technocrit

Epstein’s human trafficking organization depended entirely on the wealth management industry (WMI). It was how he obtained the capital to build it, and it was how he hid his activities from the authorities. And none of this was an abuse of the industry; it is precisely how the WMI is designed to work. Nor is it an abuse of the law, because both American and international law has been carefully designed to accomodate the WMI.

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But capitalism didn’t just provide seed funds for Epstein’s operation. It also provided a whole legal and financial apparatus that helped him find victims and disguise his transactions. An article in Deviant Behavior by sociologist Thomas Volscho observes that at first, “the predominant means for gaining access to potential victims involved Epstein using philanthropy to gain access to youth-serving institutions.”

In particular, Epstein seems to have leveraged immense wealth to buy influence in youth organizations that focused on financially at-risk children and then used the wealth disparity to control them. This was a natural step for Epstein, since wealth managers often work with charitable organizations for tax-avoidance purposes. As his conspiracy matured, Volscho writes, Epstein’s “sex trafficking enterprise was funded by Epstein’s tax shelter advisory business, where he primarily helped wealthy people avoid taxation on the sale and/or bequeathing of their assets and incomes.”

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So while Epstein likely used blackmail and other illegal schemes to avoid prosecution for his crimes, his primary strategy — offshore wealth management — was not just legal but a central feature of modern financial capitalism. If the Left wants to use the Epstein case to talk about elite impunity, that conversation has to begin with the strategies the rich use to hide their finances that are completely legal.

Gotta ditch Microsoft like years ago...

The IBM Digital Asset Haven, developed with Dfns, aims to offer banks, governments and enterprises a full-stack platform for token custody, governance and compliance.

Unless publishing gatekeepers adopt drastically more equitable practices and become partners in disseminating knowledge, they will continue to lose ground to open access alternatives, legal or otherwise.

Management’s goal of 30% profit margins for gaming has led to job losses, canceled projects

New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness.

A federal judge has granted Meta-owned WhatsApp’s request for a permanent injunction blocking Israeli cyberintelligence company NSO Group from targeting the messaging app’s users. At the same time, the judge dramatically reduced the fine that NSO Group must pay to Meta.

Harvard University is investigating a data breach after the Clop ransomware gang listed the school on its data leak site, saying the alleged breach was likely caused by a recently disclosed zero-day vulnerability in Oracle's E-Business Suite servers.

"The problem in a nutshell. Surveillance agency NSA and its [UK counterpart] GCHQ are trying to have standards-development organizations endorse weakening [pre-quantum] ECC+PQ down to just PQ."

Part of this is that NSA and GCHQ have been endlessly repeating arguments that this weakening is a good thing... I'm instead looking at how easy it is for NSA to simply spend money to corrupt the standardization process.... The massive U.S. military budget now publicly requires cryptographic "components" to have NSA approval... In June 2024, NSA's William Layton wrote that "we do not anticipate supporting hybrid in national security systems"...

[Later a Cisco employee wrote of selling non-hybrid cryptography to a significant customer, "that's what they're willing to buy. Hence, Cisco will implement it".]

What do you do with your control over the U.S. military budget? That's another opportunity to "shape the worldwide commercial cryptography marketplace". You can tell people that you won't authorize purchasing double encryption. You can even follow through on having the military publicly purchase single encryption. Meanwhile you quietly spend a negligible amount of money on an independent encryption layer to protect the data that you care about, so you're actually using double encryption.

Eyes Up's purpose is to "preserve evidence until it can be used in court." But it has been swept up in Apple's attack on ICE-spotting apps.

Silicon Valley has sold the idea of tech in classrooms for years, because they get access to lifelong customers and valuable data. But while corporations like Google make billions, student test scores are falling.