Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank • Hacker News Board

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#441

Post by ClumsyPilot » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

mercacona wrote: post #391

bouncycastle wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> place to store anonymously your illicit cash What if I just want a place to anonymously store my legally gained cash? Unfortunately, it seems the normal people lost their privacy nowadays at the expense of the criminals and the "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" argument has taken a stronghold in the financial sector.

Maybe, because you don't own your cash, your cash is a credit that society acknowledges to you, so hiding it from which makes it valuable is nuts. Can you eat your cash? Can you fly using your cash? Can you build a phone with cash? No, you can't do anything with cash without a public exchange that might be accountable. Unfortunately, people did buy the idea that ”Markets can work without accountability”, and that's w…

This is quite a good point. No-one is stopping you from stockpiling Oil, Gold, or whatever.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#442

Post by Nasrudith » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

mcny wrote: post #404

squiggleblaz wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reminds me of annecdote of old tax policies on things like silverware and the difficulty in believing and searches from one austere preacher who anomalously for his station didn't own a single set. And others like the tax on windows which lead to boarding up of windows in slums and became derided as a tax on light and air.

The answer seems to be that how well it works varies heavily on what the asset.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#443

Post by harambaebae69 » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #290

seppin wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, governments are finding new and creative ways to put new taxes on already legal money. So yeah, privacy matters.

> Also, governments are finding new and creative ways to put new taxes on already legal money. Care to cite some? That's just a silly point. There's probably no area of regulatory theory more well travelled than taxation. Imagine a trick and someone has tried it, often thousands of years ago. And it's even incorrect as a practical matter in the modern USA, where government revenue as a share of GDP has been going ste…

>> Also, governments are finding new and creative ways to put new taxes on already legal money.

In addition to the soft tax of excessive inflation mentioned by the other poster, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed wealth taxes.

https://www.businessinsider.com/wealth-tax-definition-explai...

You can agree with that or not morally, but it is by definition a tax on already legal (and taxed during income) money.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#444

Post by squiggleblaz » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

phatfish wrote: post #241

CaymanCruiser wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the true moral crime here is preventing sovereign nations (using bullying tactics no less) who lack natural resources and other income-generating resources from offering convenient and flexible regulatory climates to business who need it. Singapore and Hong Kong were two countries that did this for decades and look where they are now - why shouldn't Vanuatu or Seychelles be offered the same opportunity?

Sure OK, but I want my "moral right" to a social democracy of the Nordic style. How come the Swedes and Norwegians can have a functioning socially responsible government but the UK gets a bunch of incompetent capitalists?

You're still an EU citizen, you have a legal right to take advantage of the Swedish social democracy.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#445

Post by harambaebae69 » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:18 PM UTC

_pmf_ wrote: post #393

bouncycastle wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> place to store anonymously your illicit cash What if I just want a place to anonymously store my legally gained cash? Unfortunately, it seems the normal people lost their privacy nowadays at the expense of the criminals and the "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" argument has taken a stronghold in the financial sector.

> What if I just want a place to anonymously store my legally gained cash? Anonymously storing it makes it illegal. With Europe's negative interest rates, they're currently in the process of making personal storage illegal for large amounts (you're supposed to store it in a bank to pay negative interest).

>Europe's negative interest rates

Couldn't believe it, so I looked it up https://www.ft.com/content/74573de6-0a15-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6...

that is bizarre

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#446

Post by Nasrudith » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:22 PM UTC

squiggleblaz wrote: post #383

ComodoHacker wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Majority of people paid their taxes, but many didn't, many more than today. Think of mafias of all kinds. So law abiding majority had to pay more to cover state expenses. Without computerized record keeping taxes were collected in person, often with support of armed force. And tax evasion could be as simple as hiding in the woods when tax collector comes. It worked, but not so well.

Have we entirely eliminated tax evasion today? Money laundering continues. Our current approach of criminalising everyone and their dog isn't efficient.

Money laundering is ironically an inversion usually as part of ensuring the money looks legitimate is ensuring that the taxman gets a cut.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#447

Post by daveguy » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

marcusjt wrote: post #431

daveguy wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or possibly someone who became wealthy in the software/opsec industry who believes what they do is for the good of humanity. To a person with a net worth of 100MM+ 100k would not be significant. The funds didn't necessarily come from the hacktivism. Edit: Given the bounty is paid in bitcoin, somewhat more likely the funds are donations/fees from hacking. Not likely it came from funds deposited to an exchange (traceab…

Or possibly the payment is offered in bitcoin because that's how anyone "performing similar acts of hacktivism" would want to be paid?

Yes. That's what the edit (from a few minutes after the original post) says.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#448

Post by Nasrudith » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #409

dredmorbius wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 S…

In Athen's case I don't think it technically counted as corruption in the "misappropriation" sense as the intended beneficiaries received it. Given the number of votes to "pillage and enslaved their neighbors" it would certainly count morally if not for the fact it was "the norm".

At that point the difference between bandits and city state military was essentially just diplomacy in terms of how their neighbors and survivors would react to somebody putting killing or enslaving them.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#449

Post by black_puppydog » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

asymmetric wrote: post #370

A .torrent file hosted by the Internet Archive, since DDOSecret is apparently being DDOSed: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://data.ddosecrets.com/fi...

This size of dataset does seem to me like a good case of why the current torrent format is lacking. Many people might be interested in generally seeding for this torrent, and maybe pulling some of the files. But few are actually going to download the full 2TB. At the moment, I can select individual files to download and seed, ignoring the rest, but I cannot say "download what I want, and then seed random blocks up to a size of X GB." It's quite conceivable that in a few months, the bigger, less "popular" files will be very hard to come by.

That's (maybe the) one thing I think IPFS gets really right: full availability of the whole dataset, regardless of the popularity of the individual blocks. There were some BEPs about that IIRC, but they never got anywhere. I always figured archive.org and similar collection hosters would be interested in this sort of thing, so that people can just "donate 1 TB to archive.org" or such.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#450

Post by ncallaway » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 4:00 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #392

ncallaway wrote: post #284

Earlier 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…

> That is a succinct summary of the initial complaint.

I would disagree in one key way. The initial complaint focused on this as a recent change. "it seems the normal people lost their privacy _nowadays_ at the expense..."

Certainly this is true from a technology perspective. No argument there.

But I don't think this is in any way novel from a _legal_ perspective.

Governments have, since at least roman times, taxed individuals based on the quantity of things they possessed or based on transactions. As long as it has been this way, the government has had a legal right to know your financial standing.

So, if the argument is that we're in novel _legal_ ground, I disagree. If the argument is that we're in a status quo legal ground, but in novel _technical_ and _enforcement_ ground, I'd agree.