The Weekly Weird #42

The UN's Pact For The Future, Chick-fill-out, the Democratic People's Republic of Crypto, digital assets coming SWIFTly, see Spot gun

Mike Freedman

Oct 04, 2024

Hello again from the borderlands of dystopia! Another week, another Weird, and this one goes up to 11…

Up-fronts:

Friend of the show and all-round mensch
CJ Hopkins
was found guilty in Berlin by the Chamber Court, overturning his acquittal and setting him and his intrepid lawyer Friedemann Däblitz on course for a showdown in Germany’s Constitutional Court. You can donate to his defense fund here. A full write-up on his journey from Twitter to state-sponsored courtroom torture is forthcoming, but in the meantime you can listen to Episodes 103 and 122 to get all caught up.
The VP’s VP Tim Walz self-owned in his debate with author-turned-eyeliner model JD Vance, displaying a depressing dearth of First Amendment knowledge in the form of twin assertions that “hate speech” and “yell[ing] ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre” are not constitutionally protected forms of speech. Dr Cox summarises, FIRE and the ACLU explain, the 2012 version of President Barack Obama disagrees: “the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression; it is more speech.”
John F. Kerry1, complaining to the World Economic Forum about misinformation, said “our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, y’know, hammer it out of existence,” and he didn’t mean it in a good way. Novelist and America This Week co-presenter Walter Kirn riposted at Rescue The Republic.

Onwards!

The UN’s Pact For The Future

The UN, the supergroup whose music nobody listens to and whose albums nobody buys, have dropped a 66-page document with the definitely-not-presumptuous-or-pushy title of Pact for the Future, Global Digital Compact, and Declaration on Future Generations. It is a compendium of empty globo-speak, an assortment of phrasal concoctions carefully constructed to alienate the reader and express precisely nothing, ensuring that anything creepy, risky, or dumb is buried in linguistic contortions so impenetrable and terminology so repetitive and ill-defined that the mind is bludgeoned and blunted to the point of insensibility by attempting meaningful analysis.

Please find a non-exhaustive selection of what raised my blood pressure below.

Action 1 is headlined as follows:

We will take bold, ambitious, accelerated, just and transformative actions to implement the 2030 Agenda, achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and leave no one behind.

In case that wasn’t clear enough, it’s expanded upon later in the document:

We recognize that the 2030 Agenda is universal and that all developing countries, including countries in special situations, in particular African countries, least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and small island developing States, as well as those with specific challenges, including middle-income countries and countries in conflict and post-conflict situations, require assistance to implement the Agenda.

What is that 2030 Agenda? You can find it online here, In its preamble, it states that it is “a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity…[that]…also seeks to strengthen universal peace in larger freedom.”

What does any of that, or the previously quoted paragraphs, mean? Don’t you have to have something already in order to “strengthen” it? Anyway, moving on…

Action 14: “We will protect all civilians in armed conflict.”

Great track record there, they’ll definitely get right on top of that. Nothing selective, myopic, indifferent, or downright counterproductive about the UN’s previous peacekeeping efforts.

Action 16: “We will promote cooperation and understanding between Member States, defuse tensions, seek the pacific settlement of disputes and resolve conflicts.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t that the original intention of the UN, and before it, the League of Nations? How did this end up as #16 on the list?

As for promoting “cooperation and understanding,” cooperation to what end, and understanding of what? Countries with corrupt, autocratic, and/or repressive governments who don’t particular care for democracy, free speech, free expression, free religion, or social mobility outnumber countries with a more liberty-oriented, democratic bent.

Pictured below: An Our World in Data graphic showing a world map by political regime.

In case the small print is hard to read, here are the definitions of the different types of regime (emphasis in the original):

In closed autocracies, citizens do not have the right to either choose the chief executive of the government or the legislature through multi-party elections.
In electoral autocracies, citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections; but they lack some freedoms, such as the freedoms of association or expression, that make the elections meaningful, free, and fair.
In electoral democracies, citizens have the right to participate in meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections.
In liberal demoracies, citizens have further individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are constrained by the legislative and the courts.

If you visit Our World in Data and scroll through the timeline of the map2, from 1789 to 2023, it’s fascinating to see the shift in governance over time. The key takeaway here, however, is that ‘liberal democracies’ are in the minority numerically, geographically, and demographically, i.e. there are fewer of them, with fewer citizens, covering a smaller area of the globe than the “autocracies”.

It’s a great idea to create a forum for the nations of the world to come together, sit around a table (or large room), and talk about what they want instead of defaulting to killing one another over it. That said, it does not logically follow that if such a collective forum is given authority and power, it will exercise it in the best way, or in a way that aligns with the principles of the countries in which citizens have the most civil liberties and personal freedom. It would perhaps be more realistic to say that, if the the collective is guided by democratic principles in its decision-making, but the majority of the member states are not internally or ideologically inclined towards liberty for their own citizens, the determinations of a democratic body of mostly undemocratic nations will probably be less weighted in favour of liberal democratic values that benefit the individual rights and aspirations of citizens.

Ironic, isn’t it?

When Amazon tells us that “People who bought X also bought Y,” we get it. Someone shopping for a toaster might also want a kettle or a microwave. Why is it so difficult to put across that countries whose governments ‘buy’ repression, violence, and censorship for their citizens might also ‘buy’ them for us if they get to vote on global rules that affect everyone? Or that the very thought of enacting binding resolutions and global legislative frameworks for collective action in concert with such governments might push us closer to their end of the spectrum than it might pull them towards ours?

When the Pact for the Future commits, in Action 38, to “transform global governance and reinvigorate the multilateral system” through “strengthened accountability, transparency and implementation mechanisms,” who will be more accountable and transparent? Them, as holders and wielders of power, or us, the citizens on the ground, in the form of surveillance, censorship, and data sharing between governments? Is “implementation mechanism” a euphemism for the legal power to enforce the UN’s rules? If it is, what powers are they planning to give themselves? If not, what does it actually mean?

Under the same heading, they commit to being inclusive, in the sense that they want “to allow for the meaningful participation of relevant stakeholders in appropriate formats, while reaffirming the intergovernmental character of the United Nations and the unique and central role of States in meeting global challenges.” What “stakeholders” are going to have “meaningful participation” in “global governance” other than “States”? Your Uncle Dave? The cat’s mother? That bit translates as ‘we want to give non-government entities a say in global governance but, don’t worry, we promise that sovereign nations are still special and matter.’ In short, We Care A Lot.

Article 39 says they want to enlarge and reform the Security Council to “ensure a balance between its representativeness and effectiveness,” work towards “limiting [the] scope and use” of the veto, and “continue discussions on the issue of representation of cross-regional groups, taking into account that small island developing States, Arab States and others, such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.”

“The working methods should ensure the inclusive, transparent, efficient, effective, democratic and accountable functioning of an enlarged Council,” says the Pact for the Future, but there is nothing in sight about judging the fitness of a member state to participate in that “democratic and accountable functioning” by taking into account the horrors visited by that member state’s government upon its own people.

Don’t get me started on the commitment to “pursue deeper reforms of the international financial architecture to turbocharge implementation of the 2030 Agenda” (Action 47), the plan to “establish more systematic links and coordination between the United Nations and the international financial institutions” (Action 48), or the intention to “accelerate reform of the international financial architecture to mobilize additional financing for the Sustainable Development Goals” (Action 49).

How about Action 56’s call for “[t]he safe and sustainable use of [outer] space,” whatever that means?

In the Global Digital Compact, when they promise to “[f]oster an inclusive, open, safe and secure digital space that respects, protects and promote human rights,” are they talking about dismantling the social credit system in China or censoring social media for China? Is it “safe” to not be surveilled by repressive governments and companies exploiting loopholes and omissions in the law, or is it “safe” to not have certain people saying certain things or accessing certain information?

How do you “urgently counter and address…all forms of hate speech and discrimination, misinformation and disinformation” with “robust risk mitigation and redress measures that also protect privacy and freedom of expression” while you “[r]efrain from imposing restrictions on the free flow of information and ideas that are inconsistent with obligations under international law”?

How do you “[m]ainstream a gender perspective in digital connectivity strategies to address structural and systematic barriers to meaningful, safe and affordable digital connectivity for all women and girls” while some member states at the UN General Assembly have a problem with women showing their hair and talking outdoors?

If you “urgently…[c]all on social media platforms to provide researchers access to data, with safeguards for user privacy, to ensure transparency and accountability to build an evidence base on how to address misinformation and disinformation and hate speech that can inform government and industry policies, standards and best practices,” but the governments you want “social media platforms” to “inform” put their own citizens in jail for dissent or having the wrong religion or not wanting to be a second-class citizen, how can you “protect privacy, freedom of expression and access to information while addressing harms”?

Read the statement below while bearing in mind that elsewhere in the same document they propose measures that create the possibility of having Afghanistan on the Security Council or giving the Taliban access to the personal data of its citizens for “transparency” and “accountability”:

Gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls and their full, equal and meaningful participation in the digital space are essential to close the gender digital divide and advance sustainable development. Our cooperation will empower all women and girls, encourage leadership of women, mainstream a gender perspective and counter and eliminate all forms of violence, including sexual and gender-based violence that occurs through or is amplified by the use of technology;

The whole thing stinks.

The misuse and abuse of the English language on show makes it all even worse. For bizarre policy choices communicated clearly, next stop Britain…

The British government has seized the nettle, touched the third rail, made the hard choices, and finally taken meaningful action on the issue on the minds and in the hearts of the nation.

As of October 1, 2024, it is illegal to keep even one unregistered bird in England and Wales. No longer can a family with a hen in the yard for fresh eggs skate beneath the radar of the State. The threshold for registration used to be 50 birds, but time has been called on the anarchy.

BBC News summarises:

Owners who fail to do so by Tuesday risk being fined or even imprisoned, though officials have stressed any punishment would be "proportionate".
Farmers say registration is "vital" to protect the poultry population, but some backyard keepers have branded it "bureaucracy gone crazy".

Citing “more than 360 cases of avian influenza across Great Britain since October 2021, including a significant number of backyard flocks,” the National Farmers’ Union touted the change in the law as a victory for commercial poultry keepers.

The government said the changes would help manage potential disease outbreaks, such as avian influenza and Newcastle disease, and limit any spread.
The information on the register will also be used to identify all bird keepers in disease control zones, allowing for more effective surveillance, so that zones can be lifted at the earliest possible opportunity and trade can resume more quickly following an outbreak of avian disease in Great Britain.

The government’s website put it in refreshingly plain language:

You must register if you keep poultry or other captive birds in England or Wales. This includes any birds you keep as pets.
If you became a keeper of poultry or other captive birds before 1 October 2024, you must register immediately if you have not done so already.
If you become a keeper of poultry or other captive birds after 1 October 2024, you must register within 30 days of becoming a keeper.
You’re breaking the law if you do not register.

At the time of writing, the online registration form bird-keepers need to fill out was “currently unavailable due to technical issues.”

Why?

Upon hearing the news, the British responded with characteristic mockery and began registering every bird-shaped item they could find, crashing the system.

Off-Guardian reports:

Fortunately, the people of the UK have a tried-and-tested method of dealing with absurdity—more absurdity.
In the run-up to the deadline thousands of people took to the DEFRA website to register their “chickens”…

Some examples:

Prime Minister Starmer could not be reached for comment, but an artist’s impression has been circulating on social media:

The Democratic People’s Republic Of Crypto

An investigation by CoinDesk has “identified more than a dozen crypto companies that unknowingly hired IT workers from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), including such well-established blockchain projects as Injective, ZeroLend, Fantom, Sushi, Yearn Finance and Cosmos Hub,” part of “a coordinated scheme by North Korea to secure remote overseas jobs for its people and funnel the earnings back to Pyongyang.”

How intensive is North Korea’s infiltration campaign?

"The percentage of your incoming resumes, or people asking for jobs, or wanting to contribute – any of that stuff – that are probably from North Korea is greater than 50% across the entire crypto industry," said Zaki Manian, a prominent blockchain developer who says he inadvertently hired two DPRK IT workers to help develop the Cosmos Hub blockchain in 2021. "Everyone is struggling to filter out these people."

Due to sanctions, companies that employ people from North Korea or send money to the closed-off nation are breaking the law.

It is illegal to pay North Korean workers in the U.S. whether you know you're doing it or not—a legal concept called "strict liability."
[…]
Legal risks aside, paying DPRK IT workers is also "bad because you're paying people that are basically being exploited by the regime," explained MetaMask's [Taylor] Monahan.
According to the UN Security Council's 615-page report, DPRK IT workers only keep a small portion of their paychecks. "Lower earners keep 10 percent while the highest earners could keep 30 percent, " the report states.
While these wages might still be high relative to the average in North Korea, "I don't care where they live," said Monahan. "If I am paying someone and they're literally being forced to send their entire paycheck to their boss, that would make me very uncomfortable. It would make me more uncomfortable if their boss is, you know, the North Korean regime."

Another issue is with hacking.

CoinDesk's investigation also revealed several instances where crypto projects that employed DPRK IT workers later fell victim to hacks. In some of those cases, CoinDesk was able to link the heists directly to suspected DPRK IT workers on a firm's payroll. Such was the case with Sushi, a prominent decentralized finance protocol that lost $3 million in a 2021 hacking incident.

Siphoning off the salaries of its citizens and hacking foreign companies is a lucrative part of North Korea’s revenue-gathering strategy:

North Korea has stolen more than $3 billion in cryptocurrency through hacks over the past seven years, according to the UN. Of the hacks that blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis has tracked in the first half of 2023 and which it believes are connected to the DPRK, “approximately half of them involved IT worker-related theft,” said Madeleine Kennedy, a spokesperson for the firm.
North Korean cyberattacks don't tend to resemble the Hollywood version of hacking, where hoodie-wearing programmers break into mainframes using sophisticated computer code and black-and-green computer terminals.
DPRK-style attacks are decidedly lower-tech. They usually involve some version of social engineering, where the attacker earns the trust of a victim who holds the keys to a system and then extracts those keys directly through something as simple as a malicious email link.

In 2022, CNN covered North Korea’s cyber capabilities, particularly related to cryptocurrency companies:

The North Korean government has long benefited from outsiders underestimating the regime’s ability to fend for itself, thrive in the black market and exploit the information technology that underpins the global economy.
The regime has built a formidable cadre of hackers by singling out promising math and science students in school, putting North Korea in the same conversation as Iran, China and Russia when US intelligence officials discuss cyber powers.

Keeping webcams off, misrepresenting a team of several hackers as a single employee, lying about where they are located and what their experience in the industry is are just some of the techniques used by North Korean hackers.

For businesses like those in crypto who accept or even encourage remote working, it’s almost inevitable that someone would slip through the interview process and get access to company data or funds.

How long before proof-of-humanity is a requisite for online interaction? What kind of digital infrastructure and legal framework would that require?

Questions for another day, for now.

Share 1984 Today!

Digital Assets Coming SWIFTly

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) announced on October 3 that global banks will be “trialling live digital asset transactions [on its network] from 2025”.

From the press release:

The new trials will explore how Swift can provide its community of financial institutions with a single window of access to multiple digital asset classes and currencies – paving the way for their seamless integration into the wider financial system. Initial use cases will focus on payments, FX, securities, and trade, to enable multi-ledger Delivery-versus-Payment (DvP) and Payment-versus-Payment (PvP) transactions.

The goal? Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and tokenised assets that “seamlessly coexist with traditional forms of money.”

Latest industry figures show that 134 countries are currently exploring CBDCs , and the tokenised asset market is projected to reach $16 trillion by 2030 . But the rapid growth of unconnected platforms and technologies has led to an increasingly fragmented landscape, creating a complex web of 'digital islands’ that presents a significant barrier to global adoption.

The “complex web of ‘digital islands’” referred to above is of course the system of decentralised, independent companies and entrepreneurs providing fintech services, and by “global adoption”, one presumes that the good people at SWIFT mean the use of a centralised, controllable, closely-monitored system in the hands of a small number of people.

Which people?

Earlier this month, Swift was named as a participant in Project Agorá, a Bank for International Settlements-led project exploring the integration of tokenised commercial bank deposits and tokenised wholesale CBDCs on a unified platform.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), based in Basel, Switzerland, is often referred to as the central bank for central banks. Here’s a clip of Agustin Carstens, General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements in 2020, explaining the difference between cash and CBDCs and the reason for wanting to move from one to the other.

He says:

In our analysis of CBDC…we tend to establish the equivalence with cash, and there is a huge difference there. For example, in cash…we don’t know who is using a one hundred dollar bill today, who is using a one thousand peso bill today. A key difference with a CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that. Those two issues are extremely important and that makes a huge difference with respect to what cash is.

“Huge difference” indeed. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the United States “and its allies” included in the initial raft of sanctions a ban on certain Russian banks accessing and utilising the SWIFT network. Now SWIFT has been tapped by the BIS as part of the ‘solution’ for rolling out CBDCs and tokenised assets worldwide, meaning that the digital version of state money intended to replace or compete with cash and commercial bank deposits would flow through a system to which access can be denied at any time, more or less at the push of a button.

See Spot Gun

Behold the Quadrupedal-Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV), pictured above at “rehearsals” (for what is unspecified) held jointly by US CENTCOM and the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.

Here’s a video of “[a] British robot dog in use by the Ukrainian military from the 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade,”and here’s one of the “US Army test[ing] a "robot dog" with artificial intelligence armed with an AR-15 rifle to destroy drones.”

A month ago, AFP put out a video of a military-use robot dog, made by a British company called BritAlliance, labelled as being filmed in Ukraine, and then interviewed a masked man named ‘Yuri’ who has a German accent, which, to an untrained ear like mine, is different from a Ukrainian accent.

“Totally awesome or totally frightening?” is how ABC 7 Chicago’s news anchor kicks off a video (see below) of China’s militarised robot dogs, which is a sentence I secretly suspected I would have to write one day, and today is that day.

Here’s a longer video with more footage of the horror, including a robot dog with a flamethrower mounted on its back:

You can watch a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) clip of one of their armed robot dogs in action here, and here’s a Chinese soldier taking his machine gun ‘dog’ for a walk.

The robot dogs are light enough that they can be transported by drone, which makes it possible to insert and extract them into battle with an ease and fluidity not available to humans.

Here’s a clip from the prescient Black Mirror episode ‘Metalhead’, in which robot dogs terrorise humans:

Sleep well.