Travel.gov has an advisory for hostage taking in your country. I can assure you there are well spoken negotiators in your nation to deal with that.
I'm afraid, YOU are wrong. My opinion wasn't idle thought but derived from research on Nigeria rather than some weird borderline racist baseless rhetoric that Nigerians don't have this level of organization.
>Didn’t vice catch a bunch of flack for over sensationalizing their “reporting?”
Awesome ad hominem against the people recording actual Nigerians testimony.
>Regardless I’d be more inclined to believe an actual Nigerian than a YouTube video
And I provide video with actual Nigerians yet it's crickets from you when some guy just flippantly says I'm wrong with no supporting facts. Unless by actual Nigerians you want one to jump through the screen and talk to us... we're going to have to settle for electronic communication. It's what worth noting the Nigerian commenter above denied ransomware related activities but never denied the rest.
>That person didn’t say there were zero people doing this, they said it wasn’t likely Nigeria had a widespread and systemic issue with organized crime doing this.
They said what they said, not what you've retranslated them to say. I never said the issue was systemic, but if they really said that then their flippant dismissal was just as invalid as they'd be addressing a strawman.
No, that’s what the sanctions threat is for. It may be possible. But now you’re in the company of money launderers and terrorism financiers.
To be clear, I don’t think this is necessary. But it’s naïve to imagine it’s beyond D.C.’s capacity.
You are vastly overestimating the federal government’s coherence and coördination. Yes, we use black hats. Yes, we still jail and sanction them.
The first thing you do after conquering the throne is to bundle up all your pending atrocities in one and eliminate competition. The second thing you do is slaughter the mercenaries you had hired to win your war of ascension.
No reason to leave them around and let the next usurper hire them to dethrone you.
Also, there have been some enforcement actions on intermediaries for facilitating such payments - e.g. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0471
Yet they still complied with U.S. sanctions. (Or were arrested abroad for defying them.)
You seem to misunderstand that sanctions are not a treaty obligation. If your country deals with a sanctioned entity, it gets sanctioned as well. That enforces compliance indirectly. America and and does unilaterally extend sanctions.
We don’t sanction money launderers generally. And no, terrorism finance isn’t a solved problem either. Hence why I said one would need to keep company with that category of people were such a measure enacted. But again, your K&R retiree cum schoolteacher was describing a political constraint. Not a functional one.
Otherwise ransomware payments are just a collective action problem, paying them builds this harmful ransomware industry, but might be cheaper than losing or restoring your data. Making it costlier to pay the ransomware groups is a great strategy, in the sense that even if it isn’t perfect it might bump some cases from “pay” to “don’t pay,” damaging the industry.
I've heard this as well. A professor was flying into a less than stable area or Afghanistan and for some reason they were descending just like a normal commercial flight.
"What are you doing, we're going to get shot down!". He was used to a steep descent or a spiral to the runway to minimize the risk of getting hit.
They then explained they had a deal with the local warlord. The military provided barrels of used oil from all their ground vehicles, and in exchange they don't fire on the airplanes as they takeoff or land. The warlord burns the oil for heating, and the military doesn't need to deal with (hopefully correctly) disposing of large quantities of used oil.
Background: the student vent to visit his family back in Iraq as his town was under an ISIS attack, which is how he ended up getting stuck there.
0. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/how-swedish-professor-hel...
There were no “Zero Dark Thirty” style extractions.
It is acceptable for you, since you won't suffer the consequences, the burden of damage isn't on you.
It is similar to consuming drugs: when people buy meth they're helping the drug dealers. But they just can't help it, they're desperate.
Despair is above reason. Laws are useless to stop desperate actions.
Upwards. Second order effects of schemes like prohibition are much worse than the original problems.
It's also not quite analogous to the ransomware prohibition, because it's more akin to a prisoner's dilemma, and there's no inherent desire to pay ransomware criminals in the human psyche like there is to alter consciousness.
There are loads of countries that have illegalized alcohol and not devolved into levels of organized crime that the US did. Specifically, nearly every Muslim nation on earth. I feel this one example is way overplayed by advocates of legalization
The only way to actually have a "hostages will die" policy is to ensure you destroy whoever took them, despite the deaths of hostages.
For drugs, there’s some inherent desire for some people to consume them. Maybe they harm society a bit (in the sense that they might destroy the people that take them), but the main cost for the rest of us is that they fund criminal enterprises because they are illegal. People want drugs, if they could buy them at CVS I suspect they would.
Ransomware is already illegal, we don’t create a new criminal enterprise by making it illegal to do business with them, we just make it harder.
Also, lots go the biggest ransomware gets have been big institutional entities where everything is documented. People just buy drugs in small amounts and consume them, two parties, neither of whom wants to get caught, minimal paper trail. Basically impossible to ban.
For physical hostages—people are desperate to get their friends and family back, and so they’ll go to desperate measures to pay. For ransomware, it is usually an economic decision, nobody’s life is at risk (other than when, like, a hospital is hit). Increasing the cost increases the chance the decision will go the other way. And increases the incentives to keep IT defenses up to date. (I know you didn’t bring up the hostage analogy, I think it is worth noting that the desperation you point to here is really an artifact of the tangent we’re on from the analogy leading us astray).
Or even worse, like shareholder or regulator action, see SolarWinds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38076636
Note that in the EU under GDRP companies are still liable for privacy violations and related fines if ransomware attackers gain access to your personal details, random or no random (a hack is enough).
It's sounds nice in the abstract; in practice it's political suicide.
Depends on how you spin it. I suspect it would be quite easy to spin the narrative on this one. "So you knowingly funded a terrorist group that's likely going to use the money to commit further crimes against US citizens?" or something of the sort. Have some experts testify on that too, preferably ones in officers uniform.
Becoming as inhuman as your opponent is not the answer.
The gov will pat themselves on the back telling everyone how they've caused a drop in the number of incidents.
You're offering to increase the stick, what's the carrot for the people/corporation losing everything ?
Making the punishment bigger also means victims have stronger incentives to work closely with the terrorists so the whole thing never gets public or never gets labelled as a ransom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm4hb5yNxyE
The policy has been widely misreported as "we don't negotiate with terrorists", which is wrong. The actual policy is we won't make concessions to terrorists.
I strongly suspect this too will end up mostly a jurisdiction/accounting nuance rather than a substantial change.