This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
- ‘Lagarde list’ scandal may put corrupt Greek politicians in jail
- Syrian refugees in Jordan face increasing hostility
- Millions of South Carolina residents at risk of identity theft
‘Lagarde list’ scandal may put corrupt Greek politicians in jail
Costas Vaxevanis, leaving court in Athens on Monday (Reuters)
As Europe’s economy continues to circle the drain in a deflationaryspiral, here’s a bizarre story that might end up sending corrupt Greekbanksters and politicians to jail. Christine Lagarde is currently thehead of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but in 2010 she was thefinance minister of France. At that time, she obtained a thumb drivecontaining the names of 2,059 Greeks with bank accounts in HSBC’s bankin Switzerland, and gave the thumb drive to Greek governmentofficials, so that they could be investigated for using the Swiss bankaccounts to evade taxes.
Well, Greek officials never did anything with the list, and at timesclaimed that it had been lost or misplaced. Finally, the list fellinto the hands of Costas Vaxevanis, editor of the “Hot Doc” weeklymagazine, and he published the list. But instead of investigating the2,000 for possible tax evasion, furious government officialsbrought criminal charges against Vaxevanis for invasion of privacy,and threatened with two years in jail.
Vaxevanis might well have gone to jail, but the case got internationalattention, and infuriated ordinary Greeks who said that thepoliticians were prosecuting him because they were embarrassed. OnThursday, the court declared Vaxevanis to be innocent, but that’s notthe end of the scandal over Lagarde’s list. There are many prominentpoliticians and businessmen on the list, and they are going to betargeted by the far left as causing Greece’s problems, just as the farright blames Greece’s problems on illegal immigrants. Al-Jazeera and Telegraph
Syrian refugees in Jordan face increasing hostility
There are 200,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan, 30,000 of them in theZaatari Refugee Camp. The Syrians say that the camp has becomeessentially a prison camp, where they’re fed dirty food and aretreated “worse than animals.” As a result, some Syrians are opting toreturn to Syria. According to one, “We face a slow death here, or afast death over there.” BBC
Millions of South Carolina residents at risk of identity theft
A cyber attack of “foreign origin” on South Carolina’s Department ofRevenue taxpayer data base has permitted 3.6 million social securitynumbers and 387,000 credit cards numbers to be stolen. In addition,data from 657,000 businesses has also been compromised. The breachoccurred on August 27, but was not discovered until weeks later, onOctober 10, and only made public a couple of days ago. Governor NikkiHaley has abandoned political campaigning to give full attention tothe breach. The state has since teamed up with Dun & Bradstreet toprovide free fraud and identity theft monitoring. However, residentshave to sign up to get the free services. If you’re a South Carolinataxpayer, you should do so immediately. ZDNet
Although the attack is still under investigation, it appears that thebreach was accomplished through a fairly common “sql code injection”attack. However, information so far indicates that the data base wasset up in a fairly shoddy manner, with little attention given tosecurity. For example, 3.6 million social security numbers and387,000 credit card numbers were stolen. THEY SHOULD HAVE BEENENCRYPTED, so that they would be useless to an attacker who stolethem. In the last ten years, I’ve found that a lot of younger Gen-Xprogrammers have little regard for security, and I’ve even seen caseswhere they’ve actually removed security control because they thoughtthat all Boomers who advocate security controls are full of crap.This is a major problem in the computer industry, and we’re going tosee a lot more disasters like the one in South Carolina. Dark Reading
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