HACKERS COULD SAVE THE WORLD
Hackers could save the world in an instant but the 2 questions we must ask are, at what point is drastic action essential and what is the moral balance between illegal hacking and the corrupt destruction of our planet and the human race.
Computers, smartphones, social media, the internet and AI are now integral to almost every aspect of human existence (ubiquitous in developed countries , less so elsewhere). So much so that we fear a dystopian future if electronic warfare wiped out all the electronics, if lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) malfunction when targeting humans or self aware AGIs decided humans were parasites.
Hacking is as powerful as clever weapons but more complicated morally. We applauded when ethical hackers tried but failed to interfere with Russian military tech in Ukraine and we rightly abhor the personal scams and cyberspace criminals. Which suggests hackers could arguably be good and bad.
In terms of saving the planet I just want to focus on climate disasters and famine. War, injustice, intolerance, religious bigotry, greed, political-stupidity and corruption are beyond the remit of this article. They might also be beyond the powers of hackers.
But dealing with climate criminals and helping to alleviate famine are well within the scope of any top notch good hackers who chose to work together. I will suggest a list of cyber solutions later , but before that we need to debate need and morality.
We are fast approaching a tipping point where at the very least:
Hundreds of millions might look up from their small screens, with distracting content seemingly based on cute dogs, and see through all the greed-based propaganda and decide to act together. The chattering classes might stop talking about the environment, and do something other than virtue signal in a shiny electric car. Politicians might suddenly become intelligent and eschew self-interest (OK I know this last one is fantasy).
All it takes, is an agreed action agenda and 10 activists on every continent recruiting 10 more who all repeat that 9 times. However this is not happening. It is much easier to accept the placebo of mathematically challenged tech solutions that make money or shift power to China, rather than heal our planet.
A few great individuals and groups, realise protest is ignored. So they are trying to recruit a green army and agree on what actions to take, but they are under-resourced compared to the mighty PR machines that oppose them. These are funded by those who are squeezing the last dollar out of destruction, before retreating into their gated communities. Some are getting ready to escape the disasters they caused by booking a seat on Musk’s interplanetary ark (he won’t be taking poor people).
The Climate deniers (either ignorant, paid or affected by anal probes when they were abducted by aliens) , are doing an excellent job in saying there is no problem, these disasters are natural and will sort themselves out or anyway nothing will happen for 80 years. Their work, alongside the PR greed machines make organising a coercive revolution slow and very difficult. Inertia and a desperate need for an easy answer, are hard to battle. Eco-enthusiasts saying we have to live in caves, eat leaves and share a bicycle does not help either.
At the very least we should consider that 2040 could be really bad with more wildfires, flooding and starvation. We could then look at what else we could do if there is no revolution and the bad guys (they are 98% men) look like they will win by destroying the planet.
If there is no future for the 3 billion under 30s, if the poor will starve or migrate (the Pentagon says this will need a military response) and if extreme political control is likely to be the response to an energy policy that guarantees energy shortages, then all solutions should be on the table.
If there is no pragmatic effective way to stop greed, self-interest and stupidity killing and destroying us, then the unthinkable becomes thinkable. War is a good example, where atrocities are committed by those who have no other way to stop madmen and their evil regimes. We are probably at that point now with politicians, moneymen and industrialists and their grubby mindless schemes.
So in such dire circumstances, we could perhaps look at what would work including the use of hacking as a powerful weapon.
So if there was an imperative to use hacking, because nothing else seems to be working, we still have to answer the other question which boils down to “can two wrongs make a right?” Destroying the planet is undoubtedly bad but illegal hacking is also bad. We are programmed to believe that using evil to destroy evil makes things worse.
Apart from anally traumatised climate deniers and their greed motivated friends, everyone else agrees that wiping out 95% of humans and most of the natural world, is definitely a really bad thing. Equally cyber criminals taking money from innocent people is also evil, albeit on a lesser scale. But what about hackers who try and find out if Area 54 has any aliens (who may have probed the climate deniers) or are against big countries invading smaller countries or are using hacking to uncover injustices and lies. What they are doing is certainly illegal, but is it evil?
Like so many philosophical questions, a belief that using a new evil to remove an earlier one must be bad, is nuanced. The USA dropped nuclear bombs on Japan because the Japanese would not stop mass murder of opposing forces. So killing was used to stop killing. The moral arguments about Hiroshima and Nagasaki rage to this day, but without the bombs hundreds of thousands of different soldiers and civilians would have died.
However, hackers who have, or have acquired, a conscience suddenly taking action to save animals, plants and humans, surely should not be equated with causing the deaths of 120,000 in two Japanese cities.
Part of the moral argument, centres around the fact that the process would be completely illegal in terms of :
So is illegality ever right? Killing someone is illegal but many people would kill to save a loved one. Stealing food is illegal but the old adage says ‘ask for work or bread and if they refuse take the bread’. Stealing from those with plenty to spare, to feed your children, is illegal but ironically causing starvation is not. People who loved someone of the same sex, broke the law in the cause of love and in some countries today they still do that.
If hackers broke the law and nature was healed, poor people survived and we all had enough energy and food, would we apply the absolute letter of the law or could this be an absolute greater good.
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This type of action could also be classed as vigilantism because ordinary citizens would be disobeying the establishment or the people and organisations who see their own enrichment as more important than ordinary peoples’ right to exist. It is a fine moral line, but one that the elite have always used to end dissent. ‘We are powerful and you must not disagree with us, and certainly must not stop us doing what we want to do for our own benefit’.
The other key point is moral imbalance. Oil companies, politicians, officials, hired hacks, scientists, climate deniers, press release writers, moneymen and organisations lie because of stupidity, but mostly to make money, keep power or preserve the establishment status quo of ruler and ruled.
It appears to be OK for an oil company to identify global warming and consequent deaths in the 1970s and then hide the research and work with a cabal of other energy companies to make sure any direct replacement for fossil fuel or gas was stopped . It is apparently alright to pretend that the world will be saved by 1. 5 billion electric cars miraculously manufactured by 2040 with every disadvantage overcome. It is falsely accepted that climate change will not affect the wind needed for static wind farms, even though that is an obvious risk. Hiding solutions that would prevent mass famine because there is not enough profit, is normalised. In the same way that the poor are kept in their lowly place, to be used as cheap labour or cannon fodder in war. Killing a whole species to make fake medicines to appease an unhappy populace, is deemed to be acceptable political practise. You know the rest of this list.
On the scales of morality that would put the deliberate destruction of people and the natural world for gain on one side and breaking the law and infringing the rights of evil people on the other. Maybe they balance out and so provide some justice for ethical hacking.
The moral conclusion, surely has to be that there must be a greater good to justify breaking the law and the rules imposed by the establishment.
So if we believed that we have to take drastic action, there is no alternative and there is a moral argument, what would ethical hacking look like?
Having spoken to 6 hackers, it is obvious they would need to work together and have some resources in the form of upgraded hardware and software and funds to allow them to devote time to this.
Their capabilities are surprisingly limited, as we saw with the Russian military, unless they have the same level of equipment as their targets, the best software and an ability to access data. The data bit would be easier if there were sympathisers within rogue organisations.
Assuming all this was available, there are many interesting things they say they could do. Whether people wanting the right to exist, would endorse these actions, would be reflected in the support they gave. There is no doubt that this would be controlled anarchy, so may be unpalatable and many people might prefer to drown, burn or fight off famine migrants.
Rather than my list, it would be interesting for any respondents to add their own ideas or dreams.
So what follows is just a very small sample of what can be achieved starting with the less contentious and moving ‘up’.
Estimates suggest there are around 700 organisations and individuals who are pivotal in deliberately attacking the natural world and the human race. Other lists say 30,000, but this includes layers of decision makes below superiors and many who have awful opinions or just lied. There is, however, a principle that says ‘in most cases if you cut off the heads the bodies die’.
Ethical hackers would never advocate physical violence, but all the 700 have unpleasant secrets that could help hobble their efforts to kill all of us directly or through the destruction of nature. So rummaging through documents, would provide evidence that could be published. This would help build an unsavoury accurate image of people and organisations who project a false ethical image. Apparently, with the right software, this is less arduous than it sounds. Remember the NSA and the Chinese government does it every day.
An example of a really small action would be to stop the Japanese killing whales while pretending it is for research. I am assured that hackers could expose the lie about research easily and also track the names and contact details of the officials and politicians who said “let’s lie so we can murder mammals that are essential to climate balance”. Such details could be given to every young person in Japan who is ashamed of whale murder. Better still these people could be helped to make donations to anti-whaling charities, until Japan stopped whaling. Finally disrupting Japanese exports is quite simple, and as an incentive to stop this disgusting policy, would probably work.
Poachers who capture endangered species such as Pangolins to make useless medicines, are mostly poor people without other work. However the middlemen who make money from species genocide, could be assisted in donating those ill gotten gains to animal charities until the grubby merchants of death retired broke and unreplaced. Government officials who made it official policy to give their citizens false hope with medicines made of animal parts, could be identified. Then their their correspondence and contact details could be given to the free press (perhaps with the missing documents about where Covid came from). Or they could stop.
Some information about how Exxon knew about climate disasters and deaths plus its plans to protect oil are already in the public domain. Other energy companies’ damming communications could be sent back to them with an offer to destroy them if they funded a list of solutions that would replace fossil fuels. Accessible documentation would be on the company and individuals and could be of interest to shareholders, activists and the media.
I was surprised to learn that internal instructions and memos that proposed something bad could be corrected, so that they created something good. This can apply to diverting internal funds to environmental projects and stopping disastrous negative policies being implemented. In large corporations or bureaucracies it would be unlikely that the good deed would be stopped, as all previous checks and balances would also have been corrected. Initially organisations would behave ethically against their will, but I was told that individual decision makers could be encouraged to change company or bureaucracy policy, so that good became the new bad.
Had this been around before 2008, bankers could have been discouraged from using client deposits to fund high commission financial instruments, backed by loans made to unemployed people living in mobile homes. Sadly it wasn’t and everyone else had to pay out billions to ensure the banks did not close and bonuses were restored quickly. Luckily for us, no criminal charges were brought and so the banking elite were able to carry on as usual. Today financial institutions fund anything that they think will make them a quick buck. Using all the processes described earlier, banks and bankers and financial wizards could be encouraged to add an ethical dimension to viable funding proposals that might otherwise conflict with the interests of other greedy clients destroying the world. Replacing the word no with yes on a funding proposal, and then assisting with the fund transfer is not difficult. Making sure an eagle eyed jobsworth does not then kill the sustainable business, is also possible.
Governments and multinational corporations that have official policies of keeping poor people impoverished, wrote all that down. Even after a panicked wipe of documents, it is still there in a sort of cloud. Shareholders, voters and the media could be interested in this and so it would only be right for this kind of documentation to be made public. The writers probably wanted to do that anyway, but it just slipped their minds. Making up for the abuse, would require policy change and new investments, but as we have seen, that can be done.
I am going to stop now because those of a nervous disposition might worry if there was too much detail. It would suggest that there might be a plan to do this, with funds and a team.
I would not want anyone to panic or for those with a guilty conscience to start shredding evidence.