A late but welcome awakening ...
original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/being-cash-free-puts-us-at-risk-of-attack-swedes-turn-against-cashlessness
'Being cash-free puts us at risk of attack': Swedes turn against
cashlessness
Sweden’s central bank governor has called for public control over its
payment system. Others say a fully digital system is vulnerable to fraud
and attack
David Crouch in Gothenburg, Tue 3 Apr 2018
It is hard to argue that you cannot trust the government when the
government isn’t really all that bad. This is the problem facing the
small but growing number of Swedes anxious about their country’s rush to
embrace a cash-free society.
Most consumers already say they manage without cash altogether, while
shops and cafes increasingly refuse to accept notes and coins because of
the costs and risk involved. Until recently, however, it has been hard
for critics to find a hearing.
“The Swedish government is a rather nice one, we have been lucky enough
to have mostly nice ones for the past 100 years,” says Christian
Engström, a former MEP for the Pirate Party and an early opponent of the
cashless economy.
“In other countries there is much more awareness that you cannot trust
the government all the time. In Sweden it is hard to get people
mobilised.”
There are signs this might be changing. In February, the head of
Sweden’s central bank warned that Sweden could soon face a situation
where all payments were controlled by private sector banks.
The Riksbank governor, Stefan Ingves, called for new legislation to
secure public control over the payments system, arguing that being able
to make and receive payments is a “collective good” like defence, the
courts, or public statistics.
“Most citizens would feel uncomfortable to surrender these social
functions to private companies,” he said.
“It should be obvious that Sweden’s preparedness would be weakened if,
in a serious crisis or war, we had not decided in advance how households
and companies would pay for fuel, supplies and other necessities.”
The central bank governor’s remarks are helping to bring other concerns
about a cash-free society into the mainstream, says Björn Eriksson, 72,
a former national police commissioner and the leader of a group called
the Cash Rebellion, or Kontantupproret.
Until now, Kontantupproret has been dismissed as the voice of the
elderly and the technologically backward, Eriksson says.
“When you have a fully digital system you have no weapon to defend
yourself if someone turns it off,” he says.
“If Putin invades Gotland [Sweden’s largest island] it will be enough
for him to turn off the payments system. No other country would even
think about taking these sorts of risks, they would demand some sort of
analogue system.”
In this sense, Sweden is far from its famous concept of lagom – “just
the right amount” – but instead is “100% extreme”, Eriksson says, by
investing so much faith in the banks. “This is a political question. We
are leaving these decisions to four major banks who form a monopoly in
Sweden.”
No system based on technology is invulnerable to glitches and fraud,
says Mattias Skarec, 29, a digital security consultant. Yet Sweden is
divided into two camps: the first says “we love the new technology”,
while the other just can’t be bothered, Skarec says. “We are naive to
think we can abandon cash completely and rely on technology instead.”
Skarec points to problems with card payments experienced by two Swedish
banks just during the past year, and by Bank ID, the digital
authorisation system that allows people to identify themselves for
payment purposes using their phones.
Fraudsters have already learned to exploit the system’s idiosyncrasies
to trick people out of large sums of money, even their pensions.
The best case scenario is that we are not as secure as we think, Skarec
says – the worst is that IT infrastructure is systemically vulnerable.
“We are lucky that the people who know how to hack into them are on the
good side, for now,” he says. “But we don’t know how things will
progress. It’s not that easy to attack devices today, but maybe it will
become easier to do so in the future.”
The banks recognise that digital payments can be vulnerable, just like
cash.
“Of course there are people trying to abuse them, but they are no more
vulnerable than any other method of payment,” says Per Ekwall, a
spokesperson for Swish, the immensely popular mobile payments system
owned by Sweden’s banks.
“From a macro perspective Swish has made it safer, and cheaper,” he
says. There is little point in fighting a trend that customers
themselves are driving, the banks argue.
But an opinion poll this month revealed unease among Swedes, with almost
seven out of 10 saying they wanted to keep the option to use cash, while
just 25% wanted a completely cashless society. MPs from left and right
expressed concerns at a recent parliamentary hearing. Parliament is
conducting a cross-party review of central bank legislation that will
also investigate the issues surrounding cash.
The Pirate Party – which made its name in Sweden for its opposition to
state and private sector surveillance – welcomes a higher political
profile for these issues.
Look at Ireland, Christian Engström says, where abortion is illegal. It
is much easier for authorities to identify Irish women who have had an
abortion if the state can track all digital financial transactions, he
says. And while Sweden’s government might be relatively benign, a quick
look at Europe suggests there is no guarantee how things might develop
in the future.
“If you have control of the servers belonging to Visa or MasterCard, you
have control of Sweden,” Engström says.
“In the meantime, we will have to keep giving our money to the banks,
and hope they don’t go bankrupt – or bananas.”
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