The podcast Kill List doesn’t reflect badly on the internet – it reflects badly on us | John Naughton

This column comes to you as a break from listening to a riveting podcast series called Kill List. It’s about a secret website that journalist and author Carl Miller discovered on the dark web, the slimy underbelly of the internet. The site essentially runs what one might call an “assassination market” or a murder-for-hire service. Customers identify and profile someone whom they wish to have killed and pay (in bitcoin, natch) for the service they require. Hence the title of the podcast series.

The story starts in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic lockdown when a gifted IT expert and hacker, Chris Monteiro, was browsing the site and found a security vulnerability that, once exploited, gave him complete access to it. Inside, he found a “kill list”, rather like an Excel spreadsheet, of 175 people all over the world whom clients wanted murdered. For each target, there was usually lots of detailed information – address, photographs, habits, routes regularly travelled etc. It looked, I guess, superficially mundane – until you read the “instructions” attached for each one. “How much bitcoin should I pay?” “Tell me the execution time in advance – I can’t be there.” “I would just like this person to be shot and killed. Where, how and what with does not bother me at all.” You get the idea.

In fact, the website was a scam run by a Romanian crook who pocketed the cryptocurrency and had no intention of ever providing the requested services. So far, so predictable – and criminally fraudulent. But in a way this was a scam that revealed something much darker: that there were people all over the world who might be in real danger – and were probably unaware of the fact that someone out there wanted them dead. The risk was that if some of those bad actors realised they had been scammed – that there was no hitman coming – they might in anger or exasperation be willing to do the job themselves. Which did happen at least once – to a woman in Minneapolis whose suicide was faked by her ostensibly God-fearing husband.

This sinister spreadsheet, though, presented Miller with the kind of ethical challenge that few journalists have faced: what to do with a list of people whose lives could credibly be regarded as being in danger? His first response was to go to the police. The Metropolitan police sent two cops in a van, who listened politely but also inquired if he had any history of, er, mental illness. Eventually, the Met told him that they had passed the list to Interpol because so many of those on it lived elsewhere in the world. This was in principle useful but in practice only meant that Interpol would pass it to national police authorities – which in most cases probably meant that nothing would be done.

In the end, Miller decided that he would have to find a way of contacting everyone on the list. He assembled a team of journalistic colleagues to devise a way of doing it. They found it impossible to get the message through by phone, for the very good reason that if someone phones out of the blue to tell you your life may be in danger, you hang up. In the end, they used local journalists to meet targets face to face in the hope that this would persuade them to talk to Miller and his team. And that proved more successful.

It’s been a long haul, but it makes for a gripping story, which is why choosing to tell it via a podcast series was a shrewd move. Podcasting is a medium made for this kind of storytelling; if journalism is, as someone once said, “the first draft of history”, then maybe podcasting is the second. As a medium, it has a wider intellectual bandwidth than broadcasting, which has to address mass audiences, whereas podcasting can serve niche interests and make more assumptions about the listeners’ appetite for detail. People listen to podcasts in their own time, not the broadcasters’. And the relationship between author and audience can be more intimate because so many people listen to podcasts on headphones.

Kill List provides a graphic reminder of how the internet holds up a mirror to human nature. ’Twas ever thus. During the early years of the web, when there was a moral panic about online pornography, I naively suggested that perhaps the prevalence of porn might be telling us something useful about human nature; after all, pornographers are not philanthropists, so there must be a market for their stuff. (Readers were not impressed by this view.) Similarly, the horrendous torrents of misogyny on social media tell us something useful about men. It’s also visible in Miller’s list, by the way. “The majority of the cases,” he said, “were men targeting women, often wives or girlfriends. I think it says something about modern masculinity and what happens when people do lose control of a partner, and then lose control of themselves.”

In one example, an estranged husband, an American doctor, put in an order and paid to have his wife kidnapped, tortured and injected with heroin until she agreed to return to him. Welcome to the worst devils of our nature.

What I’ve been reading

Date with destiny
Increasing Returns and the New World of Business is a truly seminal essay by the great economist W Brian Arthur in the Harvard Business Review of August 1996.

Talking heads
David Karpf’s It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word is a magnificent blast against the baby-faced Savonarola of OpenAI.

Heated debate
A sharp essay on the Register website is AI’s Thirst for Power Keeps Coal Fires Burning Bright about how the technology that will “solve” the climate crisis is heating the planet.