The wrong machine
Developments
- The U.S. government has signed up private firms to hack criminal networks abroad. But how do you really know whose systems you’re breaking into?
- In Colombia, the last four people missing since the earthquake turn up alive, and the governor calls off the search. … In Ecuador, a gunman kills the prosecutor who was working on the drone attacks against three fishing boats. … & Biologists explore one of Africa’s last biological dark zones and find some 70 creatures science had no record of.
From the files
- How did a criminal industry worth tens of billions entrench itself in Cambodia? Jacob Sims on the nexus of organized crime and autocracy in Southeast Asia.
- Why do temperatures keep rising—even after they cool off? Rachel Cleetus on rising temperatures, billions in damages, and the climate’s uncertain future.
Features
- Why is the White House calling its political opponents “national security” threats? Andrew Preston on the 86-year history of a curious rationale.
Books
- Is Beijing right that electoral systems are for lesser nations? Dongxian Jiang, Why China Needs Democracy.
Music
- Who is Rustie?
- & New tracks from him, Overmono, FLO, Hana Stretton, & Roy Montgomery x Martha Skye Murphy.
+ Weather report
- A hurricane hits Hawaii’s Big Island for the first time in 150 years …
Developments
Under contract
In compounds across Cambodia and Burma, hundreds of thousands of people work at keyboards they aren’t allowed to leave, running romance and investment frauds on strangers overseas. Traffickers brought most of them there on the promise of a job. The United Nations counted around 100,000 in Cambodia in 2023, and put Burma above 130,000. Last year Americans reported losing US$20.8 billion to frauds like these.
On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a memorandum hiring American companies to go after the syndicates that run the compounds. A firm that passes vetting signs a contract with the Justice or Homeland Security department, puts $1 million in escrow, and takes each proposed operation to two federal officials, who approve it in writing—as long as it’s not likely to kill or badly hurt anyone.
The firm may then watch: getting into a computer without the owner’s permission and staying unseen. Or it may wreck: effecting the “manipulation, disruption, denial, degradation, or destruction” of a machine and everything on it. When anyone else—who hasn’t passed vetting and signed a contract with the Justice or Homeland Security department—does either, that is a federal crime.
The memorandum covers mistakes, too. If a firm finds it has broken into a machine it wasn’t cleared for, it has to stop, keep as little of what it took as it can, and tell Washington. But a mistake means only accessing one or more of three kinds of machine: one that is in the United States of America, one that belongs to an American, or one that an American runs.
So who are they going to hack?
- Gangs and governments. The companies may only go after a foreign group that preys on Americans and isn’t part of a foreign government or run by one. Where officials can’t tell, the memorandum tells them which way to guess. A group “will be assumed not to be” state-run “unless clear intelligence exists establishing such connection.” The State Department has said many of the Chinese gangs behind the Southeast Asian compounds are tied to Chinese government projects.
- Borrowed machines. The computer at the other end usually belongs to someone else. In a scam compound, the machines belong to the people holding the workers, not to the workers. And a ransomware crew rarely owns the computers it works from; it borrows a clinic’s server, a small company’s router, a university’s mail system, without asking anyone.
- The classified annex. So far, the administration is keeping the rules for picking targets classified. The standards a company has to meet to get into the program haven’t been written yet, and the two officials have until October to write them. The White House would not say whether any company has signed up.
As Jacob Sims says here in The Signal, in the Mekong region, you can’t really separate the syndicates from the governments. The industry got this big because the syndicates went into business with the people running the country, and any crackdown they order can end up burying the record of their own involvement.
Jake Williams, who runs research at the security firm Hunter Strategy, says the Americans who do this work “could easily be classified as non-uniformed combatants while traveling overseas”—reminding us that a foreign government could make the claim whether or not it was true.
In July 2025, Italian police arrested Xu Zewei at Milan airport, where he was on holiday with his wife, and in April, Italian authorities sent him to Houston. The U.S. Department of Justice says Xu worked at a Shanghai firm called Powerock Network and broke into American universities to steal Covid-19 vaccine research, on orders from the Chinese intelligence services. The Justice Department referred to his case in warning that China runs “an array of private companies” to give its government deniability. Xu says they have the wrong man. He faces 77 years.
The new program will work with big American firms, for their scale, and small ones, for their specializations. Government officers won’t execute it; company employees will. The firms will presumably keep their names quiet. But those names will be on a computer somewhere, and any government that wants to know which employees are involved will also presumably be refining its own ways to hack a computer—and the highly secure system it’s connected to. Sooner or later, you’d have to imagine, one of these employees will want a holiday. … See “Code black,” below.
Meanwhile
- Off the missing list. The governor of Chocó, Colombia, Nubia Carolina Córdoba-Curi, called off the department’s search on Wednesday night. The last four people missing there, a family from Quibdó, had turned up alive in another town, out of contact the whole time. Sixty rescuers and their dogs went home. The quake has killed 294 people across the country, and 320 are still missing. Only 13 of the dead were in Chocó, where it struck—and where there’s not much in the way of buildings that stand tall enough to fall on anyone. Colombia’s human-rights ombudsman says relief teams still haven’t reached Indigenous villages. … See “Permission to enter.”
- The Fiorella file. Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño was the prosecutor in Manta investigating the drone attacks that burned the Fiorella and two other Ecuadoran fishing boats. On June 14, a gunman shot her and her sister dead as they walked to Bravo’s car. Bravo was the third prosecutor killed in Manta since 2022. A representative of Human Rights Watch spoke with her in May. “The danger is always present,” she said. … See “Unlisted.”
- That ain’t a ladybird. Rob Taylor took a team from The Wilderness Project onto Angola’s Lisima Plateau, which biologists had never properly worked, and came back with eight dragonflies, three grasshoppers, and about 60 moths and butterflies unknown to science, along with fruit beetles that fill a hand and spiders marked in fluorescent blue. One spider is patterned like a ladybird, which the animals that eat spiders apparently find foul. The rivers that rise on the plateau supply people thousands of kilometers downstream, but the soil up there is poor—so, Taylor says, there aren’t many animals. Just many kinds of them.
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From the files
Code black
How did a criminal industry worth tens of billions entrench itself in Cambodia? Jacob Sims on the nexus of organized crime and autocracy in Southeast Asia.
