At the end of August, the FBI issued a public service announcement on the susceptibility for cybercrime in DeFi (decentralized finance), the growing crypto segment of financial applications backed by blockchain technology. Of the $1.3 billion stolen in cryptocurrencies in the first three months of 2022, 97% came from DeFi platforms.

The warning did nothing to deter cybercriminals, who launched flash loan attacks on the Avalanche blockchain and the New Free DAO protocol the following week that totaled nearly $2 million. According to data from investment platform DeFiYield, $211 million was lost in decentralized finance hacks just in August.

Cybersecurity experts say the timing of the FBI warningseveral years after DeFi exploits beganillustrates how slow governmental agencies and technological solutions have been to catch up to the vulnerabilities of the ecosystem.

Law enforcement is reactionary to whats happening out there, said Chris Tarbell, the co-founder of the cybersecurity firm NAXO and a former FBI special agent who was instrumental in taking down the notorious Silk Road marketplace. It takes time because its such an advanced technology.

As the apocryphal story goes, a reporter once asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. Because thats where the money is, he replied.

Michael Rosmer, cofounder of DeFiYield, said the same logic attracts cybercriminals to the world of decentralized finance, where transactions are irreversibleunlike in traditional bankingand law enforcement is still figuring out how the platforms work.

Where else can you go where you can steal really large amounts of money with no recourse? Rosmer told Fortune. That makes crypto a logical target until we can somehow turn around and come up with better systems for addressing this.

According to DeFiYields data, the $211 million lost last month still pales in comparison to August 2021, when cybercriminals stole an estimated $827 million. Rosmer clarified that the decrease does not mean there is any less of a threat, attributing the figure to the cryptocurrency industrys vastly lower market cap, as well as the shifting nature of DeFi hacks.

Previous exploits targeted lending protocolslike Binance Smart Chainbased protocol Meerkat Finance, which lost $31 million in user funds the day after it launched in 2021as well as other complex DeFi tools like liquidity pools and automated market makers.

Rosmer said that the main target in 2022 has been bridges, a type of technology that connects different blockchains, allowing users to move cryptocurrencies among chains. The biggest example from 2022 was the attack on popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, which lost an estimated $620 million in March when cybercriminals targeted the bridge to its Ethereum-linked sidechain.

The attacks have continued. Just last month, hackers exploited the Nomad bridgewhich connected blockchains such as Ethereum and Avalanchefor $190 million.

This is a challenging technical problem, Rosmer told Fortune. The more value that is being exchanged between two chains, the more attractive the pot exists to make it so that you would want to attack it.

Ryan Kalember, an executive vice president at cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, said that DeFi is in a tricky position where its attractive for cybercriminals to target, but not necessarily valuable enough for companies to develop sufficient defenses.

You could end up with this hell-state where its not worth enough to secure, but its still worth enough for cybercriminals to go after it, he said.

The problem is exacerbated by the international nature of cybercrime, which makes it difficult for U.S.-based law enforcement to act. If you cant get Edward Snowden in Russia, said Rosmer, how are you going to get some guy who just stole $10 million from a DeFi protocol in Russia?

Governmental agencies are starting to figure out new strategies, such as the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioning the open-source cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, which cybercriminal organizations like North Koreas Lazarus Group have used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars, including from Augusts Nomad heist.

Even so, officials are just starting to wake up to the threat. Its complicated, its new, and its poorly understood, especially by law enforcement, Kalember said.

While Rosmer said that the FBI warning was a step in the right direction, he was skeptical it would have much of an impact. For him, the onus is on technology companies like DeFiYield to ramp up security.

This is like the jungle, he told Fortune. We are working on trying to make the jungle safe and turn it into a zoo.

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This is the jungle: Law enforcement slowly waking up to the threat of DeFi exploits - Fortune

Bryan Fogels work was cut out for him when he chose to direct a follow-up to Icarus, his 2017 deep dive into sports doping and the elaborate system of cheating among Russian Olympians. That film closed with a cliff-hanger. Having turned whistleblower mid-film, Grigory Rodchenkov, the architect of the state-sanctioned doping program, fled Russia and was in hiding stateside. To continue to tell his story, the challenge for Fogel lay not just in the artistic shadow cast by his vividly told Oscar winner. Complicating the making of a sequel was a crucial constraint: To protect the safety of the documentarys central figure, Fogel wouldnt be able to interact with him directly.

The solution was to embed a single cameraperson, producer Jake Swantko, with Rodchenkov and his security team. Tracking his life on the lam for nearly five years, Icarus: The Aftermath is both more intimate and of broader scope than the earlier film. Its documentary as spy thriller, a portrait of institutional gaslighting, a legal nail-biter, an intimate look at the cost of refuting authoritarian doctrine, and, above all, an affecting character study.

The Bottom LineOrwellian chills, poignant twists and turns.

The Aftermath reteams Fogel with Swantko, writer-producer Mark Monroe (who has worked on some of the most high-profile nonfiction features in recent years, among them The Cove, Hooligan Sparrow and Lucy and Desi) and composer Adam Peters. For those who didnt see the earlier doc, the dexterous opening-credits recap tells you what you need to know, with a few helpful glances back during the film itself as well. With thriller lighting in law-office conference rooms and kinetic camerawork in temporary homes somewhere in the United States, the story unfolds with a fittingly unsettling rhythm (the editing is by Wyatt Rogowski and Lauren Brinkman), while Peters score shifts between percussive beats and dark, nerve-jangling chords.

Orwell is, understandably, near and dear to Rodchenkov. As the head of Russias Anti-Doping Center, his chief purpose was devising ways for the countrys Olympians to use performance-enhancing drugs and not get caught a more accurate name for the agency would have been the Anti-Doping-Evidence Center. Strategies were science-based and borderline-ludicrous, among them a secret laboratory on a luxury ship, a mandate for athletes to pee in their pants, and a Duchess cocktail that used scotch or vodka to mask the pharmaceuticals.

Rodchenkov is a compelling protagonist with a big personality brainy, gregarious, funny. His silences can be loaded with foreboding, and his effusiveness is childlike, especially when hes expressing his feelings for the people who are working to protect him. These include a legal team, led by Jim Walden, who have reason to believe that there are Russian operatives looking for him in the U.S. (During his years on the run, headlines announce the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, in England, and that of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.)

The affection between Rodchenkov and Fogel is especially strong, evidenced in the Zoom call that marks their first contact in two and a half years. They manage a couple of in-person meetings too, the first of these memorialized with an almost romantic mini-montage at one of the secret stops on Rodchenkovs underground travels.

Moving from place to place, often with little notice, the whistleblower monitors the official reaction back home, dyes his hair (with Swantkos assistance) and soothes his nerves with whiskey. Somewhere along the way, not explored in the film, he writes a book, 2020s The Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought Down Russias Secret Doping Empire.In phone calls with his wife, Veronika, whos still in Russia, his attempts to put a hopeful spin on their predicament dont wash. This is just hell, she tells him. Why did you even venture into this hell?

As to who he is and how he got to this point, Fogel uses brisk animation (by Gary Breslins Office of Development & Design) to illustrate Rodchenkovs days as a young athlete, when his own doping began against his coachs policy, and with his mothers help. Swantko conducts a sit-down interview with him, in which he speaks of a persistent Soviet mentality in post-glasnost Russia. To that point, the doc includes footage of Putin disparaging him as a nutjob and calling treason the worst possible crime. A Russian TV commentator decries Rodchenkovs malicious intent toward our athletes.

It would be a simplistic reading of the film to say that its proof of a unique brand of evil in the world. In Rodchenkovs astute observation, Whistleblowers are the most hated from both sides. (Ask Julian Assange.) With the guidance of attorney Bo Cooper, Rodchenkov seeks asylum, and his case drags on for several years; at one point, a trade for Edward Snowden is considered. Russia doesnt have a monopoly on nationalist fervor and propaganda, but its particular brand of these, combined with shockingly old-school spycraft, sets it apart. Yuri Ganus, Rodchenkovs successor at the Anti-Doping Center, is a ray of reason and hope. Hes forthcoming and endorses the importance of whistleblowers in virtual interviews with Fogel that are both heartening and, concerning his safety, worrying.

In the grand geopolitical scheme of things, of course, there are far worse crimes than cheating at the Olympics. If anyone in 2022 still views the Games as a pure and holy endeavor and not a big business, they might also be shocked to learn that theres gambling going on in Ricks Caf. The Aftermath includes interviews with member of WADA, the Olympics-affiliated World Anti-Doping Agency, all of whom express quiet disbelief in the backtracking and reversals that have put Russian athletes back in competition after the 2017 revelations that initially led to Russia being banned.

On the basis of his directing debut, Jewtopia, no one could have predicted that Fogel would become a filmmaker focused on truth-tellers and iconoclasts (between Icarus and his new film, he made The Dissident, a doc about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi). The Aftermath reflects his personal commitment and casts a penetrating light on the larger forces that shape all our lives and, in the case of courageous dissenters like Rodchenkov, turn lives inside out, irrevocably.

The focus of Rodchenkov, his legal team and the filmmakers shifts for a while to the diaries hes kept since he was a teenager, volumes that document his work for the Russian government. As to how the notebooks make it from Russia to the States, well probably never know. The triumph, of course, is bittersweet; the diaries are most certainly the only things from Rodchenkovs life in Russia that hell ever see again. Chronicling a leap into the unknown, Icarus: The Aftermath is a story of immense bravery and unspeakable sadness.

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Icarus: The Aftermath Review: A Tense and Affecting Real-Life Sequel - Hollywood Reporter

Every move you make

And every vow you break

Every smile you fake

Every claim you stake

Ill be watching you.

Every Breath You Take, Song by The Police

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to privacy. Like other amendments in the Bill of Rights, it doesnt create the right; it limits government interference with it. Last week, President Joe Biden misquoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia suggesting that Justice Scalia believed that the Bill of Rights creates rights. As Justice Scalia wrote, referring to the right to keep and bear arms but reflecting his view on the origins of all personal liberty, the Bill of Rights secures rights, it doesnt create them; it secures them from the government.

Those who drafted the Bill of Rights recognized that human rights are pre-political. They precede the existence of the government. They come from our humanity, and, in the case of privacy, they are reinforced by our ownership or legal occupancy of property.

The idea that rights come from our humanity is called Natural Law theory, which was first articulated by Aristotle in 360 B.C. The natural law teaches that there are aspects of human existence and thus areas of human behavior that are not subject to the government. Aristotles views would later be refined by Cicero, codified by Aquinas, explained by John Locke, and woven into Anglo-American jurisprudence by British jurists and American revolutionaries and constitutional framers.

Thus, our rights to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, to worship or not, to associate or not, to defend ourselves from crazies and tyrants, to own property, and to be left alone are all hard-wired into our human natures by God, the uncaused cause. Nature is the means through which God passes along His gifts to us. We come about by a biological act of nature, every step of which was ordained by God. His greatest gift to us is life, and He tied that gift to free will. Just as He is perfectly free, so are we.

In exercising our free wills, we employ rights. Rights are claims against the whole world. They dont require approval of a government or neighbors or colleagues. The same rights exist in everyone no matter their place of birth, and each person exercises them as she or he sees fit. The government should only come into the picture when someone violates anothers natural rights. So, if someone builds a house in your backyard, you can knock it down and expel the builders or you can ask the government to do so.

Suppose the builders havent consented to the existence of the government? That does not absolve them. Though government is only moral and legal in a society in which all persons have consented to it this is Thomas Jeffersons consent of the governed argument in the Declaration of Independence the only exception to actual consent is the use of government to remedy a violation of natural rights.

Professor Murray Rothbard examined all this under his non-aggression principle (NAP): Initiating or threatening force or deception against a person or his rights is always morally illicit. This applies to all aggression, even and especially from the government. The folks building a house in your backyard have either used force or deception to get there. Both violate your natural rights and the NAP.

Now, back to the Fourth Amendment and privacy. In a famous dissent in 1928, which two generations later became the law of the land, the late Justice Louis Brandeis argued that government surveillance constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and thus, per the express language of the amendment, cannot be conducted by the government without a warrant issued by a judge. He famously called privacy the right most valued by civilized persons and described it as the right to be let alone.

Today, this is the most violated of personal rights; not by judges signing search warrants for surveillance, but by government officials local, state and federal ignoring and evading the natural right to privacy and pretending that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to them. The linchpin of the amendment is the judicial determination of the existence of probable cause meaning that it is more likely than not that a crime has been committed, and that there is evidence of that crime in the place to be searched and in the things to be seized.

Today, the feds, and this has been picked up and mimicked by local and state police, have told themselves that so long as they are not looking for evidence of crimes, they neednt follow the Fourth Amendment.

Today, the government rarely bothers to obtain a search warrant for surveillance because it is cumbersome to do so and because it is so easy to surveil folks on a massive scale without one.

Today, the National Security Administration Americas 60,000-person strong domestic spying apparatus captures every keystroke on every desktop and mobile device, and every conversation on every landline and mobile device, and all data transmitted into, out of or within the United States.

Moreover, youd be hard-pressed to find a geographic area that is not covered by police using hardware that tracks the movement and use of mobile phones. When Edward Snowden passed on to journalists the facts of massive warrantless spying in the Bush and Obama administrations, he had the journalists put their mobile devices where his was in his refrigerator, as anywhere else would have alerted his former colleagues of their collective whereabouts.

The government spends hundreds of billions of dollars annually just to watch and follow us. Who authorized this? Why do we tolerate a society where we have hired a government to secure our rights and instead it engages in aggression against them?

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Fourth Amendment: The right to be left alone - Minot Daily News

The fawning adulation of Queen Elizabeth in the United States, which fought a revolution to get rid of the monarchy, and in Great Britain, is in direct proportion to the fear gripping a discredited, incompetent and corrupt global ruling elite.

The global oligarchs are not sure the next generation of royal sock puppets mediocrities that include a pedophile prince and his brother, acrankyand eccentric king whoacceptedsuitcases and bags stuffed with $3.2 million in cash from the former prime minister of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, and who has millionsstashedin offshore accounts are up to the job. Lets hope they are right.

Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour whos really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories, Patrick Freynewrotelast year in The Irish Times. More specifically, for the Irish, its like having a neighbour whos really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

Monarchy obscures the crimes of empire and wraps them in nostalgia. It exalts white supremacy and racial hierarchy. It justifies class rule. It buttresses an economic and social system that callously discards and often consigns to death those considered the lesser breeds, most of whom are people of color. The queens husband Prince Phillip, who died in 2021, was notorious for making racist and sexist remarks, politely explained away in the British press as gaffes. He described Beijing, for example, as ghastly during a 1986 visit and told British students: If you stay here much longer youll all beslitty-eyed.

The cries of the millions of victims of empire; the thousandskilled,tortured, raped and imprisonedduring the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; the 13 Irish civiliansgunned downin Bloody Sunday; themore than4,100 First Nations children who died or went missing in Canadas residential schools, government-sponsored institutions established to assimilate indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture, and the hundreds of thousandskilledduring the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are drowned out by cheers for royal processions and the sacral aura an obsequious press weaves around the aristocracy. The coverage of the queens death is so mind-numbingly vapid the BBC sent out a news alert on Saturday when Prince Harry and Prince William, accompanied by their wives, surveyed the floral tributes to their grandmother displayed outside Windsor Castle that the press might as well turn over the coverage to the mythmakers and publicists employed by the royal family.

The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians of their class. The worlds largest landownersincludeKing Mohammed VI of Morocco with176million acres, the HolyRoman Catholic Church with 177 million acres, the heirs of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 531 million acres and now, King Charles III with 6.6billionacres of land. British monarchsare worthalmost $28 billion. The British publicwill providea $33 million subsidy to the Royal Family over the next two years, although the average household in the U.K. saw itsincome fallfor the longest period since records began in 1955 and 227,000 householdsexperiencehomelessness in Britain.

Royals, to the ruling class, are worth the expense. They are effective tools of subjugation. British postal and rail workerscanceledplanned strikes over pay and working conditions after the queens death. The Trade Union Congress (TUC)postponedits congress. Labour Party memberspoured outheartfelt tributes. EvenExtinction Rebellion, which should know better, indefinitelycanceledits planned Festival of Resistance. The BBCs Clive MyriedismissedBritains energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine that has thrown millions of people into severe financial distress as insignificant compared with concerns over the queens health. Theclimate emergency, pandemic, the deadly folly of the U.S. andNATOs proxy warin Ukraine, soaring inflation, the rise of neo-fascist movements and deepening social inequality will be ignored as the press spews florid encomiums to class rule. There will be10 daysof official mourning.

In 1953, Her Majestys Government sent three warships, along with 700 troops, to its colony British Guiana,suspendedthe constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagan. Her Majestys Governmenthelped to buildand long supported the apartheid government in South Africa. Her Majestys Government savagelycrushedtheMau Mau independence movementin Kenya from 1952 to 1960, herding 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps where many were tortured. British soldiers castrated suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers, and raped girls and women. By the time India won independence in 1947 after two centuries of British colonialism, Her Majestys Governmenthad looted$45 trillion from the country and violently crushed a series of uprisings, including the First War of Independence in 1857. Her Majestys Governmentcarried outadirty warto breakthe Greek Cypriot War of Independence from 1955 to 1959 andlater inYemenfrom 1962 to 1969. Torture, extrajudicial assassinations, public hangings and mass executions by the British were routine. Following a protracted lawsuit, the British governmentagreedto paynearly 20 million in damages to over 5,000 victims of British abuse during war in Kenya, andin 2019another payoutwas made to survivors of torture from the conflict in Cyprus. The British state attempts to obstruct lawsuits stemming from its colonial history. Its settlements are a tiny fraction of the compensationpaidto British slave owners in 1835, once it at least formally abolished slavery.

During her 70-year reign, the queen never offered an apology or called for reparations.

The point of social hierarchy and aristocracy is to sustain a class system that makes the rest of us feel inferior. Those at the top of the social hierarchy hand out tokens for loyal service, including the Order of the British Empire (OBE). The monarchy is the bedrock of hereditary rule and inherited wealth. This caste systemfilters downfrom theNazi-lovingHouse of Windsor to the organs of state security and the military. It regiments society and keeps people, especially the poor and the working class, in their proper place.

The British ruling class clings to the mystique of royalty and fading cultural icons as James Bond, the Beatles and the BBC, along with television shows such as Downton Abbey where in one episode the aristocrats and servants are convulsed in fevered anticipation when King George V and Queen Mary schedule a visit to project a global presence. Winston Churchills bust remainson loanto the White House. These myth machines sustain Great Britains special relationship with the United States. Watch the satirical filmIn the Loopto get a sense of what this special relationship looks like on the inside.

It was not until the 1960s that coloured immigrants or foreignerswere permittedto work in clerical roles in the royal household, although they had been hired as domestic servants. The royal household and its heads are legally exempt from laws that prevent race and sex discrimination, what Jonathan Cook calls an apartheid system benefitting the Royal Family alone. Meghan Markle, who is of mixed race and whocontemplated suicideduring her time as a working royal, said that an unnamed royalexpressed concernabout the skin color of her unborn son.

I got a taste of this suffocating snobbery in 2014 whenI participatedin an Oxford Union debate asking whether Edward Snowden was a hero or a traitor. I went a day early to be prepped for the debate by Julian Assange, then seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy and currently in His Majestys Prison Belmarsh. At a lugubrious black-tie dinner preceding the event, I sat next to a former MP who asked me two questions I had never been asked before in succession. When did your family come to America? he said, followed by What schools did you attend? My ancestors, on both sides of my family, arrived from England in the 1630s. My graduate degree is from Harvard. If I had failed to meet his litmus test, he would have acted as if I did not exist.

Those who took part in the debate my side arguing that Snowdon was a hero narrowly won signed a leather-bound guest book. Taking the pen, I scrawled in large letters that filled an entire page: Never Forget that your greatest political philosopher,Thomas Paine, never went to Oxford or Cambridge.

Paine, the author of the most widely read political essays of the 18th century,Rights of Man,The Age of ReasonandCommon Sense, blasted the monarchy as a con. A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself as King of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally originalThe plain truth is that the antiquity of the English monarchy will not bear looking into, he wrote of William the Conqueror.He ridiculed hereditary rule. Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. He went on: One of the strangest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is that nature disproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankindan ass for a lion. He called the monarch the royal brute of England.

When the British ruling class tried to arrest Paine, he fled to France where he was one of two foreigners elected to serve as a delegate in the National Convention set up after the French Revolution. He denounced the calls to execute Louis XVI. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression, Paine said. For if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. Unchecked legislatures, he warned, could be as despotic as unchecked monarchs. When he returned to America from France, he condemned slavery and the wealth and privilege accumulated by the new ruling class, including George Washington, who had become the richest man in the country. Even though Paine had done more than any single figure to rouse the country to overthrow the British monarchy, he was turned into a pariah, especially by the press, and forgotten. He had served his usefulness. Six mourners attended his funeral, two of whom were Black.

You can watch my talk with Cornel West and Richard Wolff on Thomas Painehere.

There is a pathetic yearning among many in the U.S. and Britain to be linked in some tangential way to royalty. White British friends often have stories about ancestors that tie them to some obscure aristocrat. Donald Trump, whofashionedhis own heraldic coat of arms, wasobsessedwith obtaininga state visitwith the queen. This desire to be part of the club, or validated by the club, is a potent force the ruling class has no intention of giving up, even if hapless King Charles III, who along with his family treated his first wife Diana with contempt, makes a mess of it.

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Opinion | It Is Time to Throw the Monarchies of the World Into the Dustbin of History - Common Dreams