This is a link to a BBC article, in which the BBC attempts, without any conclusive success, to track down a persistent trader in child-abuse images via payments made to him: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq587wv4d5go
When they do trace the relevant bank account(s) to a physical address, in Jakarta, they confront a man who says that he opened the account some time before, simply to take a one-of mortgage transaction, and hasn't used it since. The BBC is unable to disprove this and has no interest in attempting to prove the claim to be true, so it is left hanging. However, the man's claim coincides pretty much to what would have to be true in order for such a persistent trader in illegal material to evade arrest. The trader also replaces stopped bank accounts in a matter of hours, which must indicate ready access to a significant relevant resource.
The trade in child-abuse images is not the only organised criminal activity where the key enabler is a safe payment pathway. Everything from bribing a local council planning official to hiring a professional killer, needs a way for the client to pay the supplier of goods or services in a way which exposes neither of them to significant risk. Even kidnappers and blackmailers need to help their victims pay them off in a way which is safe for both parties.
Now then, some of these illegal activities attract much more attention than others, due to the huge volume of transactions and their obvious evil, others are rarer but represent much more important players playing for very high stakes, and, generally-speaking, the professional killers and kidnappers are the criminals which needs to hide the most because governments tend to prioritise crimes affecting the rich and powerful over those affecting the poor and vulnerable.
Many years ago, before the internet was "invented" (like all great inventions it actually evolved in natural stages as the components became available) and its predecessors linked only university science departments, but computerised banking was already a thing, Medawar was treated to a very strange monologue by a person who he now believes to have been, or since become, a professional killer.
Most of this was the speaker expounding an ideology, which the young Medawar had not heard before (he's heard it again, a lot more, more recently) to the effect that it was in the best interests of humans as a species for strong individuals (like the speaker) to take not only what they needed, but anything they wanted, by whatever means they found convenient, and regardless of all laws created by "weak" people to protect their own pathetic interests. He also specifically stated that if he "needed" to trade in child pornography, he would do so.
The ideology was what is now described by the FBI as "accelerationist" and accelerationist terrorist groups such as "764" and "O9A" set out to use the internet and other means to promote child abuse, child rape, extreme pornography, drug use (even where this is legalised, they continue to promote it) misogynistic violence aimed at women and girls (most recent "non-terrorist" attacks since the death of Osama bin Laden have targeted women and little girls, the Manchester Arena bombing being the first really obvious example) as part of a long-term plot to destroy ALL the pillars of modern civilisation, such as family structures, democracy, organised religion, financial structures and even money itself.
The accelerationists are where the robotic mantra of "follow the money" will lead you mostly in circles, because they plan to abolish money in favour of forced labour and simply taking goods by force. In a sense, their aims are furthered both by the illegal activities enabled by safe payment pathways as well as any and all of the actions governments and international authorities take to stop up those safe payment pathways. (The Devil in folklore is associated with the two or three-pronged pitchfork as his weapon of choice.)
Even without the involvement of the accelerationists (and they are involved in almost everything bad because that is their philosophy, which is not exactly a philosophy of life) the safe payment pathways must be organised and that by definition must involve the higher levels of organised crime. And the consequence of that will be that the safe payment pathways will be used to provide layers of protection for the most important crimes and criminals, using intractably-large numbers of child abuse-transactions (children are traded as well as images) to hide smaller numbers of more important matters, which are themselves used as extra layers of cover for even more important high-level crimes.
Viewed from one angle, the structure is a fortress of concentric defences around a central tower or "keep." Viewed from another angle, it will be a pyramid with the most dangerous and guiding intelligence at the top.
The child-abuse image traders are really just the outermost perimeter of barbed wire, intended to slow-down and entangle investigators. Abusers are used by organised crime as much as they are users. And the wall of child abusers has great deterrent value if governments fear that some of their own members might be exposed if they allow the police, or the BBC, to look too hard even at the outermost ring of the fortress or the base of the pyramid, depending on how you look at it.
In detail, serious organised crime figures only NEED child abuse images and other illegal pornography to be widely traded in order to provide an intractable number of suspects (at all levels of society) for police to chase and an intractable volume of transactions in which to hide their really key payments. They can achieve this without ever having direct contact with the abuse material by acting not as the kiddie-porn trader's gophers, but as his bankers. If a pornographer or child-trafficker needs a disposable bank account, they can probably sell him the details of a dormant account in almost any country or city he might name, but a huge and fast-growing city like Jakarta might be preferred over the Shropshire or Central Texas.
What most of organised crime wants ("money for nothing and your chicks for free") differs markedly from what the accelerationists want, but at the same time the higher up the pyramidal hierarchy of crime one looks, the more one sees accelerationist attitudes and even actual accelerationist philosophy.
Posts
