Honor Among Thieves

“Burglars and
bigamists are essentially moral men. . . . Thieves respect property. They merely
wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect
it.”

The Man Who Was Thursday

Last December, hackers stole the credit card numbers and
personal information of around 110 million Target customers; an email from the
corporation informed me that I am probably among them. My bank automatically reissued my debit card,
and Target Corporation has preemptively paid for one year of credit monitoring.

While I’m not too concerned about my status as victim, I did
listen with extra interest to an episode of the podcast
Planet Money about the credit card
black market. FBI agent Keith Mularski took the podcast hosts on a personal
tour of a black market credit card site—think Ebay for criminal credit hackers.

Not just anyone can bid on stolen credit card data. Mularski
was only able to access the site after he set up an undercover identity as a
spammer. He then had to find two current users of the site who could vouch for
him, that is, assure the other users that he was an actual criminal rather than
someone trying to nab them.

Once in the system, one encounters the problem with a
virtual room full of criminals: You can’t trust anyone. Sure,  Matrix001  may claim that he has 50
active card numbers for sale, but how is one to know whether he will deliver
the goods? Credit card black market sites deal with this predicament the same
way Ebay and Amazon do, through ratings and reviews. No scammer wants to be scammed.

The most paradoxical step of setting up an account on a
black market is the requirement that the user agree to the site’s terms and
conditions. These are basically a mirror image of the type of terms and
conditions one finds on a legitimate business’s website. The terms forbid use of the site for law
enforcement; in other words, assenting to the terms and conditions is an
attempt to legally bind the user from using the site for any legal purpose.

In the same vein, a fascinating
article
in Sunday’s New York Times tells
the story of Ross Ulbricht, who has been charged with masterminding Silk Road,
the massive online black marketplace for illegal drugs. Running the site under
the moniker Dread Pirate Roberts (after the character from
The Princess Bride), Utrecht allegedly created a secure and
anonymous way to sell drugs online, similar to the online credit card black
market. As his enterprise grew rapidly, he had to go to great lengths to
protect it. When he thought that a
handful of users had double-crossed him, he tried to have them killed. After
receiving word that one of the hits he ordered had been completed, he
regretfully wrote back, “I just wish more people had some integrity.”

No matter how many artists and academicians may claim that
we live in a post-morality world, moral questions focus into astonishing
clarity when one finds
oneself in the
role of victim. While the man on the street may hesitate to call a sin a sin,
that hesitation will vanish the moment he is sinned against.