Two decades ago, my life changed forever: hearing #BruceSchneier explain that "#security" doesn't exist in the abstract. You can only be secure *from some threat*. A fire alarm won't protect you from burglaries. A condom won't protect you from mass shootings. It seems obvious, but how often do we hear about "security" without any mention of *who* is being made secure, and from *which* threat?
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/13/whose-security/#for-me-not-thee
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Take the US welfare system. It is very "secure" in that it is hedged in by a thicket of red-tape, audits, inspections and onerous procedures. To get food stamps, housing vouchers, or cash aid, you must navigate a Soviet-grade bureaucratic system of Kafkaesque proportions.
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Indeed, one of the great ironies of the post-Cold War world is that the USA has become a "#UtopiaOfRules" (as #DavidGraeber put it), subjecting everyday people to the state-run bureacracies that the USAUSAUSA set endlessly ridiculed the USSR for:
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(The right *says* it wants to "shrink the US government until fits in a bathtub - and then drown it" - but not the *whole* government. They want unlimited government bloat for that part of the state that is dedicated to tormenting benefits claimants, especially if its functions are managed by a Beltway Bandit profiteer who bills Uncle Sucker up the wazoo for rubber-stamping "DENIED" on every claim.)
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The US benefits system has a sophisticated, expensive, fully staffed anti-fraud system - but it's a *highly selective* form of anti-fraud. The system is oriented solely to prevent fraud against *itself*, with no thought to protecting *benefits recipients themselves* from fraud.
And those recipients - by definition the poorest and most vulnerable among us - are easy pickings for continuous, ghastly, eye-watering acts of fraud.
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These benefits are distributed via debit cards - #EBTCards - that lack the basic security measures every other kind of card has had for years. They're simple magstripe cards, lacking basic #ChipAndPin defenses, to say nothing of contactless countermeasures.
That means that fraudsters can - and do - install #skimmers in the point-of-sale terminals used by benefits recipients to withdraw their cash benefits, pay for food using #SNAP (AKA #FoodStamps), and receive other benefits.
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It's impossible to overstate how widespread skimmers are, and how much criminals make by stealing from poor people. Writing for *#Businessweek*, #JessicaFu describes the mad scramble benefits recipients go through every month, standing by ATMs at midnight on the night of the first of every month in hopes of withdrawing the cash they use to pay for their rent and utility bills before it is stolen by a crook who captured their card number with a skimmer:
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One of Fu's sources, #LexisNexisRiskSolutions's #HaywoodTalcove, describes these EBT cards as having the security of a "glorified hotel room key." He recounts how US police departments saw a *massive* explosion in EBT skimming: from 300 complaints in January 2022 to 18,000 in January 2023.
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The skimmer rings are extremely well organized. The people who install the skimmers - working in pairs, with one person to distract the cashier while the other quickly installs the skimmer - don't know who they work for. Neither do the people who use cards cloned from skimmer data to cash out benefits recipients' accounts. When they are arrested, they refuse to turn on their immediate recruiters, fearing reprisals against their families.
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These low-level crooks stroll up to ATMs and feed a succession of cloned cards into them, emptying account after account. Or they swipe cards at grocery checkouts, buying cases of #RedBull and other easily sold grocery products with some victim's entire SNAP balance.
Some police agencies are pursuing these criminal gangs and trying figure out who's running them, but the authorities who issue SNAP cards are doing little to nothing to stop the pipeline at their end.
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Simply upgrading SNAP terminals to chip-and-pin would exponentially raise the cost and complexity that thieves incur.
Indeed, that's why every other kind of payment card uses these systems. How is it that these systems were upgraded, while SNAP cards remain in mired in 20th century "glorified hotel room key" territory? Well, as our friends on the right never cease to remind us: #IncentivesMatter.
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When your credit card gets cloned, it's your banks and credit card company that pays for the losses, not you. So the banks *demanded* (and funded) the upgrade to new anti-fraud measures. By contrast, most states have *no* system for refunding stolen benefits to skimmers' victims.
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In other words, *all* of the anti-fraud in the benefits system is devoted to catching benefits cheating - a phenomenon that is so rare as to be almost nonexistent (1.54%), notwithstanding right wingers' fevered, Reagan-era folktales about "welfare queens":
https://blog.gitnux.com/food-stamp-fraud-statistics/
Meanwhile, the most widespread and costly form of fraud in the benefits system - fraud perpetrated *against* benefits recipients - is blithely ignored.
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Really, it's worse than that. In deciding to protect the welfare *system* rather than welfare *recipients*, we've made it vastly harder for benefits claimants who've been victimized by fraudsters to remain fed and sheltered. After all, if we made it simple and straightforward for benefits recipients to re-claim money that was stolen from them, we'd make it that much easier to defraud the system.
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Cory Doctorow
Brandon Blake