tThis column comes to you as a break after listening to a fascinating podcast series called List of deaths. This is a secret website that journalist and author carl miller discovered on the dark web, the most vulnerable part of the Internet. Basically, the site runs what we could call a “murder marketplace” or a murder-for-hire service. Clients identify and profile someone they want to kill and pay (in bitcoin, of course) for the service they require. Hence the title of the podcast series.
The story begins in 2020, in the early days of the pandemic lockdown, when a talented hacker and IT expert, Chris Monteiro, was browsing the site and found a security vulnerability that, once exploited, gave him full access to it. Inside, he found an Excel spreadsheet-like “kill list” of 175 people around the world whom the clients wanted to kill. For each objective, there was usually a lot of detailed information (address, photographs, habits, regularly traveled routes, etc. I guess it seemed superficially mundane) until you read the accompanying “instructions” for each one. “How much bitcoin should I pay?” “Tell me the execution time in advance; I can’t be there.” “I would just like this person to be shot dead. Where, how and with what does not concern me at all.” You get the idea.
In fact, the website was a scam run by a Romanian criminal who pocketed the cryptocurrency and had no intention of providing the requested services. So far everything is predictable and criminally fraudulent. But in a way this was a scam that revealed something. a lot Darker: that there were people all over the world who could be in real danger and were probably unaware of the fact that someone wanted them dead. The risk was that if some of those bad actors realized that they had been conned (that no hitman was coming) they might, angry or exasperated, be willing to do the job themselves. Which happened at least once: to a woman in Minneapolis whose suicide was faked by her apparently God-fearing husband.
This sinister spreadsheet, however, presented Miller with the kind of ethical challenge that few journalists have faced: What to do with a list of people whose lives could be credibly considered in danger? His first response was to go to the police. The Metropolitan Police sent two police officers in a van, who listened politely but also asked him if he had any history of, shall we say, mental illness. Finally, the Met told him that they had passed the list to Interpol because many of those on it lived in other parts of the world. In principle this was useful, but in practice it just meant that Interpol would pass it on to national law enforcement authorities, which in most cases probably meant nothing would be done.
In the end, Miller decided he would have to find a way to contact everyone on the list. He brought together a team of fellow journalists to come up with a way to do it. They found it impossible to convey the message over the phone, for the good reason that if someone suddenly calls to tell you that your life may be in danger, you hang up. In the end, they used local journalists to meet the targets face to face in the hope that this would persuade them to talk to Miller and his team. And that turned out to be more successful.
It’s been a long road, but it’s a gripping story, so choosing to tell it through a podcast series was a smart decision. Podcasting is a medium created for this type of storytelling; If journalism is, as someone once said, “the first draft of history,” then perhaps podcasting is the second. As a medium, it has a broader intellectual bandwidth than broadcasting, which has to address mass audiences, while podcasting can serve specific interests and make more assumptions about listeners’ appetite for detail. People listen to podcasts on their own time, not on the broadcasters’ time. And the relationship between author and audience can be more intimate because many people listen to podcasts with headphones.
List of deaths provides a graphic reminder of how the Internet is a mirror of human nature. It was always like this. During the early years of the web, when there was a moral panic over online pornography, I naively suggested that perhaps the prevalence of pornography might be telling us something useful about human nature; After all, pornographers are not philanthropists, so there must be a market for their products. (Readers were not impressed by this opinion.) Similarly, the horrendous torrents of misogyny on social media tell us something useful about men. By the way, it is also visible on Miller’s list. “Most cases” he said“They were men who targeted women, often wives or girlfriends. “I think it says something about modern masculinity and what happens when people lose control of their partner and then lose control of themselves.”
In one example, an estranged husband, an American doctor, ordered and paid for his wife to be kidnapped, tortured, and injected with heroin until she agreed to return to him. Welcome to the worst demons of our nature.
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what i have been reading
date with destiny
Increasing returns and the new world of business is a truly seminal essay by the great economist W Brian Arthur in the Harvard Business Magazinew August 1996.
talking heads
David Karpf It’s time to stop taking Sam Altman’s word for it. It’s a gorgeous blast against OpenAI’s baby-faced Savonarola.
Heated debate
A sharp essay on the Register website is AI’s thirst for energy keeps coal fires burning about how the technology that will “solve” the climate crisis is warming the planet.