Money And Computers – Disaster Coming?

“Cats and dogs, living together.  Real wrath of God type stuff.” – Ghostbusters

A hacker got my friend’s bank account.  The hacker was so disappointed he started a fundraiser for my friend.

I drove up to the local generic national pharmacy that has systematically absorbed all the local pharmacies like Hillary Clinton absorbs the souls of the innocent.  The Mrs. had asked me to pick up a prescription for my scalp polish – she said she wanted to bounce a signal to the people up in the International Space Station.

To my surprise, I drove up to the drive-through window and saw this sign:

I had cash, but I figured it must be a nightmare inside for the people in the pharmacy.  I figured it would be easier on them for me to wait until they got it figured out before I came back.

After I saw the sign, I knew what was up:  yet another critical failure of an electronic data system leading to (probably) a nationwide outage.  I was right.

This is scary to me because of . . . money.

Money today is much more complicated than it was 200 years ago:  back then, it was (mainly) gold and silver and copper bits that we traded back and forth.  Most citizens of the newly-formed United States didn’t trust paper because the Continental Congress printed so many stacks of Continental money that it became as worthless as a math book to AOC.  This inflation and currency collapse gave rise to the phrase, “not worth a Continental.”

This is the direct reason that the Constitution had the clause that “no State may . . . make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts”.  Today, however, an arbitrary thing we all call a dollar exists.  But in many cases, those dollars may be entirely virtual.  I got paid by a direct deposit of electronic dollars into a bank account that, when I write a check, will send some of those electronic dollars to another bank.

This requires secure computer systems to work.  As we have seen, from oil to water treatment systems to my pharmacy, these systems are very capable of being hijacked.  Just this week, a list of 8 billion (yes, billion) passwords were being downloaded into the Internet, 6 billion of which were just “password”.  Chance are good that one of them was mine.  And one of them was yours.

It gets worse.  Should we even be trusting our computers?

A Russian research team found something scary:  undocumented instructions on Intel® computer chips.  As the researchers found out, these particular instructions couldn’t be run in the chip’s “normal mode.”  But why are they there?  Who could have put them there?

The NSA?  The CIA?

Want to bet that the NSA doesn’t really care how you encrypt your communications because they can read your typing and watch your screens in real-time?  I don’t know if the “Odin” post is some anon just making up a story, but with everything we’ve learned over the last decade, I’d be surprised if something like this didn’t really happen.

I would be shocked if they didn’t have the ability to take full control of my computer.  The United States government certainly reacted in a pretty negative way, pretty quickly.

What happens when you find a vulnerability?

Even turned down from sharing information about their data at the world’s most elite gathering of hackers.

Why wouldn’t Intel® want to know about vulnerabilities on their chips?  Hmmm?

Maybe the NSA could share tech with McDonalds®?

But if that backdoor vulnerability is there, what’s important to know is who has access to it.  As we look back, Stalin had not only a better mustache, but also better regular progress reports on the Manhattan Project than Truman did.  Who wants to bet that China doesn’t have backdoor data (if it exists)?  Who wants to bet that Chinese manufacture of motherboards and other electronic control architecture don’t have little extras added in?

I wouldn’t.

And, I’m not saying that the Chinese are evil for attempting to gain these particular secrets or this advantage – it’s a matter of self-preservation.  If I were President of the United States and had the ability to infiltrate all of the industrial, financial, and military assets of potential enemies, would I do that?

Sure.  But in this case, if you’re President of an increasingly weak government over an increasingly fracturing population, what do you do?  Anything you can in order to keep control, even if it means building in dangerous backdoors to critical products.

Which brings us back to money.

Money is essential to society as it is now configured.  A breakdown of the electronic systems that control the flow of money would, at minimum, bring utter chaos.  Matt Bracken famously asked this question nearly a decade ago:  “What if a cascading economic crisis, even a temporary one, leads to millions of EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards flashing nothing but ERROR?”

We saw what three days without gasoline shipments did on the East Coast.  That would be nothing compared to what we’d see if the money system broke down.

Well, I think the pharmacy will be back up tomorrow, and the impact, for us, has been zero.

This time.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

26 thoughts on “Money And Computers – Disaster Coming?”

  1. We don’t have to guess about the EBT system crashing, there was a snafu for a few hours several years ago and it was chaos. The whole system from money to raw materials is incredibly vulnerable and it is just a matter of time before something breaks.

    2. Very much so. I’d forgotten about that.

      Might want to call that the EBT EWS (Early Warning System).

  2. To respond to your original point about bugged computer hardware, this has been a shadowy secret for years. Bloomberg published expose stories in 2018 and again a few months ago in 2021 about how China had secretly changed the design of Super Micro server boards they manufactured and shipped to the US, and both times the US intelligence agencies (apparently, supposedly) shut down news coverage of this story.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

    https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/

    The truth is most likely WAY beyond what we can imagine. It’s a law of nature that this kind of capability does not go unutilized.

    1. If there is any doubt as to the veracity of any of these claims, just put “Intel in Israel” and “Unit 8200” in a search line.

      Good thing they are our greatest ally in the ME, Intel is a small company not used by many companies and people, there are no connections to other countries that could use this information, and it wouldn’t be shared with US intel agencies to be used against it’s own citizens.

      I know because I was told that by the media, and sleep well at night.

    2. I saw the first one. The second one is new to me.

      And that’s a kill switch that will hit us at the worst possible moment. (S.M. Stirling’s The Stone Dogs is a reference few will recognize)

      1. Wait, one of my favorite authors and a series I’ve never even heard of? And then you go on Amazon to discover that it’s not available in Kindle and when you search for the series “Draka” you find that there are two books in the series: Volume 4 and Volume 5. Guess I’m going to his page to ask when they are going to be republished. I’d assume that after 40 years they have reverted back to him.

        On the money issue, if electronic money crashes, do we still have to pay our mortgage? That’s my biggest expense (other than wine) right now. Wondering how that would work since they would have no evidence that you weren’t paying.

  3. Not to after-the-fact too much, but the vulnerabilities and fragilities that are now increasingly obvious were equally so back when JIT began to really gain traction…. for me, this was around 1988 or so. The consolidation of the supply system in this way created the potential for disaster, but since it would seem things have been only compounded by the degree to which computer control has been built-into absolutely everything. The IOT gave me the creeps when it was first suggested; Alexa is not a convenience, but a Trojan inside the walls.
    A matter of time, now. And that time groweth ever shorter. If there was anything else you needed to do, or to arrange, or to purchase, now is the time to do so. Lots of EMP chatter these days, as if there weren’t already enough going on. Instant 1800s, and no coming back anytime soon….
    Just another brick in the wall.

    1. Actually not 1800s because no one owns tools compatible with the 1800s. Do you have a mule? Everything from gardening to clothing to food prep and storage is radically incompatible with today’s gear.

      Inserted bugs: curious that my brand new phone and new OS have so many issues. Bought Samsung to maybe avoid so much Chinese spying, but something is screwing with functions that worked fine in my 7 yr old phone.

    3. Yes, EMP goes up. The risk is much bigger than 1800, since people in 1800 were adapted to living in 1800. Abc points that out very well.

      Think dieoff.

  4. There is a whole secondary economy that uses cash almost exclusively, or as a deliberate tool. Many of the people are what pundits call “the unbanked”.

    They are people like me, that shop at thrift stores, yard sales, estate sales, garage sales, that make money in the gig economy or with a side hustle. Or they are illegals that don’t want to attract attention. Or they are a combination of things but there are a lot of them out there once you start paying attention.

    I went from using almost no cash to using primarily cash for everyday purchases when I stopped shopping in the ‘first’ economy. I still use amzn and others, and I still have and use credit cards for the things that they are useful for, but I look for most things elsewhere first.

    FWIW, I think you should probably seek out and practice using those cash and person to person markets. Start with a farmers market, or a local swapmeet. Figure out whether dickering is expected, or not. Watch people. Learn to fit in, especially if there are cultural differences as well as social.

    Even in smaller or more individual stores, it doesn’t hurt to ask if there is a ‘cash discount’. Even if they say no, you aren’t out anything, and many times they offer at least the 3% they would otherwise pay to Visa/MC.

    Remember too that you are entering an agreement, and if they meet your request, you should close the deal. It’s informal and has unwritten rules, but there are rules. They are one of the things you need to look for and figure out, and why you should practice.

    If the SHTF, you want some practice at this. Existing structures will expand to fill gaps. There are lots of those structures out there, and you don’t want to be oblivious to them.

    n

    added— you may want to get started building cash outside of the surveillance network NOW rather than later. Getting cash out of the bank on a regular basis establishes patterns that you want. Paying for things with cash and no transaction records establishes patterns that can be helpful later. And some of that cash can just end up in a rainy day fund, for when you really need something that you’d rather not have everyone and their big brother know about. ( you know, like a birthday present for your spouse, that she won’t see on a credit card statement. Like that.)

    1. nick flandrey gives excellent advice. The only downside is having to do the math for the kid at the register to get correct change. But I have hope…

    2. I (generally) carry enough cash on me for any purchase I might make with a card. You’re right about establishing patterns.

      Cash has its own allure.

      What would take its place if electronic cash disappeared?

  5. The comic is loaded. The chilli is simmering. One last business was meeting, and it is Wilder Time.

    By the way: Glyph read your “all numbers rounded to their greatest extent equal 0” comment and said, quote, “OMG, mom: that’s awful.

    Well done!

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