Strangely under-reported is that the same hacker is offering up to 100k to others who perform similar acts of hacktivism: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5agy/phineas-fisher-off...
Probably a nation state actor
Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
401–410 of 491 posts
Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the problem with making zero tolerance the ultimate goal of society. Either we accept there will always be a few bad apples or everyone has to prove they aren't one of them.
Nit, but it's a pet peeve of mine: The saying is "A few bad apples spoil the barrel", meaning "be vigilant about bad apples and get rid of them ASAP." I'm baffled and frustrated by the tendency to use "a few bad apples" as if the saying were "a few bad apples are no big deal, get rid of them if you happen to notice." I actually don't think reasoning from vague analogy and folk wisdom is all that great an idea, but re…
Moved to a house with a few apple trees last spring and.. yeah. You have to pull those out quick or you'll be bringing the farmer next door wheelbarrowfulls of soft apples for animal feed :-(
Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haven, not heaven. :) The city has had the deserved reputation for being a tax haven for well over a century. https://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2011/02/london-corporat...
The title is the only part of that page suggesting the City itself is a tax haven.
Well that's simply not true. Even if you want to ignore that one, there's plenty of other articles and books exploring the topic.
Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
How else do you propose taxation is assured? Blind trust?
Tax assets not transactions. Land ownership is registered for good public purposes which does not unreasonably destroy privacy concerns - it's usually obvious who (person or business) controls the land anyway (who should a tenant pay the rent to? who gets to decide if you can be a tenant?) and it gives people a great deal of confidence that they know that whoever is recorded in the government land registry as having…
> Tax assets not transactions.
I know I've said that we shouldn't do public policy by taxes but taxing wealth instead of income probably isn't easy. We can tax income because one person's income is another person's expense if I understand how this works.
Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
#405Consider this holocaust survivor. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/16/holocaust-surviv... His family is murdered by Nazis but he escapes to the UK. He sets up offshore funds in the event something like the holocaust happens again, but the tax authorities go after him. This is one of many reasons for people to set up offshore accounts that have nothing to do with illegal activities. How many people like this h…
> How many people like this has this person hurt?
Could be for an holocaust fund, Bezos secret birthday party fund or for your new 4k TV it's all the same, pay your taxes, then do whatever you want with your money. It really isn't that complex.
Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then, by definition it's not anonymous because the authorities know that you have it. If you transfer it to someone else (legally) then there's going to be another taxable event, and the IRS will know you no longer have it. If you're trying to store cash anonymously from the public, there are many countries where that's possible. If you're trying to store cash anonymously from the government, there's not really a leg…
> If you're trying to store cash anonymously from the government, there's not really a legal avenue for that. That is a succinct summary of the initial complaint. We're moving from a world where a buyer and vendor agreeing means something will happen to a world where buyer, vendor, bank and government all have to agree before something will happen. This is not a world that will cope well with change. There are big in…
> We're moving from a world where a buyer and vendor agreeing means something will happen to a world where buyer, vendor, bank and government all have to agree before something will happen.
No, we were never in that world. The only truly bilateral agreement is a gentlemen's agreement.
Trust usually relies on certain facts being public, and visible to a whole lot of people besides the transacting parties. "Who owns what" is a pretty important set of facts to agree on publicly.
Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a trust but verify thing I believe. If the cash is anonymized, how can they know if the owner of this cash did in fact pay their taxes on it? Either they blindly trust everyone to properly declare all of their income, or they need to have some form of traceability.
So everyone is assumed to be a criminal until proven otherwise?
If "property is theft" is too harsh, how about "property is theft until proven otherwise"?
Whether you agree with it or not, money laundering laws usually go in this direction.
Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money is a claim on future production, and you don't get to transfer that claim over other people's work without caveats, whether it's inheritance tax, limits on gifts, or wealth taxes.
Of course. I'm not talking about avoiding taxes, or skirting other laws. The issue here is simple privacy for the common law abiding people.
What you own can never be an entirely private matter. It's fundamentally about your relation to everyone else in the world, things you are allowed to do that they aren't.
Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
> modern book-keeping Can you clarify what precisely you mean by this statement? Most empires historically-speaking have had sophisticated book-keeping methods. Chinese empires used to tax anyone who exited a city on the profits they made during their visit. The Romans when they took over Egypt, taxed the hell out of it and for that purpose kept meticulous records on all of the transactions that happened. The notion…
The general principle of a tax which can be levied fairly, equally, clearly, and with low costs of collection or effort, are not new: The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, the quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to every other person. Where it is otherwise, every person subject to the t…
About arbitrary taxation, I understand that's how they handled it in ancient Athens. Some nobody would say something like "It's been a while since we taxed the Alcmaenids, I propose they pay for the next Panathanea festival".
Since that state was radically democratic, it may not have had the corrupting influence on the taxers as Smith suggests... but maybe it was a factor in the aristocrats allying with their rival Sparta to topple their own constitution.
Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank
#410I’ve read the Pastebin and I wonder, where did they send the 200k to be able to cash them out without getting in trouble? I’ve always assumed that diverting electronic money is relatively easy, the hard part is to convert it to a physical or untraceable form without getting caught; I assume the receiving bank would have kept a record of the incoming transfer and what happened with that money afterwards.
Plenty of people on the darkweb allow for flushing of bank transfers to untraceable crypto currencies. Typical scenario: use an unknown (homeless, hacked account whatever) person to register bank account, send money to bank account, withdraw in cash or use digital service to convert to cryptocurrency. Money is gone and owner of bank account might not even know and can probably not be held responsible. The reason the hacker got caught was because he made invalid SWIFT transactions to accounts in Mexico and someone found out the reported errors and checked other transactions.