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Look, there's been *another* massive banking leak, this one from Credit Suisse, showing complicity in laundering money for the world's greatest monsters: human traffickers, despots, criminals. They're calling it Suisse Secrets.
They had to call it that, because Swiss Leaks was already taken, for the 2015 UBS leaks that revealed UBS's complicity in the same fucking thing.
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As Jeffrey Neiman - lawyer for the Credit Suisse whistleblowers - told the *Guardian*, "How many rogue bankers do you need to have before you start having a rogue bank?" I'd add, given that this rot extends beyond Credit Suisse to UBS and undoubtably further, "How many rogue bankes do you need to have before you start having a rogue banking system?"
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The friend who emailed me about this wrote, "After so many of these, I am accepting that these leaks don't matter, and that those in power don't actually want to fix the system. Sunlight isn't doing any disinfecting at all."
He's not wrong, but that's not the whole story.
The problem isn't the *transparency*, it's the *inaction*.
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They money laundering revealed in Suisse Secrets abetted the worst criminals on Earth, like Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, who looted $5b from his people and laundered hundreds of millions (or more) through Credit Suisse. Abacha is in good company - CS also laundered for the Marcoses and their bagman, and other looters from Syria to Madagascar.
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Also mafiosi, killers, human traffickers, embezzlers, fraudsters, corrupters and worse. The facts laid out in the Guardian story (and stories in partner outlets like *Süddeutsche Zeitung*), there is no question that Credit Suisse knew whose money they were handling, and knew just how dirty it was.
What's more, the reporting makes it abundantly clear that Swiss banking secrecy is designed and maintained for the express purpose of laundering this blood money.
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Despite Swiss officials' claims to have ended banking secrecy, the country is still a rogue state, a criminal haven. It's not only failing to end money-laundering, it's encouraging it: Switzerland is *broadening* its banking secrecy law to allow it to punish whistleblowers who reveal the nation's role in global finance crime:
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To my friend's point, we kind of knew all of this. The leaks - SwissLeaks, LuxLeaks, IRS Files, Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers - keep revealing that the marble facades of the world's greatest banks are holding back oceans of blood and misery:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#transparency
We haven't done anything about it.
Yet.
500 new billionaires were minted in 2020. Then it got worse. There's a new billionaire being minted every *17 hours*:
https://www.dw.com/en/forbes-a-new-billionaire-every-17-hours/a-57135443
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Behind every great fortune is a great crime:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/09/fortune-crime/
It's a nightmare and it shows no sign of ending.
Knowing about it isn't enough. But knowing about it is *a start*.
The knowledge we've gained from the reporting on these leaks - reporting at great expense and risk, which has resulted in a journalist's assassination - isn't the reason for the inaction.
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Indeed, if the action ever comes, it will be *because* of this reporting. You can't solve a problem until you know it exists.
A truism of the free/open source world is that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." That is, with enough scrutiny, a solution will emerge.
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That idea came under enormous strain with 2014's Heartbleed Bug. It turned out that a widely used free/open piece of web-server infrastructure had a longstanding bug, just hanging out there in plain sight. The code was there for anyone to scrutinize, but no one had looked hard enough to find it.
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That was a wakeup call for the community. It wasn't enough to publish sourcecode for important infrastructure. We had to build and fund *systems* that would audit that code. Having the code where anyone could see it would make their job easier, but the job wouldn't do itself.
We got lucky with Heartbleed. The good guys found it before it was ever exploited in the wild, and they coordinated a massive, global upgrade that patched the majority of webservers before the bug was disclosed.
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But we didn't get so lucky the next time. When the Log4j bug was discovered last November, it was already too late. We'd hit snooze on Heartbleed's wakeup call and holy shit had we ever overslept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell
Competent, serious people are worried about the vulnerabilities presented by the software that underpins our digital world, but none of them argue that the problem with that software is that it's available for inspection.
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The problem is that we don't inspect or act on it in a systemic, coordinated way. We don't take it seriously.
We should take it seriously.
The problem isn't that we know about these deep and worrying flaws. The problem is that we're not doing anything about them. Knowing these specifics - whether it's Log4j or SuisseSecrets - is the necessary, but insufficient condition for change.
These leaks are claim-checks on the people who sold us out. Someday, we'll collect on them.
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Image:
Ready.gov (modified)
https://www.ready.gov/floods
eof/