The Hack List

“To Do is to Be — Rene Descartes
To Be is to Do — Karl Marx
Do Be Do Be Do — Frank Sinatra”
From Discovered Graffiti (Ed. by Bachchoo)

To be hacked or not to be hacked, that is the status question”, as any Hamlet living in our age of lightning information might have said. A year or so ago certain British newspapers were enmeshed in a phone hacking scandal. The News of the World, a Sunday rag, owned by Rupert Murdoch was discovered to have hacked into the phone of Milly Dowler, a child who had been kidnapped and was later found murdered.
The Milly Dowler case opened up the Pandora’s box of illegal hacking activity and the names of the people targeted by the News of the World emerged.
Among them were actor Hugh Grant, politician David Blunkett and a hundred others. For some people the only thing worse than being hacked was not being hacked. Being ignored by the News of the World hackers downgraded one’s status. I can name at least one writer and one actor (whose gender shall not be disclosed) whose disappointment at not being important enough to hack was expressed in my presence. That was a year ago, though the editor of the News of the World and the journalists accused of phone hacking are only now to be tried in court for the crime.
This week another hacking scandal breaks. The bank accounts, credit card details, phone numbers, social security numbers and other details of “important” people in America have been hacked into and made public on a website on the Internet. The most celebrated victims of “Moneyleaks” or “Bankileaks” (as this avenue of illegal info will soon be called) are the pop stars Beyonce and someone called Jay-Z. These two are listed as victims before mention of Michelle Obama, Donald Trump and head of the FBI, all of whose personal financial information has been accessed and exposed.
So far the exposure of the accounts is itself the only scandal. The figures have not yet yielded some shameful fact or transaction. But enthusiasts will undoubtedly peruse the figures carefully and contrive stories around the First Lady’s shopping expenses or laundry bills, or around the possibly outrageous amounts Beyonce receives from some sponsorship deal. Maybe some mundane fact such as the amount the FBI’s director pays his cat-psychiatrist will hold the public’s interest.
I haven’t yet ventured to look up the website www.exposed.suon [2] and probably won’t bother.
So why expose the accounts of actors such as Mel Gibson and yesterday’s politicians such as Al Gore?
Are we going to discover that Gibson, famous for his fundamental Christian films is actually financing Al Qaeda? Probably not. Are Al Gore’s accounts going to reveal that the eco-warrior is paid a monthly retainer by the manufacturers of wind-farm machines? Again very doubtful.
Some commentators have remarked that this exposure originates in Russia and is the declaration of a renewed Cold War. This is plainly ridiculous but will, in all likelihood, be believed in the US, just as in the subcontinent attributing an outbreak of flu in Mumbai to Pakistani viral-infiltration or the outbreak of flu in Karachi to Indian viral-infiltration is acceptable and believed by some.
I think the hackers’ motives are more sophisticated. The exposure of these bank accounts may demonstrate some of the absurdities of capitalism. How much does a vacuous pop singer get paid for a song that tops the charts? Or an actor for mouthing someone else’s lines? Or a billionaire property-owner in rent from corporations? Interesting if disconcerting revelations — and no illegality involved.
That’s because so far the hacking has targeted the US.
Would targeting and exposing the bank accounts of Indian politicians, filmstars, cricketers, capitalists and other rich-list personalities be of any interest? Very doubtful. The bank accounts would almost certainly reveal that the transactions, the income, expenditure, deposits and savings shown on the bank statements couldn’t possibly sustain the evident lifestyles of the celebrities, capitalists or politicians concerned.
Much more interesting would be a hacker’s raid on the clandestine Swiss or other foreign bank accounts of a selected number of people. Obviously these would have to be accompanied by discovery of the chain of ownership as I am sure that foreign bank accounts and properties are not registered in the names of their real Indian owners.
Perhaps the money doesn’t pass through banks at all and is not susceptible to exposure by this form of hacking. Where does it go? Why hasn’t any investigative journalist or campaigning TV director cracked the codes, trajectories and statistics of the passage of black money?
I renewed contact with an old friend who used to be a rich and prosperous professional in Britain and now lives in West Asia. He told me, over several glasses of vodka that he had given up his profession and was now an “art dealer” specialising in modern Indian “art”. I was puzzled. He said there was a lot of money in it and proceeded to explain:
A painting would be bought at a small but respectable price in India. It would then be sent to West Asia and my friend’s outfit would put it up for auction. The surrogates of the owner of the painting would turn up and bid huge sums and buy the painting at 10 or more times the Indian price. The original Indian owner would then have this sum of money with a legitimate “receipt” or contract for the sale of the painting. He would also have the panting but that wouldn’t interest him. My friend explained that it was a mechanism for turning black money into white and bringing it to the surface so it could be “legally” spent. I can’t say I grasped every detail of the dodge, but was told that he made a good living out of it and that it had sent the Indian “art” market soaring. Good for artists if not for art.