Do I Feel Lucky?

Do I Feel Lucky?

(A Competitive Intelligence Blog.)

Over the last 7 days several news stories have emerged about key breakthroughs in deciphering major encryption patterns – one was a cypher system developed at the founding of our nation that had not been broken until now, and the other popularly reported story was the fact that with at least a 44% accuracy rate that the Social Security system of assigning numbers to applicants can be deciphered with extraordinarily minute amounts of personal data (all of which is freely and publicly available).

In most respects this news doesn’t have the slightest impact on the day to day lives of the average American, and no one is really paying a whole lot of attention to it.

As far as competitive intelligence goes, most American corporations aren’t paying any attention to it either.

As I delve into the subject more and more as a way to teach, explain and identify tools, opportunities, and risks from competitive intelligence research and analysis, I keep tripping over elementary steps that I haven’t had to carry out for years that are now ever more important than before.

Here’s one of them…

Much has been made of the ending of the Cold War as the basis for substantially reduced need for human intelligence activities and substantially reduced pre-employment screening and interviewing. This in turn has led to substantial reductions in the kinds and quantities of in-house mentoring and supervision that used to take place to both develop talent in-house and to protect individuals and companies from potentially disastrous hires.

Since we’re no longer looking for ‘Reds under the Beds’ or any of those traditional misnomers for those relatively harsh hiring restrictions in place during the peak of the Cold War, theoretically this should have saved us millions, even billions of dollars nation-wide, creating immense prosperity, and in some ways it did. It can be argued that the 80’s and 90’s represented periods of unprecedented growth as a result of the freeing of the employment restrictions and the reduced costs of hiring and monitoring and supervision.

That argument, though, falls flat very quickly when you also include the point that was predominant with every insurance salesperson and presentation that has ever been made in the last 25 years – the baby boomers’ retirement savings plans were the primary source of that economic boom, not the ‘peace dividend.’

Now how does this tie in to the news stories about breaking cyphers and encryption systems?

One of the key things that happens to be in the news today is the requirement of employers to do adequate background checks to make sure that employees, new and long-term are all legally allowed to work here. This is to help minimize risks involved in hiring illegal immigrants and undesirables like terrorists and criminals on the run.

To facilitate this activity employers have been given access to double blind systems that the government offers to submit SSNs to that the government can then read in order to determine a worker’s authorization to be here.

Now that the SSN encryption system is broken, even partially (and 44% odds are pretty darned good ones for gambling with) any organized crime syndicate can replicate with substantial ease the SSN’s of citizens from across the country, living, dead, missing, or adjusted so as to pass this inspection methodology in spite of itself by taking publicly available data and using it to generate false identities and documents.

It also means that corporate id theft is liable to explode in the coming months and years.

Imagine if you will that you’re a crook out to make a big heist and make it look legitimate.

You take the name of a corporate executive from the articles of the Wall Street Journal. You look online for that executive’s biography and become familiar with the details of their career and their personal background from freely available public sources. You even get your hands on the last 4 digits of their social security number from a number of sources as organizations, companies, and government agencies often use them as usernames or identifiers for their employees and customers.

You feed any of this information into the algorithm that spits out the rest of the individual’s SSN. Once you have this information, you generate the relevant correspondence trail that creates new legal documentation of the identity and get yourself a new SSN card, a new driver’s license out of state, new unused credit cards, a new passport even.

You then set up a business in a non-extradition country in your new name as a ‘division’ of the company that the real person runs, but whose ownership is not the originating company but the ‘new’ you.

‘Your’ new company does business buying and selling on the credit or at least the good name of both the original person and their original company. Everyone thinks that you’re them. You have credit, you have clout, you have power. And when it all goes away, you even have a scapegoat. You walk away with the assets and profits, and they’re left with insurmountable losses and fraud and perhaps even criminal records in a variety of countries established in absentia.

If you think this could not happen, think again. Even without the benefit of legal documents from SSN generated false identity documents, NEC as a corporation was taken for billions over a period of 5 years on a very similar trick. Now we’re going to see it happen with legal documentation supplied by the government to make it harder to fight.

Good competitive intelligence is the tool that gives you access to where your risk factors stand at any given time. It helps you to track transactions, suppliers, competitors, customers, and most importantly irregularities in other companies’ cash flows and investment/revenue patterns.

BI, or business intelligence tends to rely primarily on customer tracking – monitoring what customer purchasing trends are telling you only tells you so much. Hoovers, Dun and Bradstreet and the other notable credit and corporate analytics firms only are able to offer you high-end overviews, not detailed data that comes from long term relationships in the marketplace for companies that aren’t yours and aren’t doing business with you, but are doing business with your competition for the first time in a country or region or product line you’re not keeping your eye on.

With international credit reporting rules that will prevent/impede distribution of this kind of data, your good name and your company’s good name are on the one hand protected, but on the other hand grievously exposed to abuse by those who aim to circumvent the right and honourable ways to do things.

This is why BI alone is not enough to capitalize and defend market trends – competitive intelligence is a required asset, not just a piece of suggested reading material for those long hotel nights on business trips when you wanted something to read to put you to sleep.

And last but not least – about that peace dividend? More and more evidence is coming to light that whereas the good guys ramped down their intelligence infrastructure, the bad guys ramped theirs up and unleashed it on the global marketplace. There is mounting evidence to suggest that the biggest players in the oil speculation market that affects everything from the price of gas to air travel to basic groceries and heating and cooling utilities costs are not the middle eastern oil countries but the oil speculators who get their information from ‘ex-intelligence services’ personnel connected to organized crime and national energy supply firms in various countries.

The beneficiaries of this data have made huge gains over the decades by using progressive political gains to open up new markets for speculative investments and playing those gains against structured speculation in the oil and gas markets and consumer goods markets. Once those markets reached saturation of demand, the speculators yanked their investments out at a tremendous gain and put their money in currency plays to devalue national currency markets simultaneously generating windfall profits and ungluing whole national economies. This encourages world leaders to listen to their political views more seriously or face massive economic consequences.

Evidence of this kind of predatory economic attack has been mounting for years and the economies of Great Britain, Italy, the US, France and others have each been systematically targeted and attacked by these speculative investors, and evidence of their information sources has until recently been merely a matter of surmise. Under the Peace Dividend it clearly could not have been an intentional attempt to undermine national economies or security, right?

As new evidence is coming to light in the wake of the current global economic downturn, we’re starting to see patterns of behaviour, information pathways, human linkages, and human intelligence networks emerging as the bases of these problems. And none of them are people working for the good guys.

The question you have to ask yourself now is this: Are you prepared to enter the global business marketplace blind, uninformed and handcuffed by lack of critical data, or are you keen to find profit-making opportunities by undermining global networks of crooks, bad guys and globally savvy competitors?

The question is… ‘Do I feel lucky?’

Well….. Do you?