https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/03/11/how-russian-spymaster-worked-with-un-official/A Russian spymaster was in talks with a UN official and European leaders over payment cards which would have allowed him to track refugees.
Jan Marsalek was involved in plans to develop a card for the payment of benefits or aid which would have provided a “treasure trove” of data on the movements of people fleeing their home countries.
At the time of discussion in 2019, Marsalek was chief operating officer of Wirecard, the Germany payments processor. It has since emerged that he was also working for the Kremlin and running surveillance operations on enemies of the Russian state.
The information available on the card would be “invaluable” to the intelligence services and could allow hostile states such as Iran and Russia to track dissidents, security experts have said.
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n one police interview, a transcript of which has been obtained by the Telegraph, one of his associates revealed that they were planning to launch a “mega project” immigration card which would cover a number of countries including Austria, Slovakia and Russia.
One of those involved was the boss of an intergovernmental organisation set up by the UN who “wanted the card for a UN project”, detectives were told. The official refused to comment when approached by The Telegraph.
In November 2019, Marsalek also commissioned a €950,000 study to identify the “opportunities to introduce a refugee card in Ukraine”, his emails show.
A number of governments have explored using such cards, which can be used to load money paid in benefits with the aim of ensuring the money does not end up in the hands of criminals.
One project which Marsalek was linked to said the card could include biometric data and “can be expanded to allow cardholder data to be accessed directly using official/police terminals/equipment”, according to documents obtained using Freedom of Information laws by the German NGO FragDenStaat.
Marsalek was kept informed about meetings on the card with the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior. He also met senior Austrian politicians to discuss similar plans.
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One security source said that any such card could have provided a “treasure trove” of data which could have allowed Marsalek and his Russian paymasters to track people on the run.
Sources have told The Telegraph that whilst Marsalek was not originally recruited for his work at Wirecard its value was clear.
The payments processing company could be used to move money around the world in defiance of sanctions as well as to monitor the movements and provide “kompromat” – compromising information – on its customers, which included the German secret police.
Fabio De Massi, a German MEP who took part in the government inquiry into Wirecard, said that there is a “legitimate case” for refugee cards to manage migration and payments for refugees and fight the risks of any benefit payments funding crime of terrorism.
He added that there is “big interest of intelligence services” to create “profiles of movement” and he was concerned that the way Marsalek could have used them may have gone “beyond the responsible use of the data”.
Meanwhile
Tony Blair admits UK will need ‘a little persuading’ to embrace digital ID
https://www.politico.eu/article/former-pm-tony-blair-admits-uk-will-need-lpersuading-to-embrace-digital-id/The European Commission wants to develop an app that would contain the digital version of your identity card.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-europe-digital-id/Large Scale Pilots are testing the Wallet
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/EU+Digital+Identity+Wallet+HomeTransatlantic tensions are fueling calls for the EU to wean itself off its U.S. tech addiction. It won’t be cheap.
https://www.politico.eu/article/push-for-eurostack-as-eu-us-tech-tensions-grow/My advice is to listen to privacy advocates. There appears to be an influence campaign afoot and I believe it may have impacted national security apparatuses and political leaders' thinking in regards to internet regulation.
For comparison purposes only, heres a what's goin' on in Florida:
from the was-he-the-dungeon-master? dept
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/11/judge-uses-dds-failure-to-make-him-worship-satan-to-school-florida-on-social-media-moral-panics/People, I don't want to have to explain that if this seems like a good idea your young people are already smarter than you and, if they feel like it, may either attempt to bypass this or attempt to go to places more likely to expose them to risk of compromising. A good idea is to talk to your young people and explain to them how to use the internet well and your opinions on the matter. This is because I think it's fair to guess there is not often an Internet Policy 101 class in the high schools (if it were able to not be politicized which were that to happen may run the cost of being less effective with dissenting opinions). One way to look at it, though probably a poor comparison in some ways, may be how a drug use epidemic is slowed effectively by the younger generation seeing the impact hard drug use has had on their elders' health. However such responses to that issue did not do a good job in discernment by for example placing marihuana use on the same tier as heroin use due to such a classification being used for decades to suppress dissent on the matter and to expose users to unnecessary but popular until recently criminal enforcement in an illicit market. One might say this was in part due to the properties of internet communication expanding discourse on the matter. Thus in this, for effectiveness it would be important not to use such an educational course even futher than that example to heckle political opponents or people who do legal things you disagree with, because unlike hard drug use, regular internet usage does strengthen individuals to the end benefit of the state (though not necessarily of political leaders) because it also is crucial to becoming effective in things such as political activism when used towards those ends. In my opinion, an important bit for a hypothetical Internet 101 would be that aspect, as to how the internet is used to study law including how to access resources that, at least in the US, the public is not commonly aware of. One easy example is the Lexis software found in (at least some) state university libraries of the school of law. Expanding access to this or similar software with public terminals at the community or county rather than regional level would also be helpful in the teaching of Internet 101, in my opinion, as well as to the general public in understanding laws and decisions of the courts. This is because it is quite pricey for an individual, and because pitching a second additional new class called something like "Motion Writing Practice to the Local Court 102" is probably a tougher pitch. It's a mouthful!
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Topic: The friendly and polite Europe related terrible jokes thread (Read 1173568 times)