Panama Papers, Asymmetric Warfare, and National Security

I was listening to the song of Balawan and Trisum when I first learned about the Panama Papers scandal. The news is a big thing since a lot of high-profile and honorable individuals are linked directly or indirectly with Mossack Fonsesca, the company at the epicenter of the scandal.

Since the beginning of April 2016, the scandal of Panama Papers had actually been sprouted by the reputable International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Total loses as result of capital-flight is tremendous. And as for Indonesia’s, casual estimation counts our potential loses of capital at around 70 trillion Rupiah.

The motivation itself is understandable, however. It is actually quite common for prominent individuals to stash their cash abroad because you can make a lighter way to pay your duty, free from the progressive taxes in your home country. It does not mean that the actor can be free from the taxes —as for example, in British Virgin Islands, they also pay taxes to the local government — yet the taxes is much more lenient in than in the home country, generally speaking.

The story, on the other hand, represents an irony. The case was actually first made public about three years ago by a watchdog. Some clients of Mossack Fonseca were nervous already at that point and asked if their secrets were safe. However, the firm managed to conform their wealthy clients that its data center was state of the art (emphasize added) and its encryption algorithm was world class (emphasize added). But the firm failed to prove its words.

Though the economic and business aspects of the story are intriguing, I am a bit more interested on the national-security side of the story. My question is, “how the case may affects the national-security of the country involved?” Was it the barn of unlimited, invisible banks of asymmetric war actors? And related to the case, the hacked email serves as harsh remainder for the public and other relevant parties regarding the chances of impromptu doors for incognito hackers to access well-protected cyber infrastructure everywhere and at anytime. Hence, an asymmetric threat is indicated.

Explaining asymmetric threat, Robert David Steele's provided a categorization which is useful for analyzing the problem. He uses four classes of threat categorization as a means of generating an understanding of how to deal with the threat environment. The four classes he identifies are: a) high technology brutes, b) high technology brains (technology and knowledge based), c) low technology brutes, and d) low technology brains (ideological and culture based).

In this case, the hackers are categorized as high technology brains:

“These types of threat actors are associated with high end hackers who hack for monetary profit, friendly and unfriendly nations that practice economic espionage, and transnational corporations that are linked to or operated by organized crime, money launderers for drug cartels, and similar groups and individuals. They practice information warfare, have knowledge as their source of power, and rely on cyber stealth and database targeting for their effect. Individual hackers are relatively untouchable, especially if they operate across state borders. It is worth noting that high end hackers can exist and operate in states which are otherwise seen as being low technology environments. As a general rule, their capabilities are well-matched to their goals and requirements.”

All said, Panama does serves as haven to make illegal transactions (drugs, money support for terrorism groups, human trafficking, etc) and above all it can be used as a medium through which a country can execute a secret policy program or else. Who knows? There are plenty motives to plant your (country) money abroad.

Let us have an analogy here. A is a home country of an extreme jihadist group called B. In a law firm specializes in set up the offshore companies, B tries to build up a secret company to deposit the donor’s money and do regular transactions. Government of A then found the truth. In order to fool the jihadist group, A considers to does the same for the sake of future investigation. Then, the hackers detected the information.

And, voila! Your plan is found unconsciously by the naive (who really does not know the truth). It is also impossible for you to explain the situation and suddenly you will be under heavy protest from your society. So here we get the analogy of ‘blind men and the elephant’ – that is how the interpretations of a phenomena can be really deviated by the heterogeneous background of minds and knowledge.

As for this case, when we are seeing the world of hacking through Julian Assange’s lense (the father of Wikileaks), our perspective toward hacking world is finally becomes more enlightened. Unfortunately, when we use the Assange’s perspective to see the world, governments can undoubtedly only be seen as the bad guy.

At the end, it must be concluded that one cannot easily explain the reality and deduction to the society. As for this article, the purpose is not about to shore up supports for government side. It meant to merely providing us with a different perspective.  Written by: Nurul Qomariyah. The writer is a staff on Indonesia Berbicara's Substance Division (Divisi Materi).