[BRIEF NOTE] The Tenuous Present

[rfmcdonald]

sbisson linked today to a remarkable article by Charles Arthur in the British publication The Register about how a single man's legal work uncovered the fact that, in the early 1990s, the IT departments of certain British banks were engaging in massive fraud.

How could there be thousands of such cards? Because the chances of any two random people meeting in the UK population at that time were 25 million to 1. For one of them to have the only card in existence that debited other peoples' accounts was absurd. He'd been on the case for six months, met - say - 3,000 people through it - and one of them had such a card. The odds only work if thousands of people are walking around with cards like that, or potentially could be. They had the wrong magnetic stripe on the card: the front was embossed with the holder's details, but the account and PIN encrypted on the stripe pointed somewhere else. How wouldn't that be spotted?

Simple: dummy accounts. To do their testing in an environment where the bank systems had to work all the time, the computing teams set up a parallel universe of dummy banks, dummy branches and dummy accounts. But they generated real ATM cards for them, and could take out real money - authorised by the banks. Some people were getting dummy cards.

But equally, Kelman saw, it would be possible for a "rogue" computing department to start tweaking the cards to take money from innocent customers.

It doesn't seem altogether impossible that, had this continued, the legitimacy of the British financial system might have been called into question at this time. We can imagine the gory sequelae of this event.

Our technologically advanced and complex global society has brushed with near-apocalypse many times before. Think only of how the number of victims of that exotic and superbly lethal central African virus was limited to single digits, or how a global nuclear war was averted in the early 1980s by a smart Soviet radar specialist who found a first strike with just five missiles literally unbelievable.

One thing concerns me. Was it inevitable that we'd escape all of these catastrophes? Or have we just been lucky? If so, when can we expect our luck to run out?