“This night’s motorway cars
Have brought the stars
Down to earth.
White constellations approach
Red dwarfs recede...
A blue police light
— must watch my speed.”
From Modern Worses by Bachchoo

When I first got to Britain in 1964, I opened an account, for my meagre monthly allowance to be stored out of temptation’s way, in a bank called Westminster because it happened to be the closest one to my college. As is the way with galloping capitalism, the bank merged with another and then came under the aegis of a larger one and is now popularly known as NatWest.
Last week it suffered a major freeze.
I had no business with it — neither depositing nor withdrawing cash in those few days. Its computers went bonkers and the millions of depositors who wanted to transact business through NatWest couldn’t. Accounts were frozen, amounts on cheques went into a dark hole in the ether to be extracted only when the computer system was revived.
The media was full of it, beginning by hinting at a cyberattack on the bank and then concluding, because NatWest rushed to confess, that it was nothing as sinister but a failure of bad software and that some geeks had blundered.
The bank apologised profusely because there were reports of babies who had gone without their milk, old people who had shivered to death because they couldn’t access their fuel allowance; floods and hurricanes; weeping and gnashing of teeth — I exaggerate for effect, but the cyber-slip was seen as very serious all over the country.
NatWest’s branches sported large and small posters saying “SORRY” and then offering some lame explanation.
NatWest’s short-lived failure was overshadowed by another bank story, the one involving Barclays, a vast multinational which was accused this week of fixing the interest rate of lending between banks. I must confess that I don’t quite understand the mechanism whereby this fixing takes place, but it has prompted the resignation of the chairman of the bank, its CEO, one Bob Diamond, and his immediate deputy and also resulted in a call by the government for a parliamentary inquiry into the ethics of the practice and an opposing demand by the Labour Opposition for a judicial (and not merely parliamentary) inquiry with powers to recommend criminal prosecutions.
The fixing of this internal rate enriched some traders and hedge funds and inevitably cheated the ordinary public who invested in Barclays and all other banks.
These stories about the inefficiency and unethical, possibly criminal, behaviour of bankers follow years of controversy about the role of international banking in bringing about the world’s debt crisis and the European Union’s Eurozone stalemate.
They also follow an unresolved debate about what to do about millions in bonuses that the fat cats of the banks have been taking each year. Bankers who have manifestly caused the worldwide crisis of banking don’t exempt themselves from this loot. I suppose those who deal daily in usury have lost all sense of shame and there is an acceptance in our societies that beekeepers are entitled to take home pots of honey.
It is yet to be seen if there can be any checks on the greed or unethical behaviour of banks and bankers. The business secretary in the present coalition government is a Liberal Democrat called Vince Cable who has a public image of a politician opposed to greed and unbridled capitalist practices. The solution he proposes to the palpable lack of public faith in banks and bankers is to empower the shareholders of financial institutions to determine the remuneration and bonuses of the executives. This may go some way to deal with this blatant imbalance between function, performance, effort and material reward. The problem with such a mechanism is that the main shareholders are likely to be the offenders themselves. Thieves can rarely be set to catch thieves.
There is one area of contemporary activity in which they certainly can. About a year ago a group of eco-conscious hackers calling themselves “Anonymous”, threatened the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which happens to be the parent company of the NatWest bank, with cyber disruption. RBS was involved in financing oil deals in Canada to which the eco and human rights lobby objected and Anonymous threatened the bank with a viral infusion which would cause a meltdown of their computer systems. The attack didn’t happen but the world now knows that groups such as Anonymous have to be taken seriously.
Virtually every country and certainly every trans-national enterprise depends on IT hubs for its vital communications. China is regularly accused of attacking and infiltrating the cyber systems of Western companies and of the US government who have set up Cyber Command as a fourth branch, after air, sea and land forces, of its military. The recruits for this Army are in large measure from the hacking community — poachers turned game-keepers for the security of their country.
One form of attack on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and facilities is cyberattack and it is no secret that Israel is attempting just that and has succeeded in some measure in this disruption of Iran’s cyber-net. Recently, South Korea suspected an assault on its military computers by North Korea. The investigation, however, traced the viral interference as having originated from an Internet server in Brighton, UK! Brighton of all places — dirty weekend capital of the UK!
Britain takes the threat seriously. The head of Britain’s security service MI5, Jonathan Evans, warned this week that there are “industrial-scale processes, involving thousands of people, lying behind both cyber-espionage and organised cybercrime.”
Last year cybercrime cost the UK £27 billion, a figure arrived at by calculating the cost of the theft of confidential information and industrial secrets and the cost of countering these.
One comprehensive answer to cybercrime is to get rid of computers and go back to using pen, paper and filling cabinets and perhaps pony-express to deliver mail. Is it going to happen? Can the genie be stuffed back in the bottle? Can Pandora’s Box be refurnished and sealed?