Cultural Appropriation
Syrian Artifacts, Native American Artifacts, The NRA, Wirecard, and Twitter
The Looting of Syria
If I sat down to write a list of the terrible things Facebook has enabled over the last ten years, it’d be quite long. Corruption of democracy, ethnic cleansing, brutal authoritarian crackdowns, the list goes on. I wouldn’t have thought to put “allowing ISIS to sell stolen Syrian artifacts to fund the caliphate” on the list, but here we are:
Looting soon became one of ISIS’s main income sources in regions such as Aleppo, and one of the only job options for residents trapped in these ISIS-controlled territories. This January, the UN Security Council released a report on terrorism financing, citing Facebook as “a tool for the illicit trafficking of cultural property” that benefits ISIS.
I write a lot about stolen artifacts, and occasionally tech platforms make an appearance - as we’ll see in the next story - but this is on another level. It went on for eight years and was documented by archaeologists:
Al Mohamad spent eight years documenting the looting, in hopes of ultimately persuading Facebook to change its policy and ban the sale of historical artifacts on its platform. It was risky; ISIS regularly posted bounties on Facebook for people it suspected of similar acts.
I’m sorry…what? ISIS also used Facebook to post bounties for people who outed its illegal Facebook artifact trade? What on earth is going on at Facebook? While this story is absolutely wild and its subject Adnan Al Mohamad is a bad ass:
But Al Mohamad was worried Syria would lose its artifacts forever. So he collected data and evidence, and stored it on a memory card he kept hidden in his home. Every few months for more than three years, he would tuck it into his jacket’s inner pocket, rev up his motorcycle, and smuggle it through five ISIS checkpoints to Jarablus, a Syrian village on the bank of the Euphrates less than one kilometer from Turkey—so close he could see the Turkish military officers stalking the border. Through friends, Al Mohamad had gotten a Turkish cellphone, and in Jarablus, he was close enough that he could catch a signal from a Turkish cell tower—out of reach of ISIS, which controlled the internet in its Syrian territories. Al Mohamad would insert the memory card into the phone and wait for the signal to catch. When it did, he’d send all the files to his wife, who was living just over the border. Then he’d wipe the memory card clean, and drive back to Manbij. His wife would then transfer the files across the globe to Portsmouth, Ohio, to a man named Amr Al-Azm.
…it should not take Indiana Jones levels of heroism to get Facebook to crack down on a terrorist organization using its platform to sell looted artifacts and put murder bounties on its enemies. For fuck’s sake.
It turns out ISIS was only one of many:
Over two years, Al-Azm and Paul monitored a sample of 95 Facebook looting groups across the Middle East and North Africa, which included 488 administrators and nearly 2 million members. For every group or page they discovered, Facebook’s “recommended pages” directed them to three more, uncovering a circuit that looks less like an unconnected set of lone amateurs than an organized criminal network governed by the same rules, and using a common code to signal to buyers that they are selling historical artifacts.
[…]
Facebook groups, Al-Azm and Paul found, aren’t just being used to facilitate sales, but to help train a generation of looters, providing a place where members can share techniques, excavation tutorials, and pricing guidelines. One Facebook user in Tunis annotated a satellite-image screenshot with instructions for how to use Google Earth to identify promising archaeological sites for looting; another in Egypt offers a tutorial on building a pump to remove groundwater from looting pits. “It’s almost like an accelerator program for looters,” Paul said.
Ahhhhhh, good. As the global community sits idle while parts of the Middle East have fallen into civil war and turmoil, the tech industry is training looters to strip mine the land of its cultural heritage, selling it off wholesale to amoral Western collectors and museums. Fantastic.
I know it’s not critical to this story but I’d like to pause for a second to surface something that belongs in the Don’t Post Your Crimes on Social Media hall of fame:
in 2017, the International Criminal Court brought a warrant for war crimes against a Libyan general based solely on videos uploaded directly to Facebook
Anyhow, after years of lobbying and UN reports and all that, Facebook has finally released a policy on selling looted goods on its website:
“We now prohibit the exchange, sale or purchase of all historical artifacts on Facebook and Instagram,” Greg Mandel, a public-policy manager at Facebook, wrote to me in an email. This includes archaeological discoveries and ancient manuscripts, tombstones, coins, funerary items, and mummified body parts.
I mean, that’s better than nothing, but as we’ve seen, these sorts of policy changes are all but meaningless, since tech platforms rarely put any resources behind them for enforcement:
In the weeks after Facebook updated its policy, Paul reported 11 posts as “unauthorized sales,” including an antique sword, historic religious artifacts of human remains, and an Egyptian coffin that had been advertised in a group called “Pharaonic Antiquities for Sale” in Arabic. Seven of those reports were met with a response stating that the post had been reviewed by Facebook and was not determined to violate its Community Standards, and three with a message that Facebook “couldn’t prioritize” the report because of a shortage of moderators due to COVID-19. Only one post, featuring Benghazi coins, was removed.
Like most things, the pandemic is only going to make looting worse in the months to come as heritage sites sit unprotected:
According to ATHAR, at least five new trafficking groups launched in the Middle East in the early days of the pandemic; one group gained 120,000 new members in a single month, from mid-April to mid-May—exactly when lockdowns were initiated in the region.
I wish the intrepid archaeologists luck convincing Facebook to do the absolute bare minimum to stop illegal loot of ancient cultural artifacts, but it’s hard to be optimistic.
Native Artifacts
America has spent hundreds of years mistreating, oppressing, and stealing things from its indigenous populations. This story in High Country News talks about one such theft, and the lengths to which a Native American tribe went to retrieve a sacred shield that’d been stolen years before:
The shield and its siblings were passed down from father to son. The caretaker prayed with them daily when they were not being used as a symbol of protection in ceremonies or festivals, when other tribal members could be in their presence. But the shields never belonged to him alone. According to Acoma law, they were collectively owned; they could not leave the pueblo, nor could they be sold or destroyed. They were considered living beings rather than works of art. Cultural patrimony, unlike possessions, is an aspect of a tribe’s identity as a people — like Acoma land, language and resources, the shield was one piece of the tribe’s cultural fabric, passed down through generations and contributing to the whole.
One day in the early 1970s, the shield and five others vanished from the caretaker’s home.
I’ve written about artifacts stolen from other, ancient civilizations, but there is apparently a thriving market for stolen American Indian goods. Due to the passage of various laws in the 20th century, much of the market had shifted to Europe:
When it came to trafficked items, “the U.S. was traditionally a destination country, not a source country,” [Philip] Breeden, an American, said. Americans, the thinking went, were more often the ones buying looted cultural items from other countries — not losing them. “We were the bad guys,” Breeden said. “So, now, the shoe is on the other foot.”
It’s comforting to know that for once, we are not the ones buying stolen history. Believe it or not, it gets even worse:
Even more illicit deals recede further into privacy, especially those involving ancestral remains. “From what we’ve been told from law enforcement, in terms of those significant items, they go black,” O’Loughlin said. “They’re being sold hand-to-hand, or they may be sold on the deep web.”
So, uh - who the fuck is buying Native American remains? What kind of sick person does this? I’ve written about the mistreatment of Egyptian mummies, which is pretty gross, but this feels more real, given the history of desecrating Native relics in this country. There are no ancient Egyptian tribes still around to find the corpse someone stole from them on the Internet. It feels so much worse to know that these tribes are having to watch their sacred objects and pieces of their history be sold to faceless white men at Paris auctions.
Also, a lot of stuff ends up on eBay, because of course it does:
In 2006, an attorney named Shannon Keller O’Loughlin (Choctaw) worked as counsel to multiple tribal governments. Some of her clients began to notice their cultural property collecting bids on eBay. What were they supposed to do, they asked her, when the seller could hide behind an account name? “Trying to deal with the quagmire of eBay is really difficult,” O’Loughlin told me. “It’s hard to get to an actual person.” O’Loughlin would contact the site, and sometimes an item was taken down, but the seller “will usually put it back up, and then you get it taken down again.” And so on.
Color me shocked that tech platforms refuse to accept responsibility for trafficking in stolen artifacts. Not to be outdone, the London auction houses got in on the game:
When the fine art auction industry caught on to eBay’s techniques, more sensitive items — such as sacred beaded wampum belts from Eastern Woodlands tribes, once nearly sold by Sotheby’s in 2009 for $30,000 — began surfacing. “That’s where we really started seeing cultural items (for sale) that we had never seen before,” O’Loughlin said.
The American government has repeatedly failed to live up to its promises to Native tribes. Instead, they are forced to try to preserve their culture, way of life, and fight for the scant dollars they’ve been promised but never received over the last hundred years. The Acoma tribe knew all about this:
Starting in the 1940s, Acoma litigated and petitioned the United States Indian Claims Commission for millions of acres of territory, reserved for the tribe in colonial land grants but disregarded by the United States. In 1970, Acoma received a financial settlement for its losses, but no actual land.
This story does have a happy ending, which is rare. A combination of perseverance from the tribe’s elders and a surprising level of American government competence returned the shield to the Acoma. It’s not much, but it’s a start.
The NRA
In a delightful coincidence, I finished listening to the excellent second season of the Gangster Capitalism podcast on Wednesday. It’s about the National Rife Association, and boy is it messy. I’d previously only read rumors of scandals at the non-profit, but the podcast details a decades-long history of fraud, grift, and just about every white collar financial crime you can imagine. It’s astonishing that such a high profile organization has been able to operate as a personal expense account for its senior executives and board members for decades, but hey, America, right?
Well, today the New York Attorney General decided to do something about that:
The attorney general of New York took action Thursday to dissolve the National Rifle Association following an 18-month investigation that found evidence the powerful gun rights group is "fraught with fraud and abuse."
Attorney General Letitia James claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that she found financial misconduct in the millions of dollars and that it contributed to a loss of more than $64 million over a three-year period.
The suit alleges that top NRA executives misused charitable funds for personal gain, awarded contracts to friends and family members, and provided contracts to former employees to ensure loyalty.
After listening to the podcast, I felt relatively certain that some folks would go to jail, and that the NRA was in the process of destroying itself financially with or without the help of law enforcement, but it’s good to see that James intends to dissolve the organization.
I am sure more articles will be written in the coming months as the NRA spends whatever money it has left fighting the case and begging for donations from the very members it’s ripped off, but if you’d like a deep dive into just how completely fucked the organization is, check out the podcast, or read Tim Mak’s reporting for NPR. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of scumbags.
Wirecard x Softbank
This lede was created in a lab to appeal specifically to me:
A German financier who evangelises for bitcoin investing and psychedelic drugs received €13m for brokering SoftBank’s controversial $1.1bn investment in Wirecard.
Hmmmm, sure. So what happened? This guy brokered an investment deal to allow Softbank to pump investment money into Wirecard to help shield it from a fraud investigation. He received millions in broker fees, and a fund managed by Softbank executives and the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund profited big off the investment. Sounds totally above board, right?
The €900m debt, and a separate €500m bond issued at the same time to generate an investment grade rating for Wirecard from Moody’s, the credit rating agency, is now the focus of litigation by investors nursing losses of almost 90 per cent of their capital.
Ah yes, a fraud like this wouldn’t be complete without a credit rating agency signing off on it. Anyhow, who was this enterprising young German? Just a normal guy:
The 42-year-old Mr Angermayer is a serial technology investor and a vocal believer in the benefits of psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”. His efforts to commercialise psychedelic substances for medical purposes have drawn investment from Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and US cryptocurrencies investor Mike Novogratz, who have both partnered the German financier on several other ventures.
He’s also worked with Chinese conglomerates investing in Europe, and the president of Rwanda. All very normal stuff for a 42-year-old banker. Investors in Wirecard and German authorities are now looking into this deal, among many of the others involved in the collapse of the payment company.
Twitter Hack
I’ve written a couple times now about the Twitter hack. This week, more details emerged of how the perpetrator carried it out:
In fact, the call was from a Florida teenager who convinced a Twitter employee that he was a co-worker, according to prosecutors, who revealed their case last week.
As any security expert can tell you, most hacks are nothing like the movies, and mostly involve very boring stuff like guessing someone’s cat’s name based on their Instagram posts, or calling them pretending to be from IT. The perpetrator did do some more complex technical hacking, including SIM-swapping - convincing a carrier to assign a number to a new phone - and setting up phishing pages that mimicked Twitter’s company portal.
There was this odd tidbit in the piece that caught my eye:
In an unrelated investigation, authorities searched Mr. Clark’s residence last August, seizing his computers and freezing approximately 300 bitcoin, or $3.4 million at Monday’s rates, in digital currency, according to Mr. Weisbrod, who declined to comment on the nature of the investigation. Mr. Clark paid 100 bitcoin to authorities to resolve the matter with no admission of wrongdoing, Mr. Weisbrod said.
The authorities seized over $3 million dollars in bitcoin in a 16-year-old’s accounts, then let him pay them a million worth to drop the charges? The fuck?
I said previously that Clark should have stuck to selling Twitter handles rather than running a Bitcoin scam that only netted him a hundred thousand dollars, but it appears he didn’t really need the money? Going to federal prison for hacking Twitter when you already have two million in crypto doesn’t seem like the smartest move, but what do I know.
Short Cons
ProPublica - “Dolgova’s answers were not in the script. They were plugged in separately. King was expected to tape his questions without speaking to her.”
NY Post - “A man in Florida reportedly purchased a brand new Porsche with a check he printed on a home computer — and then decided to splurge on some watches.”
Reuters - “Chinese government-linked hackers targeted biotech company Moderna Inc, a U.S.-based coronavirus vaccine research developer, this year in a bid to steal data, according to a U.S. security official tracking Chinese hacking.”
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