports this as pro-Tory election-rigging, and fakes footage of an ensuing riot in order to spread unrest. These scenes hopefully aren’t based on actual occurrences, although there’s evidence that the Russian state has interfered with US presidential elections and the Brexit referendum, and that the US state has a long history of intervening in other countries’ elections.

Cyber-warfare as described in The Undeclared War is as much about psychology as it is about technology. The script refers to the strategy of ‘reflexive control’: manipulating an enemy’s behaviour, in this case to promote the interests of the Russian state. This approach isn’t new, but it finds new applications as technology develops. In the drama, this is shown as attempts to influence the responses to hacks and to create interpretations through TV broadcasts and social media. The Undeclared War is set in the future, but much of what it depicts is already here.

Mike Foster

Voice From The Back: Knowledge is power (1999)

The Voice From The Back Column from the March 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Knowledge is power

“Evolution,” says the message from the Alabama State board of education, “is a controversial theory some scientists present as scientific explanation for the origin of living things such as plants, animals and humans . . .” New York Times, 24 November.

The promise—

Mr Raynsford, MP for Greenwich, said that begging was the most disgraceful indictment of the present [Conservative] government’s policies. “Our task has got to be to eliminate begging in London and create a memory of how bad life was in the late 80s and early 90s.” Camden New Journal, 7 July 1994.

—The reality

Beggars who exploit youngsters to raise money face having their children taken into care, the [Labour] Government is warning. Ministers [including Nick Raynsford, Minister for London] are worried about the huge upsurge in street beggars using their offspring in an effort to extract cash from passers-by. Police and local social services departments are being told to intervene in such cases. Sunday Telegraph, 3 January 1999.

Strategic class war

Midland-based engineering giants Rolls-Royce today warned it could move production to America if Britain introduces costly new labour laws . . . Speaking at a business lunch in Sydney, Australia, Sir Ralph [Robins] said that social costs made it 30 percent more expensive to manufacture in Europe. “The last thing we want is the on-costs associated with the social costs of Europe,” he said. “But I don’t see any signs of it happening and the current government is not going down that path. But we will progressively move work to the United States if we find ourselves disadvantaged by those sort of social costs,” he said. Birmingham Evening Mail, 25 November.

How wealth divides the world

Here are some pretty amazing facts from the United Nations Human Development Report of 1998: The world consumed more than $24 trillion in goods and services last year, six times the figure for 1975. Of the world’s 6.8 billion people, 4.4 billion live in developing countries, the rest in rich industrial or transition countries. The three richest people in the world own assets that exceed the combined gross products of the world’s poorest 48 countries. Among the 4.4 billion people who live in developing countries, three-fifths have no access to basic sanitation; almost one-third are without safe drinking water; one-quarter lack adequate housing; one-fifth live beyond reach of modern health services; one fifth of the children do not get as far as grade five in school and one fifth are undernourished. Basic education for all would cost $6 billion a year—$8 billion is spent annually for cosmetics in the United States alone. Installation of water and sanitation for all would cost $9 billion plus some annual costs–$11 billion is spent annually on ice cream in Europe. Reproductive health services for women would cost $12 billion a year—$12 billion a year is spent on perfumes in Europe and the United States. Basic health care and nutrition would cost $13 billion—$17 billion a year is spent on pet food in Europe and the United States. $35 billion is spent on business entertainment in Japan; $50 billion on cigarettes in Europe; $400 billion on narcotic drugs around the world; and $780 billion on the world’s militaries. Washington Post, 2 December.

New Labour, old capitalism

On Monday, the new president of the Confederation of British Industry told his members that the greatest threat to British business was red tape. “Excessive regulation,” he said, would “suffocate the golden goose.” He singled out trade union recognition, the minimum wage and the Working Time Directive as measures which would “darken the business horizon” . . . but one speaker went further than most. We need, he told the conference, to hooting applause, “greater labour market flexibility” and “increasing capital market liberalisation”. The government must create “the most business friendly environment in the world”. Even bankruptcy should cease to be stigmatised. The speaker was the [then] Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Peter Mandelson, Guardian, 5 November.

Pollution and profits

British Steel last night urged the Chancellor to exempt it from the proposed carbon energy tax designed to meet the Kyoto target of reducing greenhouse gases by 12.5 percent by 2012. It said the tax would undermine its competitiveness, putting plants and jobs at risk. Guardian, 28 January.

How could they!

Companies will be warned this week that they could be subjected to devastating computer hacking attacks from disgruntled employees who face the sack as part of cost-cutting programmes. Experts say that employees with only limited knowledge of computers are now able to download hacking programmes from thousands of illicit Internet sites around the world and use them to wreak havoc on their employers’ computer networks. In one recent case, an employee who feared he would lose his job used a hacking program to wipe his employer’s central computer database after his name was erased from the payroll list. Times, 26 October.

Greasy Pole: Hacking? Who’s hacking? (2011)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

“Sundays won’t be the same again,” whined the Political Editor. Or rather the ex-political editor of the abruptly defunct, paedophilia-hounding, police officer-corrupting, phone-hacking, record-circulating News Of The World. No more blearily turning the pages for a weekly dose of insight into the chaotic privacy of a select few handily grouped under the shield of celebrity. No more envious excursions into a growingly denser jungle where the more luxurious the undergrowth the larger the financial profit. Never the same again? Are there any who would be ungrateful for such a small mercy? Even accepting that it came swaddled in breathtaking hypocrisy?

 

BSkyB

 The earlier reaction to Rupert Murdoch ending the News Of The World was that it was the tycoon’s punitive response to the exposure of the paper’s habitual intrusion into the private lives of anyone liable to be regarded as newsworthy through hacking into their telephones. However within an hour or so a more acceptable explanation came onto the scene. For some years Murdoch’s News International had been manoeuvring to take over the 61 percent of shares it does not hold in BSkyB, which is estimated to yield them some £1 billion profit during the next financial year. It seemed like good balance-sheet sense to help this process by surrendering the News Of The World’s comparatively modest £12 million annual profit – apart from the prospect of the tighter binding of Murdoch’s relationship with the Tory and Labour leaderships, with all that promises in terms of future concessions for his media machine. It is a long time since political leaders have operated with no regard for the ambitions of that fearsome magnate. A long time since a Prime Minister has omitted to invite Murdoch and his underlings to one of those regularly sickening ventures intro terrified sycophancy among the lawns and terraces of Chequers. And, until the events of recent weeks, it was promising to be a long time before that situation changed. 

 

Gotcha

In essence it was a simple strategy. The party leadership and their advisers paid heed to the prejudices, fears and misconceptions which were stimulated by, and advantageous to, the Murdoch operation and calculated that these could be applied to their electoral advantage. In other words, the Murdoch empire could win elections – a theory which might be said to have fitted in with events in this way:

• 1969 Murdoch buys the News Of The World and the Sun, revamped from the successor to the old Daily Herald. 
• 1979 The Tories under Margaret Thatcher and supported by the Sun win the general election against an exhausted and demoralised Labour Party.
• 1981 Thatcher’s government supports Murdoch’s recently formed News Corporation bid to buy the Times and the Sunday Times – with the predictable guarantees of “editorial independence”.
• 1983 After surviving a number of problems during their early days in power the Tories win an emphatic majority, helped by patriotic hysteria over the Falklands war, marked by the full-page headline in the Sun screaming GOTCHA! over the sinking of the Belgrano. 
• 1987 Another Tory election win, with a majority reduced probably in reaction to Thatcher’s impending replacement by John Major
• 1992 John Major, struggling against the Eurosceptics “bastards” in his party, notches up an unexpected election victory. The Sun helps him on his way by devoting its front page to a request that in the event of Neil Kinnock’s Labour winning “…will the last person to leave Britain…turn out the lights”. Then crows that “It was the Sun wot won it.”
• 1997 With the Tories descending into a confusion of sleaze, economic chaos and scandal Murdoch joins forces with his persistently loyal friend Tony Blair and his party and Labour win the election in a landslide. 
• 2010 After Murdoch defects to support the Tories, Gordon Brown’s Labour Party loses the election, replaced by a fractious Coalition.
• 2011 As the hacking scandal breaks into the open previous assumptions about electoral alliances, governmental stability – and the influence of the Murdoch clan – need to be re-assessed. 

 

Profit

 That ex-Political Editor told us why he grieved at the closing of the News Of The World: “Villains, paedophiles and corrupt politicians will be able to sleep more soundly now that the greatest investigative newspaper on Earth has gone.” He did not mention that such newspapers work so devotedly to unearth their scoops in the cause of higher sales, advertising revenue and investment – or that in that process a significant clutch of criminals and corrupt politicians are enabled to stay active. One investor in News Corporation, the Church of England, held £4 million worth of shares overseen by a body incongruously known as the Ethical Investment Advisory Group which described the News Of The World’s hacking campaign as “utterly reprehensible and unethical”. Compared to that, and in the present crisis in the industry, the advice of Murdoch’s favourite son James, chairman of News International, to the 2009 Edinburgh Television Festival, that “the only guarantee of independence is profit” reads as more illuminating and useful – if menacing. Among the terrified hysteria of Westminster, the panic of laggardly journalists and manipulatory police officers, the figures – an expectation of £135 million a year circulation revenue, £38 million advertising income, and, if the bid for BSkyB succeeded there would be an additional £1.6 billion a year – carried more weight than the exotically titled, smugly gambling excuses of the clerics. The simple fact is that what we know as the media, in all its forms, is no different in its need to conform to the rules and demands of a commodity society. Unavoidably, politicians saw it as a priority to foster such ambitions in the assumption that come the next election it would yield a rich harvest of votes. The sudden flooding of these facts into what is known as ‘the public domain’ provoked widespread outrage. Another example of the urgency for the ‘public’ to react in a proper, reparative manner.

Ivan

Pathfinders: Eye to eye (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eye to eye

The recent Guardian exposé (19 July) concerning Israeli company NSO and its Pegasus phone-hacking software is only the latest in a long line of media revelations about government surveillance. One can no longer be surprised by this sort of shenanigans. Of course governments watch people of interest to them. Ruling elites have always had their spy networks for keeping an eye on enemies from without and enemies from within. It’s an unwise ruler who fails to keep themselves sufficiently informed, as Julius Caesar found out.

NSO says that the Pegasus software, which monitors your location and can secretly activate your camera and microphone, is only for tracking criminals and terrorists. But of course they would say that. An investigation by Amnesty International and others revealed that human rights activists, union officials, journalists and lawyers have also been targeted. One journalist in Mexico, whose number appeared on a leaked Pegasus list, was assassinated at a carwash after, it’s believed, being tracked there via his phone. NSO won’t say who their state customers are but they are known to include Mexico, India, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, Rwanda, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

What other countries might be customers? Pakistan, surely, and Burma, given that India is. If Saudi Arabia and the UAE are on the list, then Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Iran and Syria probably are too, demonstrating incidentally that the Arab-Israeli ideological divide which incites poor workers to kill each other is of no concern when it comes to businesses making lots of money. Other countries probably don’t need Israeli software. Belarus almost certainly gets its hacking tools from Russia, as North Korea will from China. Five Eyes, the intelligence group of the ‘Anglosphere’ that includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, no doubt has its own sophisticated spyware, indeed might well have provided the Israelis with the tech expertise to develop Pegasus in the first place.

The obvious concern for workers everywhere, and for anyone who wants to see a better society supersede capitalism, is that government surveillance could become so powerful and all-pervasive that independent critical thought and deed become impossible.

When you look at some of the more authoritarian or unstable countries in the top 25 global economies, it’s easy to believe that this is indeed their ultimate aim. China is obsessed with totalitarian control freakery despite having given up any vestige of its so-called communism years ago in a bid to become the world’s top capitalist economy. Russia, with an economy smaller than Italy’s, is run by gangsters who have made murdering journalists and political opponents almost an Olympic sport, as have Mexico and Saudi Arabia. But what about other countries in the top 25, such as Australia, Canada, the US, Switzerland, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc? Flawed to be sure, but as capitalist democratic freedoms go, these states score fairly high, with little outward sign that they are bent on creating Orwellian dictatorships.

They probably could do it, technically speaking, if they wanted to. Some, like the UK, have granted themselves the legal powers for almost unlimited surveillance, and the tools for the job already exist. Nowadays you don’t need armies of red-eyed, chain-smoking spooks listening in on phone calls. You just need AI plugged into the cable and satellite feeds. Even so, round-the-clock surveillance of an entire population would be a huge drain on money and resources, and would it represent a good return on investment given that 99 percent of the population don’t do anything interesting?

It depends how paranoid you are. Some regimes are so dodgy they have every reason to be paranoid. Needless to say, all capitalist states feel the need to be eternally vigilant, however for the most part, they are likely to be more judicious in their focus, keeping a weather eye on individuals and groups deemed dangerous but in general letting the population go about its business.

It’s easy too for individuals, especially angry and radical dissenters, to get themselves caught in a feedback loop of confirmation bias regarding state surveillance, and become convinced that Big Brother is staring at them out of every CCTV, phone screen and laptop webcam, and that everything that happens, even in a pandemic, is part of some dark design by the deep state. How far any of this is justified or based on objective reality is a matter of debate, but unfortunately rational debate tends to fly out of the window when paranoia comes knocking at the door.

Whistleblowers like Julian Assange are held up as evidence of deep-state conspiracies, and certainly their treatment by vengeful governments can be appalling. But if state control was really as strong as some people think, how did these individuals manage to blow the whistle in the first place? And why is it that states and their politicians seem to conduct their affairs in a way that is so often confused, chaotic and incompetent, a fact made very obvious during the pandemic? Are these devious Machiavellis just pretending to be idiots, or are they what they appear to be, venal mediocrities with little idea what they’re doing? What kind of deranged global plan would include runaway climate change, now thought to be causing record heat levels, forest fires and catastrophic flooding? Is the simpler explanation not the more likely one, that capitalism is out of control and its leaders clueless?

Lose the ability to wield Occam’s Razor and you can lose your bearings. Once, at a socialist meeting, a visitor asserted that there was no point doing anything because the whole world was mind-controlled by a giant media conspiracy. When socialists asked him how come, in that case, we were free to hold a socialist public meeting, his reply was ‘You’re in on it too.’ That’s a cave-dive down a very deep rabbit hole.

Still, it’s understandable that a lot of radical political activists worry about state surveillance. If it’s not happening now, they argue, it soon will. If you try to downplay this concern, perhaps by suggesting that any large-scale suppression of legitimate working-class activity would create more problems for the state than it solved, you can be seen as naïve. Conversely, we suspect that activists sometimes overestimate how ‘dangerous’ they really are. In any case, the more secretive you aim to be, the more the state will take an interest in your affairs.

So, all things considered, the Socialist Party conducts its political activity in plain sight, with open public meetings, because it’s a democratic organisation that seeks change by democratic methods, and you can’t be democratic from the shadows. The best way to challenge the legitimacy of capitalism is, we think, to be legitimate yourself. Instead of trying to avoid the state’s gaze, we meet it, eye to eye, and wait for it to blink.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: I’m Putting on my Black Hat . . . (2017)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s probably not the first question you need to ask about the practical workings of socialism, but given the recent panic about NHS trusts suffering ‘ransomware’ cyber-attacks you might be tempted to wonder what a future socialist society would do about a potential cyber-induced system shutdown. Leaving aside the fact that hopefully socialists wouldn’t be as daft as some of these trusts are alleged to have been in ignoring repeated warnings and not upgrading their obsolete operating systems, there is the question of why anyone in a free and cooperative non-market society would launch such an attack in the first place. In socialism there would be no money to extort from victims, and it seems difficult to envisage anyone being so zealously anti-social as to try to take out a hospital for the sheer hell of it.

But still we can’t be sure. On the face of it, socialism once established would be highly inclined to apply the same principle to its cyber systems as to any other of its systems, which is to say open and accessible, without locks, passwords, public or private keys, codes or captchas. Would this be asking for trouble? Maybe. Socialism in its infancy would be wise to take precautions against petty reactionary vandalism. But the way that mature socialism would work would tend to militate against vulnerability.

First, one of the reasons the Windows operating system is so hard to defend against attack is that its source code is kept secret, for business reasons, and therefore friendly ‘white hat’ hackers are kept out of the loop and unable to help spot flaws. Contrary to what Apple acolytes so often claim, the reason Apple rarely gets hit is not because it is superior but because it locks out all non-Apple software while Windows is an open platform, and because relatively few people use its desktop operating system so ‘black hatters’ are not so tempted to tinker with it.

Second, in socialism there would be no financial or other incentive to refuse or forget to update obsolete systems. If anti-virus software was deemed necessary, it would be state-of-the-art and automatically installed and updated. One of capitalism’s more minor stupidities is putting the financial onus on individuals to protect themselves and thereby society against digital or biological infections, where common sense would dictate making such protection free and universal.

Third, though it would make sense to standardise hardware to maximise repair and reuse, socialism could choose to adopt a diversity policy over software similar to agriculture, the idea being that monocrops spread plague whereas diversity diminishes their effectiveness. There isn’t just one way to write a program, there are potentially hundreds or even thousands, but capitalist competition tends to destroy all variants until only one is left. Socialism, to immunise itself, could in theory do the exact opposite and encourage as much cyber-diversity as possible, though such redundant complexity would not be without its own problems.

Lastly, there is the matter of widespread anonymity in the capitalist web, surely an affront to the socialist ethic of transparency. Hackers hide behind elaborate mazes of their own making, which socialism would have every reason to demolish. Such openness might make people nicer online too. An interesting study has shown that trolling behaviour is generated where two conditions are met: first, the online environment is hostile so that users feel antagonised, and second, the users are anonymous. Where there was no anonymity, the hostile environment still triggered some trolling but not as much, and where anonymity and hostility were both absent, a ‘virtuous circle’ resulted, where well-behaved peers encouraged good behaviour in turn (New Scientist, 13 May). There’s no reason to think that socialism wouldn’t do something similar.

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It’s alive, it’s ALIVE!

Sex dolls that make small talk, recognise your face and get jealous of your Facebook friends? Yup, they’re now on sale at around $10,000 (BBC Online, 15 May). That’s great news for agalmatophiliacs everywhere. Pygmalion eat your heart out. Of course, the dolls don’t have much of an emotional range or even very sophisticated vocabulary, but then that probably suits the buyers very well. Many of them view their acquisition in terms of a ‘relationship’. One says ‘I can go out shopping for her and look for clothes – it is like having somebody in my life without having to deal with making mistakes. If I like a hat on her, she doesn’t say that she doesn’t like it.’ No indeed, because of course you can program their moods for them, even choosing to allow them to be moody, angry and jealous. Oh, and of course you can customise their bodies too, according to taste. But social acceptability is another matter and it may be a while before the happy hat-buyer is willing to go out shopping with his doll instead of for it.

Ethically it would be less accurate to say that the jury is out than that the jury has not been sworn in yet. Last time we mentioned this horizon tech (October 2015) things were still very much at the prototype stage, but already some academics were crying foul and calling for an outright ban. Now one of them has changed her mind, deciding that dolls aren’t really the problem, we humans are, in particular our ugly habit (that is to say capitalism’s ugly habit) of turning us into objectified and disposable machine tools. Meanwhile other academics guardedly suggest such developments might be a good thing if they help lonely and unhappy people with little chance of a real relationship. Maybe so, but the plot thickens when you start talking about child sex robots. If none are currently in secret development, one wonders how long it will take capitalism to pounce on the possibility.

Here’s a happier thought – what if they start designing politician sex robots? We could program them to be honest, truthful, incorruptible, selfless and competent. Silly idea, we know. But at least then we’d be screwing them instead of them always screwing us.

Paddy Shannon

Editorial: The Real Crimes of the Mass Media (2011)

Editorial from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Very many disgusting crimes have been exposed in the phone-hacking scandal that eventually brought down the News of the World newspaper. But what really turns socialist stomachs is not so much the illegal excesses, vile as they are, but the bog-standard journalism that has as a result been defended and praised with such sanctimony in the other papers. It is well known, to anyone paying attention, that the press passes over the vastly more serious crimes of state power with silence. And the silence is a lie.

To be a truly effective liar, it is essential that you come to believe your own bullshit. So we have had the spectacle of NotW journalists defending themselves on the basis that it is necessary to peddle propaganda, lies and gossip to fund the truly great investigative journalism that also goes on. David Aaronovitch, writing for the Times (7 July), also swallows this argument in the name of accepting ‘reality’, as all grown-ups must of course do. In other words, truth-telling heroes, and Aaronovitch modestly includes himself among their number, must save their souls by supporting efforts to rein in the excesses, whilst apologetically defending the general principle of business as usual.

The truth is that the main job of tabloid newspapers is not to report the facts to a concerned, democratic citizenry, but to make profits. The working class generally has little interest in state policy decisions because they feel that they have no real say over it anyway. And they feel that not because they’re stupid but because it’s true. To make profits, therefore, the tabloids have to appeal to something the working class in general is interested in: sex, say, or football. 

The same general principle applies to the liberal, so-called ‘serious’ newspapers, except they have to deal with a different audience: ‘middle-class’ types who believe that their careers and what they think is of some consequence. Of course, in a democracy, it is of some consequence: they have to be educated to accept capitalism and profit-making and ruling class power as an inevitable part of ‘reality’. That’s where Aaronovitch and his ilk do such an impressive job.

If you want something approaching the truth, turn instead to the newspapers addressed to the ruling class. These are better sources because the ruling class needs reliable information about the world so it can make suitable investment decisions. So, Martin Wolf for example, writing on the Financial Times website (14 July), blandly takes to be a matter of fact and plain common sense what the Aaronovitches and tabloid hacks of this world are obliged to dismiss as paranoid conspiracy theory. And this is that the media are businesses whose job is not just to make profits, but to mould public opinion. But it is intolerable for business in general if any one dictator should come to wield decisive influence. Wolf gives the example of Murdoch’s Fox network in America, which has “distorted” public opinion so much as to give credence to “rightwing populism” – which threatens to put state power in the hands of ideology rather than true business interests. 

Of course, from our point of view, it was equally intolerable that Murdoch should so influence public opinion as to build support for wars, from the Falklands to Afghanistan, and opposition to the class struggle, from the 1980s miners’ strike to the most recent teachers’ strike. But on these issues, the loud clamour over hacked phones in the mass media returns once again to a respectful silence.

Wikid Games (2011)

From the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.

In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, Wikileaks is currently mirrored on 1426 up-to -date sites (from WikiLeaks website)

Once upon a time, if you wanted to keep a secret, you locked it in a drawer and held the only key. When states wanted to keep secrets, they used huge underground warehouses with security locks and armed guards to store the vast quantity of information compiled by their spies, spooks and secret police. Most of this information was useless, and most of it never saw the light of day. Then the information revolution happened.

A very large wired information network looks exactly like a sieve, and that's essentially what it is. Information leaks out of it in any number of ways, on purpose or by accident. When you can hold the personal details of 50,000 people on a pen-drive no larger than a cigarette lighter and when these can fall out of pockets on the tube train home, the potential for leakage is gigantic. Then there is email, which is not secure and which has become the preferred mode of communication for all businesses and public services. Just a few emails brought about 'Climategate' in 2009, in which a few careless phrases by researchers at the University of East Anglia fatally undermined the authority of the Independent Panel on Climate Change.

The recent WikiLeaks' exposure of the private lives and opinions of the world's movers and shakers has been so prodigiously covered in the press that the details are scarcely worth covering again, yet from a socialist standpoint the furore deserves to be set within a wider context than the conventional media never discusses. The capitalist class, as indeed all hitherto ruling classes, owes its power not only to its private ownership and control of wealth but also its private ownership and control of information, and inevitably socialists must ask themselves to what extent the overthrow of the latter is likely to lead to the overthrow of the former.

While controlled leaks have always been a tool of government, or internecine feuds within government, it was rare until recently for damaging information ever to escape and when it did, retribution was punitive. When in the 1970s Philip Agee, a CIA agent working in the UK, published an exposé of CIA operations including names of operatives, the US authorities reacted with fury, had him deported and mounted a smear campaign against him involving sex allegations and alcoholism that ran to 18,000 pages (Guardian, 19 December). In 1971 Richard Nixon was tape-recorded speaking thus of Daniel Ellsberg, another Pentagon mole gone public: "Let's get the son of a bitch into jail.... Don't worry about his trial. Try him in the press."

Mud, glorious mud
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has made no secret of his involvement in the leaks, so one would be astonished not to see governments trying to fling whatever mud they could at him. And sure enough, he is currently on bail in the UK and facing possible extradition to Sweden to answer sex crime allegations, followed by a possible further rendition to the US to face a lifetime wearing an orange jumpsuit in a certain Cuban seaside resort.

That these allegations are a frame-up is a conclusion that many people have leapt to with a conviction thus far unsupported by the known facts, however it is undeniable that the whole business looks damned fishy. If the UK or Swedish authorities go one step further and allow the Americans to get their hands on him, the affair may well blow up to become the Dreyfus case of the 21st century.

But how do you try a website? WikiLeaks is a game-changer for state security forces and radicals alike, challenging the whole notion of secrecy and calling into question what if anything can be kept secret. The universal state condemnation of WikiLeaks rings increasingly hollow and comical when one looks at the massive public support for it. The vast number of mirroring sites – sites that duplicate WikiLeaks – means that WikiLeaks could not realistically be shut down without shutting down the internet.

It isn't only source websites which pose a problem for state security, it's also destination sites. If you wanted to leak a confidential document in 1950, there would only be a few newspapers or small printing presses to leak it to, most of whom would not risk touching it. Conventional media tend to have a symbiotic, back-scratching relationship with government which ensures that newspapers are self-regulating so direct news bans – D notices – are rarely invoked. Media bosses are capitalists themselves and have no interest in rocking the boat. But the other side of the information equation is publication and distribution, and the internet has created unlimited scope for both.

Thus Wikileaks can sidestep conventional media and leak to anywhere, even to the Socialist Standard if it chose to, which means that the capitalist class has for all practical purposes lost control of the mass media. It cannot hope to strike mutually agreeable deals with every media outlet, especially not those avowedly hostile to it, and any attempt to coerce or threaten such outlets would be likely to blow up in its face and make matters worse.

Off with their heads
Aside from the allegations against Julian Assange, Wikileaks itself is not however above criticism. Its foundation in 2006 is shrouded in some mystery. Founders allegedly include Chinese dissidents, mathematicians, technologists and journalists, yet none have been identified. There is supposedly an advisory board of 9 members, yet one 'board member' has said that his involvement is minimal and that the board is merely 'window dressing'. One volunteer told Wired Magazine that Assange considers himself "the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest". Indeed, WikiLeaks is not even a Wiki anymore because Assange has removed public editing access to it, and has moved away from being a mere whistleblowers' conduit to a full publisher in his own right. Whether or not he set out to do so, Assange does seem to be going for personal glory but in doing so is drawing down all the fire on himself. One-man-bands don't play well when they're playing against the state. One way or another, American and European state agencies are out to get WikiLeaks which is why the obvious move is to go for a decapitation strike against Assange himself.

Even if they succeed in bringing down Assange, there is no stopping what he started. This month a former Wikileaks advisor is set to found a new website called OpenLeaks, which aims to avoid the problems WikiLeaks has encountered, specifically by being governed democratically and by remaining as a conduit for anonymous information rather than empire-building into a publishing enterprise. At heart is the open source philosophy which holds that cooperative and transparent endeavour is more productive and progressive than the secretive and territorial ethos which underpins most capitalist activity: "Our long term goal is to build a strong, transparent platform to support whistleblowers – both in terms of technology and politics – while at the same time encouraging others to start similar projects" (Wikipedia, OpenLeaks). There is a parallel here with file-sharing sites, which started as centrally controlled databases (Napster) that were easy to target and kill, before evolving into distributed peer-to-peer systems which had no centre and could never be nailed down and neutralised. There is a further parallel to be made here with democratic models in politics. Socialists oppose leaders and vanguardist leadership-based groups on the left, not only in fact but also in theory, because top-down hierarchy structures are too easy to neutralise. In fact, as a distributed, egalitarian and transparent organisation, we could lay claim to being the original political Open Source movement.

All of a Twitter
There is a momentum of workers' disgust at capitalism at the moment, at least in the western countries, starting with the sub-prime collapse which exposed nonsensical business logic, then massive bail-outs and bankers bonuses, together with squalid parliamentary expense fiddles, followed by the most savage cuts in living memory and attacks on the poor and those on benefits. Anyone who thought 'the yoof of today' could never be motivated by politics is having to eat their words as students pour onto the streets, camcorders in hand to record and upload police cavalry charges onto YouTube just as the police attempt to deny them. Meanwhile 'hacktivists' attack banks with massive Denial of Service offensives and the spontaneously organised UK-Uncut group occupy and picket the stores and offices of banks, mobile phone companies and high street stores accused of large scale tax avoidance. Though one could always quibble with these activists' grasp of the bigger picture over tax, or their tactics in singling out individual companies when, after all, they're all at it, you've got to admire how the digital native generation are mobilising their opposition in ways that the ruling class has not anticipated and is ill-prepared for.

The grubby game that is capitalism is being exposed as never before in its history, and more people are getting to know about it every day. The genie is out of the bottle, and there's no putting it back in. These are interesting times for socialists.

Paddy Shannon