You have to die a few times before you can really
live.
It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and inhabitable world. The problem was that it had nothing to work with. There was no partner, no children, no home. No nine-to-five job either. So it grabbed anything it could. It was desperate, and it read off the world wrong.
A quiet tax grab is going on — not of our money, but our data.
HM Revenue & Customs has long had access to information from bank accounts, pension savings, and overseas tax offices. Tax experts say it also secures data from credit card transactions, travel records, passports and even the driving licence authority.
But the growing power of digital communications and computing, combined with new regulatory powers, enables the tax authority to go further, deeper and faster in trawling for mind-boggling amounts of financial information. You may not know it, but HMRC could be crunching your data right now.
Three recent moves highlight HMRC’s growing reach. First, the UK has become one of the first countries to begin implementing international rules agreed at the OECD, the rich states’ grouping, requiring digital marketplaces such as Amazon, Airbnb and eBay to share financial details of people selling on their sites with tax authorities.
Next, this year the UK tax authority will have new powers to obtain data from financial institutions and others. Unlike now, HMRC will not need the taxpayer’s consent or the approval of the independent tax tribunal.
Then there is the government’s flagship programme to make tax digital, which already requires some businesses to keep digital records and provide VAT returns through software. From April 2023 landlords and the self-employed with property or business income of more than £10,000 a year will be drawn in and made to keep digital records and report their income every quarter.
In the three months since it opened, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office has processed more than 1,000 reports of possible fraud involving EU funds and projects. It is a speedy start to an audacious experiment in extending the EU’s system of supranational governance deep into the judicial sphere. But a start is all it is. The hardest work lies ahead.
Economic crime and corruption turned into a pressing issue for EU leaders in the 1990s and 2000s. Under the twin pressures of the bloc’s expanding membership and its evolving single market, EU budgets allocated ever larger sums to regional aid schemes and agricultural subsidies. But with the launch of the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund, the need to protect the EU’s financial interests against crime has never been a higher priority.
The initiative, financed by common EU debt issuance, will make available up to €800bn in grants and loans to member states.
Niccolò Machiavelli taught that politics is an alien universe, unstable and inconsistent – dominated by chance – in which appearance, not reality, defines success. It does not matter who politicians really are. What matters is how people perceive them. Because public opinion is fickle, politics a gamble and the political universe unstable, successful leaders need minds that change with “fortune and changing circumstances”. And because “people are ungrateful, fickle, feigners and dissemblers”, the politician must necessarily also be a “great feigner and dissembler”. Dishonesty – and indeed any other immoral conduct – is justified, for Machiavelli, provided that it leads to dominion over a powerful state. The end justifies the means (“accusandolo il fatto, lo effetto lo scusi”).
When the flawed succeed: Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and the corrosion of morals Times Literary Supplement
How to protect digital citizen identities through identity management GCN
https://gcn.com/articles/2021/08/18/citizen-identity-management.aspx
Securing digital citizen identities continues to be a top concern for the federal and state governments. Over the past year and a half, the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the importance and need for secure authentication and credentials in a number of ways. Primarily, the pandemic necessitated a proliferation of digital identities, as citizens required increased access to online government services. Unfortunately, this growth also highlighted a lack of identity security, as seen with fraudulent unemployment insurance claims filed using stolen identities. With this spotlight on securing citizen identity while also maintaining citizen data privacy, federal and state governments must implement government-to-citizen identity and access management (IAM) solutions that not only provide security but also improve the user (i.e. citizen) experience while protecting their data.
What makes securing citizen identity unique
Governments are now expected to offer citizens the same level of secure and seamless access as they experience in the consumer and corporate worlds. However, there are differences between workforce identity (i.e. identity for employees) and citizen identity — the latter is significantly more complex.
With workforce identity, employees are given a single identity to access applications, referred to as a single sign-on (SSO) solution. When it comes to citizen identity, users often create multiple different identities to access different services offered by the same government. For example, a citizen might have one login for renewing a vehicle registration and another for obtaining a state fishing license.
New South Wales Police confirmed on Wednesday evening they have handed out nine $1,000 infringement notices as part of their investigations into a number of raves in the Maroubra area.
SCIENCE: Army’s COVID-19-detecting dogs show promise, may help against other biological threats.
Let me explain. Dead-internet theory suggests that the internet has been almost entirely taken over by artificial intelligence. Like lots of other online conspiracy theories, the audience for this one is growing because of discussion led by a mix of true believers, sarcastic trolls, and idly curious love s of chitchat. One might, for example, point to @_capr1corn, a Twitter account with what looks like a blue orb with a pink spot in the middle as a profile picture. In the spring, the account tweeted “i hate texting come over and cuddle me,” and then “i hate texting i just wanna hug you,” and then “i hate texting just come live with me,” and then “i hate texting i just wanna kiss u,” which got 1,300 likes but didn’t perform as well as it did for @itspureluv. But unlike lots of other online conspiracy theories, this one has a morsel of truth to it. Person or bot: Does it really matter?
