International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 48

A (Guided) Tour of the Digital Wild West
2018). Beneath the prudish exterior of Silicon Valley, recent investigations
have uncovered the orgy culture that is rife in the boys’ clubs shared by the
male CEOs, commercial bankers, and directors of high-tech, real estate, and
advertising firms. At the weekend, these titans, with their paleo-hippy mindset,
“invite” their female employees—or those from nearby start-ups—to soirées of
sex, drugs, and power in secluded villas or hotel suites. But if you work in the
Valley, how can you turn down an “invitation” from those who control your
future? And who attends these secret orgies? Younger women and older men
(always white and heterosexual) in a ratio of two-to-one. “Diversity”? That’s
for the press releases only.
• Cyber fraud is still fraud. Might we see a high-tech Bernie Madoff? With all
the data, the “transparency,” and the monitoring of online activity? Impossible?
No. The young self-made woman Elizabeth Holmes had founded and was
running the start-up Theranos, working to revolutionize blood testing: a laboratory
on the tip of a needle, thanks to her technological solution, “Edison,”
which would carry out hundreds of tests in an instant, with just one drop of
blood. This would have saved American health insurance programs such as
Medicare and Medicaid hundreds of millions of dollars. Theranos promised
the moon, and the media fell for it hook, line, and sinker. The story appeared
on the front cover of Fortune Magazine, Forbes, and Time. So came the cries:
Holmes is one of the richest and most influential women in the world! She’s a
media darling! Henry Kissinger’s on the Board! Nine-hundred million dollars
of risk-capital poured into the miracle start-up. Such credulity, such gullibility,
such blindness, and it all turned out to be a sham. Silicon Valley, the media, the
investors, and the customers were all scammed, old-school.
Cyberconflict, Present and Future
At present, the term “cyberconflict” suggests a digital Cold War: undeclared;
surreptitious, indirect disruption; an arms race, just in case. But the cast is
now different from what we saw during the two-sided Cold War. Today we
have North Korea’s cyberarmy of around six thousand hackers, capable of stealing
(or recovering) the NSA’s digital offensive weapons and modifying them in order
to loot poorly protected banks (to make ends meet); or sabotaging the computers
of anyone who dares to disrespect the “Great Leader.” In a world where everyone
is always talking about detection and prevention, it has to be pointed out in passing
that not one misdeed on the part of Pyongyang has ever been identified or
foreseen by anybody, with the planet’s global gaggle of cyber experts floundering
around for months before dimly spotting the problem.
These episodes do demonstrate, however, that cyberconflict is an ideal arena
for asymmetric strategy: it is cheap, anonymous, even profitable, and poses a
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