Criminomics 103

Examples

From here

A few examples of 'organized crime as a branch of the secret service':

The fact that organized crime and the United States government have had some common enemies (Mussolini in Italy, and Castro in Cuba) has sometimes led to cooperation between them. In Italy local Mafiosi were active in the underground and provided the Allies with intelligence for the invasion of Sicily. As the Allies then moved on to the Italian mainland, anti-Fascist Mafia were appointed to important positions in many towns and villages. The French liner Normandie was burned in New York, just before it was to become an Allied troop ship. Following this incident, the government sought the aid of mob-controlled longshoremen, truckers and guards as help against waterfront sabotage and infiltration during World War II. 7 Help was received from Joe (Socks) Lanza on the East Side and Lucky Luciano on the West Side. Just what the government offered in return is less clear, although Luciano’s cooperation won him, at the least, a transfer to more comfortable prison quarters near Albany (Talese, 1972: 206).

Recent reports of connections between the CIA and the underworld may simply be the continuation of an old American tradition. The CIA with its “executive action program” designed to “eliminate the effectiveness of foreign leaders” also delegated some of its dirty work (such as assassination efforts directed against Castro and Lumumba) to underworld figures. In Castro’s case organized crime figures were thought to have “expertise and contacts not available to law-abiding citizens.” They also had a motive which it was thought would take attention away from sponsorship of the U.S. government. According to one estimate (Schlesinger, 1978), Castro’s coming to power cost organized crime $100 million a year. Outsiders were used by the CIA to avoid having “an Agency person or government person get caught” (Select Committee, 1975: 74).

A former bank robber and forger involved in the unsuccessful plot to assassinate Lumumba was given plastic surgery and a toupee by the CIA before being sent to the Congo. This man was recommended by the Chief of the CIA’s Africa Division as a “field operative” because “if he is given an assignment which may be morally wrong in the eyes of the world, but necessary because his case officer ordered him to carry it out, then it is right, and he will dutifully undertake appropriate action for its execution without pangs of conscience. In a word, he can rationalize all actions” (Select Committee, 1975: 46). It appears that in extreme cases one crucial element which agents of social control may obtain in such exchange relationships is a psychopathic personality not inhibited by conventional moral restraints

Lucky there's all that organized crime about the place, eh? I wonder if anyone in power's ever thought that it's in their best interests to sustain global organized crime *coff* war on drugs *coff*

Free speech*

*Some terms and conditions apply.

This is weird. I don't like the BNP, racist fuckwits that they are, but I was under the impression that 'valid political parties' had gotten themselves excempt from laws such as this, on the grounds that suppressing or controlling political groups is tantamount to censorship: you can't form a group to politically discuss X.

A common argument against censorship is that what starts off to, say, prevent child-porn, will then be 'expanded' to prevent bestiality and other 'obscenities' before then being expanded further to suppress terrorism, then racism, then glorification of crime.

Sounds natural, until you realize just how much that covers: according to the people who censor the telly, glorification of crime, for example, includes anything that condones or glamorises violent, dangerous, seriously antisocial behaviour, or crime; anything explaining how to commit a crime^[1].

The problem there is that as 'crime' includes, say, refusal to pay tax, attempting to overthrow the gov', organized civil disobedience (smoking in pubs, maybe), and so on, then the law essentially is that you can't use the telly to suggest/co-ordinate civil resistance to the government: the government is in charge, challenging that is illegal, and thus it is illegal to publicly discuss ways to challenge it (excepting via the non-functional Electoral System). Hell, it sounds like it forbids mentioning WikiLeaks on the telly, as that explains how to break the censorship laws.

Or broadcast child porn, which is the reason touted out whenever the TV censors need justification.

Anyway, in order to safeguard at least themselves against totalitarianism, I was under the impression that political parties were excempt from certain laws, such as censorship and racism. After all, if the political parties of the 60's were subject to public decency or corruption of minors (e.g., 17-year-old's) acts, then they wouldn't have been able to discuss the decriminalization of homosexuality.

So it's odd seeing the BNP, who, for all that they're assholes, are a political party, being held to the race-relations laws, given that that would kinda destroy them.

You may form a political party for the decriminalization of gays, but, by jove, you can't do so in such a way that condones homosexuality for that is illegal.

You may form a racist political party, but, by jove, you may not do so in a racist way.

Hmm... I wonder if you could get "you may form a political party to actually give power to the people, but, if our broken electoral system doesn't work, you may not suggest that people take power, for that is illegal. By jove."?

(Oh look, apparently you can: for all their genuine political complaints, and for all the political cheating by the UK government, for a while some separatist Irish political parties were censored within the UK.)

On the other hand, given that their proposed change is to omit the whites-only requirement but have a requirement that every member "bona fide supports and agrees with each of the Principles of the Party", I'm not sure how that'll work:

Criminomics 102

Or: how to maintain a secret-service branch on the cheap

Put yourself in the position of a secret-service high-up.

You've been given a big task: you're to create an organization that can achieve 'things' within the UK. These things will be 'ground-work': the actual 'doing stuff' leg-work that exerts small-scale, local influence which, if carefully applied (to, e.g., politicians, police-chiefs, etc) could have useful larger-scale effects. Your organization will work with other departments (psyops/propaganda, political, economical, military, etc) in order to exert influence within the UK.

The exact specifications are:


Must be capable of 'getting stuff done', mainly the illegal stuff: espionage, entrapment/framing, bribery, forgery of documents, theft, breaking-and-bugging, kidnap, torture, blackmail, coercion, assassination, provoking riots, anything else that might need doing.

Must be capable of logistics to facilitate the above: importing, exporting, transporting, storing, manufacturing stuff; finances (movement of cash); identification and appropriation of skilled operatives; etc.

Size and spread: must be present in every city and ideally infiltrate the power structure (police officers, magistrates, civil-service, etc.), and be large enough to bear a large workload if necessary.

Must do all the above in a deniable way (not traceable back to us) and be as cheap as possible.

Now, the 'cheap as possible' requirement kind of rules-out many potential approaches: armies of operatives spread thickly throughout the UK would cost a bomb and, anyway, it would kind of risk the 'deniable' requirement.

A much better idea is to pass 'stupid' laws.

See, illegalizing cannabis, for example, contributes to the profitability (and thus sustainability/maintenance) of the UK criminal infrastructure. It funds illegal transportation networks, and criminal gangs. Cocaine does likewize, and also makes it financially viable for 'organized crime' to maintain some (at least small and basic) chemical manufacturing plants. All drugs contribute to the profitability of crime, and thus facilitates criminals bribing police officers for information.

Patent laws lead to forgery, which includes stuff like, e.g., televisions: make a sub-par TV that just-about works, slap a 'sony' label on it, and sell it above what it's worth, and you get 'organized crime' maintaining electronic-equipment factories and the skilled electronics and machining experts who are required to set up the factories.

Obviously, chuck thieves and thugs, forgers and whores in there too, as they're all illegal. And, for every law that pushes more 'economics' into the hands of the organized criminals, and -- given that even the 'victimless criminals' such as prostitutes can't really go to the police -- there's more and more demand (and more and more money available) for organized crime's 'police' -- People Who Go Have Words With People, People Who Break Other People's Legs, People Who Kill People...

Mostly staffed by People Who Do Things For Money, and administrated by People Who Know People...

Lets look at the requirements of our organization again:

Must be capable of 'getting stuff done', mainly the illegal stuff:

espionage; breaking-and-bugging: Pay the more-skilled thieves to break and enter, and plant bugs (the bugs can be manufactured by the patent infringers in bulk, or the people who design their factories in small numbers, or by the gov. and then smuggled in by the drug smugglers); use the police/etc contacts for internal information.

entrapment/framing/blackmail: whores and drug-dealers would be good for this. 'Got caught snorting coke off of two whores breasts' makes an awful headline, don't'cha think... as does anything relating to whores or drugs, tbh.

bribery: of officials? drug-dealers, crime-lords, etc, already do so for early-warning of raids and 'accidentally' losing evidence. Of other people, you just need the money and someone to go make the offer.

Forgery of documents: forgers

theft: theives

kidnap, torture, coercion, assassination, provoking riots, anything else that might need doing: organized crime is quite versatile enough to get all of these things done, given sufficient money, and half of those things are done by their 'police'.

Must be capable of logistics to facilitate the above: importing, exporting, transporting, storing, (drug smugglers mainly) manufacturing stuff (patent infringers; drug-makers for chemical stuff); finances (have their own trust-based money-moving systems, and money-laundering too); identification and appropriation of skilled operatives (the 'leaders'); etc.

Size and spread: must be present in every city and ideally infiltrate the power structure (police officers, magistrates, civil-service, etc.), and be large enough to bear a large workload if necessary (umm... yes).

Must do all the above in a deniable way (not tracable back to us, criminals take the blame) and be as cheap as possible (no maintenance costs, simply pay on an as-needed basis).

Bloody cheap way of doing it. You just need to make sure that the criminal infrastructure remains strong. That's easy, just illegalize enough that they have a crapload of stuff to do and make money off of, and ignore all arguments based on 'makes organized crime more powerful' and police badly ('zero tolerance' policing, for example, leads to more and more people not being able to go to the police == more power for organized crime; underfunding would work too).

Now you have a branch of the secret service that can do the 'ground-work' cheaply. No one who matters will get hurt.

On the down-side you'll have to constantly fend off 'hippy liberals' who want to decriminalize stuff, and you'll have to play silly-buggers with the organized criminals so that they don't get too powerful (maybe arrest the leaders who try to unite the gangs, and leave the more conflicty bosses in charge to keep the society less cohesive?), not to mention that others could, in theory, use this system against you; but on the plus it's a method that can be applied to other countries as well, as long as you can put enough influence on them to pass organized-crime-friendly laws and have enough money to be 'the highest bidder' when it matters.

tl; dr?

If we assume that the secret service desires a large, deniable network of people who can get local-scale dodgy stuff done in order to exert control, with its own supporting infrastructure (e.g., logistics) and all on the cheap, then organized crime doesn't half fit that need well...

Also, it works to exert influence on foreign countries as well, as long as you can influence them enough to get an organized-crime friendly set of laws passed.

Therefore, our arguably stupid approach to law and order (especially conceptual crimes) may well not be so stupid, if you assume they're supposed to promote, rather than suppress, crime (especially organized crime).

Crimonomics 101

Really obvious stuff about economics and the black-market

Lets take John Smith. John likes drinking beer. So, John has several problems:

• He needs beer
• He needs a nice place to drink the beer
• He needs to get to and from the place where he drinks beer (as he'll be drunk, the normal solution -- driving his car -- might not be appropriate)

Now, people have sprung up to solve John's problems: brewers make beer, land-lords store beer and maintain a nice drinking environment, and taxi drivers will ferry you to and from the pub. They'll do all this under the assumption that you'll give them money. Pretty much economics 101.

Now lets take Druggy McCokehead. Druggy likes snorting coke. So, Druggy has several problems, pretty similar to John's: for a start, he needs cocaine.

Again, people will have sprung up to solve Druggy's problems. A taxi-driver might ferry him to and from his local drug-dealer, who stocks cocaine for him.

If you have a problem, and are willing to sacrifice money to get it fixed, there will be people available to fix your problem, whatever it is. Economics 101.

Similarly, there's infrastructure for other problem-solvers. Take the person who solves John's beer-problem: he'll need a way of getting the beer from the brewers to his pub, hence there's a transportation infrastructure. Some of these transporters might address clients/goods with special requirements: maybe those goods are perishable and thus require cooling/freezing whilst being transported, or maybe the goods need to be hidden and transported covertly because armies of big men with sticks are out to find and confiscate the goods. Either way, there will be people willing to solve your transportation needs... for money.

Similarly, John's land-lord might, in his quest to provide an enjoyable drinking environment, encounter the problem of violent drunks; if he can't, or doesn't want to, solve this on his own, there are bouncers who will solve his crowd-control problems for him. For money.

And, in the worst case, if the problem can be summed up as 'so-and-so is being a problem for me and the people who's problems I solve', there's always lawyers and/or the police (or bouncers).

Exactly the same exists within the black market. As a support-service for out-sourcing the problems that you encounter whilst trying to solve other people's problems, there are available:

• People who move things from A to B
• People who store things
• People who get things
• People who make things
• People who stop other people from being a problem

The latter one consists of:

People who stand there looking intimidating (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who physically remove someone from the premises (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who go and have a word with people (police, lawyers, 'heavies')
People who go and have a stern word with people (police, lawyers, people who break legs for money)
People who remove other people from the equasion. (police & prison service, hit-men)

All for the same fundamental reason: if someone else has a problem, and you will solve it, there's money in it for you. OK, granted, police are done socialistically via tax, but whatever, I'm mainly focusing on the black-market equivalent here.

Both legal and illegal economies also have people who know what's going on and wander round organising stuff, whether they're called managers or crime-lords.

And there's much, much more to the criminal infrastructure. Coke-dealers, for example, quite often give discounts and are friendly to any of their customers who happen to be taxi-drivers or police, because taxi-drivers tend to go everywhere (so make passable 'spies' and relatively inconspicuous traffickers) and pigs have inside information on 'the enemy', for example; a successful coke dealer often moonlights as an information broker.

My point? Just that problems beg solutions, and that if you have both problems and money, you will have people solving the former for the latter. Laws create crimes not only in the strait-forward 'this is illegal now so everone who does it is a criminal' sense, and not only in the 'criminalising coke creates coke-dealers as well as coke-takers' sense, but also in the 'each law contributes to the existence and financing of the organized criminal infrastructure' sense.

Now... this is all relatively obvious. And the main point of this blog is to force me to write stuff down, and thus check it (in fact, I'm relatively sure I don't have any readers, but whatever). So, the next part of this avenue of thought will come later, when I've checked some (relatively mundane) facts.

tl; dr?

• Criminals are people who do things.
• They do all sorts of things, including boring logistical stuff like moving shit and killing people.
• They do this for money.
• Obviously.

Nice weather for it

Random observation:

When the UK introduced the smoking ban, I honestly expected lots of people to just simply disregard it. Yet they did not, at least not in the pubs that I drink in (which aren't ruff as shit, but aren't exactly upper-class or anything).

It might have something to do with when the ban was introduced, which was July.

A few facts about July^[1]:

It's one of the hottest months, as are August and September.
It gets dark later than most months, as do August and September.
It's drier than most months, as are August and September.

June is also a nice month weather-wize, but not as hot, gets darker a bit earlier, and is wetter.

Had the government introduced the law in, say, November, I'm sure that more people would have smoked inside: new law, pissing it down, bugger that lets just smoke inside, fuck off pigs, etc.

A semi-detailed assessment of this plan is quite interesting:

Strait-off the bat, lots of people would have resisted: you have three months to allow them to rack-up enough warnings to justify a 'final warning', and during these three months most people won't resist as they don't mind going outside too much in nice weather.

Three months later, you've got a new set of rebels as the weather has turned bad, BUT these people cannot rely on the support of the original (instantly-rebellious) people, as their landlords have earned their 'final warning'. This is less draconian than actually legislating that a land-lord will instantly lose his licence on his first offence, but acts the same for a large number of land-lords when it counts, i.e. they've reached that point when the weather turns bad and lots of other land-lords are considering rebelling.

Hence, you get a smaller group resisting when the weather turns bad. You've now got a few months before it starts snowing to ensure that this group is also 'fairly' given a few warnings, so that, come the snow, the number of pubs that say 'bollocks to that, it's snowing, just smoke inside' is much smaller than you'd expect.

In other words, it divides and conquers the pubs by allowing land-lords to resist, and get to the draconian 'do it and you'll have your licence (i.e., livelyhood) revoked' point, in spurts rather than all at once.

By giving the land lords a few warnings (when the gov' can afford to be light-handed, i.e. before the next group of people start resisting) the gov' appear fair and less heavy-handed, even tho forcing compliance by threatening -- at the right time -- to take away their licence if they disobey even one (more) time is an integral part of the plan: when it matters -- when their resistance would have an effect because they'd be resisting with many other people -- they can't, because doing so would result in an insta-ban. But, if called on it, the gov' can say 'we gave them numerous warnings' and seem fair...

Now, had they spent about 5 months obeying, but trying to whip up support against the ban, then all resisted at once in December, maybe people wouldn't have accepted the law just because it had been 'unchallenged' for 5 months, and there'd have been a lot more people resisting at once...

Or, y'know, if the government had tried to pass this law in November... which is probably why they didn't.

Wikileaks

Some guys from Wikileaks have given a talk which I think is relatively interesting as it gives an insight into how the media works, tho it's over an hour long. Also, Wikileaks itself is quite interesting, and worth checking-out.

Wikileaks (site currently more-or-less down) is a website that acts as a 'clearing house' and secure drop-off point for leaks, ranging from internal business documents to suppressed newspaper articles to documents protected by the Official Secrets Act, and they're currently trying to create an 'information safe-haven' in order to forcibly bring transparency to the governments and power-groups of the world. They also ultimately want some kind of open-source/wiki approach to fact-checking, verification, etc., presumably to deal with the massive over-head of analyzing all of the data.

Some interesting bits from the talk:

They mention a company (Trafigura) 'allegedly' dumping toxic waste off of the ivory coast: a fact which made the front-page of the Guardian, thus earning them a Secret Gagging Order; the BBC, the Times, the London Independent, also had to remove stories about the incident.

If you're wondering why you haven't heard about any of this... well, it's because it's been censored, so it hasn't been on the news: a Secret Gag Order is essentially 'meta-censorship', where you're not only forbidden from reporting on a certain topic, but you're also forbidden from reporting the fact that you've been gagged... the UK apparently has 2-300 of these currently in effect. We can't tell if they're justified or not, as we don't know what they're about (this is why meta-censorship is bad), but New York recently passed legislation basically saying that a UK libel order cannot be upheld in New York, and similar USA-wide legislature is partway through being passed; that's how bad the UK is on 'thou-cannot-say' laws (the worst liberal democracy, as the Wikileaks guys call us)...

Anyway, at the height of the censorship, an MP had to actually stand up in the House of Commons and read out the URL of the Wikileaks page with the censored stories on it -- colons and slashes and all -- to get the word out about it, which I thought was kinda cool.

What else... they mentioned their 911 pager messages: released in 'delayed real-time', they are 'an objective snapshot of communication of the time, including NYPD, doctors, secret service, etc.'. Or an attention-grabbing stunt, depending on how cynical you want to be. Still, it's interesting that there was, for some reason, a wide-spread intercepting and logging of pagers (including that of civvies).


They also host leaks from the European Union Institute for Security Studies; according to the Wikileaks guys, the EUISS is a think-tank on security, well-listened to by the EU, who suggest, basically, that 20% of the world are 'globalizers' (1st world countries, trans-national corportations, etc), whilst the other 80% are 'localizers', i.e. 'poor'; and that said 80% are unhappy (probably at being so poor), and are 'limiting the 20%'s wealth', which -- according to the EUISS -- neccesitates an EU military, so that they can extract global resources (e.g., rainforests) from their owners who otherwize might not let the 20% use them; an approach which is apparently tantamount to declaring war on the poor. The report where they suggest all this is available on Wikileaks.

Another leak is a high-level US special-ops hand-book: amongst others pieces of advice, the International Monetary Fund is described as 'a financial weapon' to be used to exert America's will on foreign countries. It's just as interesting that this hasn't been reported despite being leaked and there for the reading -- this (potentially juicy and newspaper-selling) leak was not picked up on by the press, presumably because the report is 200-odd pages long, written for above-averagly intelligent people, and full of military acronyms: hence journalists didn't bother reading and reporting on it.

The Icelandic loan book was also leaked, showing who was withdrawing all their money from the Icelandic Bank before it went bust.

Iceland is so small that everyone was effected by the banking crisis. The leaking of the book allowed them to look at which insiders took all their money and ran before the country went bust; i.e., who knew that the ship was sinking; who 'sold them into debt-slavery'.

5 minutes before Iceland's equivalent of the BBC went on-air to report this, they got an injunction: so, as they went on-air, they simply posted up a picture of Wikileaks, hint-hint nudge-nudge.

And this is why Wikileaks is trying to persuade Iceland to become an Offshore Publication Centre.

For those not familiar with the dodgier side of economics, an Offshore Finance Centre is a small island without any large source of income that agrees to pass a very convenient set of laws -- no money-transfer logging, no money-seizure, no public records, low(ish) tax, etc. -- in order to allow them to be a nice hidey-hole for rich people who don't want to follow laws, or pay too much tax.

An Offshore Publication Centre would essentially be the same, but for information: Sweden's source-protection laws, Belgium's journalist-protection laws, the US's 1st amendment (protection of free speach), etc. In return, Iceland could pick up some well-needed cash from the hosting/server fees.

Iceland, btw, has recently undergone some political upheaval, with riots on the streets and the government resigning and an early election putting a new party in power, all over the financial crisis. (Iceland had the worlds highest Human Development index, and now... well, now it does not. Iceland feels shafted by the bad guys, and bullied by the IMF and the UK (we're using their desired entry into the EU as a hostage to try to get them to pay us four times their GDP, which they apparently owe us, and using anti-terror laws to seize the Icelandic Bank's assets (hardly diplomatic...)), so the country has been somewhat 'radicalized' by the perception that they are the first 1st-world country to be a victim to globalization, with a bill nearly passing (tho the Wikileaks guys didn't say where... EU?) allowing for the military seizure of Icelandic assets in leu of payment (as usually happens to 3rd world countries)...


They also mention that it's not uncommon for Journalists to have quid-pro-quo deals with secret services/intelligence agencies: I'll report this for you, if you tell me such-and-such insider information...

An interesting watch, all-in-all.

Weak and shit

A thought occurs to me about the expenses scandal:

From a lecture about the economics of crack-cocaine dealing as revealed by talking to the crime-lords during the American Crack-Wars (at about 20:30):

One thing we observed in the data is that it looked like [...] the gang leader always got paid [...] — no matter how bad it was economically he always got himself paid — so we had some theories related to cash flow, and lack of access to capital markets, and things like that, but then we asked the gang [leader]: "why is it you always get paid, and your workers don't always get payed"; and his response is: "you got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig? If you start taking losses, they see you [as] weak and shit.". [...] And I thought about it, and I said: "CEOs often pay themselves million-dollar bonuses even when companies are losing a lot of money, and it never really occurred to economists that this idea of 'weak and shit' could be important, but maybe 'weak and shit' is an important hypothesis?".

Maybe it is: the expenses scandal — along with bank CEOs giving themselves million-pound bonuses — came at a time when the economy, the banking system, and the Labour Party were weak. Nothing, really, happened to any of them — a few MPs stepped down, there were some apologies, and allegedly there's going to have to be some money paid back — but not what you'd expect for gross embezzlement: no-one got fired, impeached, or imprisoned, and Gordon Brown and the Labour Party are still in charge.

Maybe they didn't want to appear 'weak and shit', so they gave us a demonstration that they are still strong enough to take the piss and, at worst, suffer only minor repercussions, to stop us niggers going after their jobs, you dig?