Day minus 300

With preparations done, I can begin my work. I have purposely avoided planning what to do until now. The minute you plan a crime, you start to leave behind evidence that you re planning it. I have waited until I have a secure environment to plan any specifics, to record anything, or to perform any specific calculations. I have set a date of April 15 to disappear and begin to take possession of the funds. This is 300 days away.

The most reliable way to obtain money is to steal it. Your efforts either work or they don t. Your only risk is getting caught. I have access to commercial investment research tools. Bloomberg, LexisNexis, press releases, and so on. These are accessed through a set of anonymizing efforts, like any other traffic I generate. If you re going to make someone analyze your traffic, you make them analyze all of it. You don t make it easy for them by only treating important traffic differently.

What I need are institutions that have money. I also need institutions that can t defend and detect well. Somewhere in there is the crossover point that tells me which are of use to me and will be the easiest to hit. Africa. The countries there are often in a state of flux, governments and borders come and go, they have poor computer crime laws and little investigative experience, and poorly- formed extradition and information sharing policies. But they get to play in the international money markets.

I decided that African financial institutions would be either the source or middleman for all my transactions. To make this effective, an amazing amount of control over the computers for those institutions would be required, which is what I will be arranging. Once obtained, the money would have to be filtered through enough sieves so that it can find me, but that the people following the money can t find me.

There is very little real money anymore, the paper and metal stuff. Money is now a liquid flow of bits that respect no boundaries. If you want to steal money, you simply siphon off some of the bits. The bits leave a glowing trail, so you have to make sure the trail can t be followed.

The international banks move several times the amount of actual money in the world every day. That means they just move the same money over and over again. There are a few ways to make the trails go away. One is to make the trail visible, but not worth following. Would Citibank publicize a $10 million loss again, given the choice? Another way is to make sure the trail leads to someone else. A third is to create a series of false trails.

Science fiction writers have been writing stories about killer machines and computers taking over the world for 50 years. The future often arrives on schedule; we just don t see it for what it is. We ve had human-controlled killing machines for many years , we call them cars . Computers control every aspect of your life. If the computers all agree that you don t own your house, then you get evicted. If they say you are a wanted man, you go to jail. The people with the skills to make all of these things happen are out there, they just aren t organized. They aren t motivated .

I know my way around computers, but I am not an expert in all the vertical security areas. It s simply not worth my time to be. Instead, I can employ those who are. My skills are organizational, you can think of me as a systems integrator.