Part of the grassroots argument for liberty in this country should be directed at the implications of sensitive personal financial data residing on servers of financial institutions throughout the world.
Thomas Paine argued in Common Sense that for representative government to be effective, the gap should be as small as possible between citizens and representatives making decisions for them. When the representatives were located in the UK, while the citizens were in the Colonial states, it was clear to Paine and others that the gap had to be shrunk, if those citizens were to control their own destinies.
In a similar way, we see the big gap between the power of global financial firms versus that of consumers. With the amount of debt and credit held by financial firms, it amounts to a form of oppression over consumers. Yes, these consumers had to make their own choices. That makes this a different kind of oppression than slavery or colonialism, to be sure. Yet, the implications are similar. The power and leverage is shifted to the institution, rather than the individual.
So what happens when these banking institutions and the consumer financial data they control are compromised? What are the ongoing implications? So far, it would seem the implications are only felt at the individual level, when a person’s credit card information is stolen and one has to go through incredibly difficult and time-consuming process of trying to restore one’s credit rating after fraudulent transactions.
But after reading the article “What cybercriminals do with your information” I am concerned this could become a systemic issue for global financial institutions and the millions of individuals who depend on them, especially now. Check these numbers:
If every stolen credit card and bank account had been wiped clean last year, that would have netted cybercriminals some $8 billion, according to data from Symantec, maker of the Norton antivirus software. As a result of the lucrative payout, more and more online criminals are entering the game. In fact, the number of new Internet security threats rose nearly three-fold last year to 1.7 million.
