Paranoia, my garbage and I

One of the reasons I moved to Utah was to escape the overwhelming sadness of coming out of my apartment in Buenos Aires at night to find a young, once lower-middle-class family going through my garbage in search of food.

When you see children pulling out dirty nappies and empty cans, then holding up half-eaten food to the street light, you feel ashamed—of the bankers and politicians who blithely engineered the currency collapse, and of yourself for having enjoyed the fruits of the economic swindle Argentines benefited from in the late 1990s, only for the roof to cave in shortly after the Millenium. I, after all, could leave the country, having lost my pension and two-thirds of my bank account when the government forcibly devalued the peso. But for many Argentine families, the grim reality was often begging on the street for money for medication or food.

Fast forward six years later, and on Tuesday night I wheel my garbage bins out to the street. I live in a quiet, residential neighborhood in Sandy. In the years I've lived here, I've only had one problem when I was stupid enough to leave my wallet on the front seat of my unlocked car in the driveway overnight—an invitation for the robbery that occurred. Other than that, nothing to report. Until yesterday.

My neighbor had requested to use my bins so they were full of the refuse of his cleaning out his garage after 20 years of piling up boxes. I placed a bag of kitchen garbage on top of his detritus, but could not close the lid.

The next morning, I came out for an early-morning stroll, only to find the lid closed and my garbage bag gone. I stood in the street, scratching my head. Who would take my garbage?

By placing your garbage out on the street, you are, as I understand it, legally relinquishing ownership. If the state or the government wants to look in your garbage, then they arrange to get the entire bin's contents after it has been picked up by the garbage truck. That way you don't know anyone is peering into the entrails of your refuse. If you're a P.I., however, then you snag what you can out of the bins in the early hours and find somewhere convenient to explore the contents.

In the past, I confess that when I have worked on stories about people I consider a menace or, relatedly, find myself pursuing stories involving questionable behavior by law enforcement or local government, at times my paranoia has almost gotten the better of me. When I look down the current list of stories I am working on, however, I cannot see anything that would spark an interest in the personal details of my life.

Some background information on UseMyWallet and Maryland ICE/HSI ...

I have some things I’ve learned about the different players in this drama recently but they were a bit too random to go into any of the other posts, so I thought I’d make a generic background info entry.

First, UseMyWallet.

Some of this info is a bit obvious when you think about it, but I figure it’s worth spelling out because with all of the distractions, it’s sometimes easy to miss things.

The whole idea behind UseMyWallet is one of abstraction.  This type of idea is very common in the software development world.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, the idea of abstraction is basically that you can make generic frameworks that know how to communicate with each other through an interface, but they don’t get bogged down in each other’s nitty gritty details.

UseMyWallet is essentially the abstract idea of an e-wallet.  It’s the interface by which a pokers site agrees to talk to the actual payment processor.  In this most recent case, the implementation I’ve been talking about is quicktender.com.  The purpose of setting the site up this way is to handle the situation that has occurred most recently – pressure/seizures by the U.S. Government.  Let me explain:

John Briggs is the owner of Chargestream LTD, QuickTender, UseMyWallet, Psi-Pay, EcoCard, and a number of other companies involved in payment processing.  He also used to work for Neteller.com.  This is not his first rodeo.  He knows this business inside and out.  His partner in Chargestream, and I’m assuming several other businesses, is Paul Templeman – former Neteller.com CEO.

With UseMyWallet, Briggs has designed his business so he inks a deal with the poker sites so that they support UseMyWallet.  The underlying implementation of that UseMyWallet interface is/was QuickTender.com.  When (not if) the U.S. Government comes at his implementation he can simply spin out another implementation using the same protocols (perhaps “fast-tender”) and be back up and running without any heavy changes to the poker sites.  In other words, the poker sites know how to talk to this generic “UseMyWallet” interface which hides the layer underneath it, QuickTender.com (or “Fast-Tender”), so that when QuickTender is gone, he can just turn on another implementation and be back up and running.

Given the email I detailed in the last post, I believe this is what could be happening right now.  I suspect they are making slight implementation changes to handle Euros instead of USD, get different bank accounts set up, and be ready to spin out another payment processor that the poker sites can talk to via the UseMyWallet interface.

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