LATVIA LETTER:The person known as Neo has been embarrassing the 'fat cats' in a country with the EU's highest rate of unemployment, writes DANIEL McLAUGHLIN
IN THEIR hour of need the people of Latvia, the European country hardest hit by the economic crisis, have found an unlikely new hero.
Neo is the nickname of a computer hacker who has stolen millions of supposedly confidential documents from the Latvian tax authorities, and exposed just how much cream the nation’s “fat cats” have been guzzling while urging ordinary citizens to swallow crippling cutbacks.
Neo’s revelations have embarrassed scores of public officials and inflamed public anger at a time when unemployment has soared to 23 per cent – the highest in the EU.
His victims include the head of a state heating company, who was shown to have paid himself a 16,000 lat (€22,500) bonus in 2009, and top central bank executives who received salaries of 6,000-23,000 lats (€8,495 to €32,566) per month in 2008.
They trimmed their wages last year after the previously booming Latvian economy went into tailspin, but their earnings still caused outrage in a country where the average monthly salary is the equivalent of about €600, and people live with the constant fear of redundancy.
After publishing the salaries of police chiefs, Neo urged the police union via his Twitter account “to analyse the data and determine whether the salary reform is fair and to continue the fight against crime”. And to accompany his exposure of central bank pay, he wrote: “Rise up and take the power back, it’s time that the fat cats had a heart attack, you know that their time is coming to an end.”
Police and officials say they do not know the location or identity of Neo, who seems to have taken his nickname from the hero of the sci-fi Matrix films – a hacker who strives to liberate humanity from a computer-generated reality controlled by malevolent machines.
In a country where people feel powerless to oppose the decisions of an elite that they see as largely corrupt and self-serving, Neo’s actions have struck a nerve.
"If we were to compile a list of Latvia's most popular people over the last several weeks, the top spots would probably be taken by our country's participants in the Olympic Games in Vancouver, as well as by the person known as Neo," the Dienas Biznessnewspaper wrote.
Maris Kucinskis, the head of parliament’s national security council, agreed: “Judging by the overall reaction, it seems that Latvians are getting some new heroes – a sort of Robin Hood,” he said.
On the streets of the Latvian capital, Riga, there is no sympathy for the wealthy and well-connected officials who are the target of Neo’s keystrokes.
“Latvia didn’t save any money during the ‘fat years’, and that is the fault of the government. Those young men came straight out of university and into power and didn’t have any wisdom or experience,” said Wanda, a 54-year-old feeding birds in a snowy park in the city centre.
“I still have my job as a proof-reader, but I make very little money. The lucky people who still have jobs have lost all their little extras and perks. We are paying now for the fairy tale of the last few years,” she said, referring to the breakneck, credit-fuelled growth that accompanied Latvia’s accession to the EU in 2004.
Neo’s campaign has also gone some way to improving the image of computer hackers in a region where identity fraud is rife and cyber attacks are an increasingly common political weapon.
Hackers in Latvia were blamed for January’s theft of data belonging to thousands of users of the boards.ie website, including passwords and e-mail addresses used subsequently to gain credit on gambling websites.
A cyber raid on Citibank in the US last year removed tens of millions of dollars from customer accounts and funnelled at least some of the funds to Latvia.
The attacker in that case used a programme called Black Energy, which was written by a Russian hacker and used against Georgian government websites during the country’s 2008 war with Moscow, and against Estonian state and business websites during a 2007 dispute with the Kremlin.
There are even suggestions that Neo’s attack on the government may, intentionally or otherwise, help Latvia’s main Russian-speakers’ party take power in a general election this year; polls show that the Harmony Centre group – which is led by a politician who opposed Latvia’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 – is now the country’s most popular party.
An unnamed "expert source" told Latvia's Telegrafnewspaper that Neo may reveal his identity and endorse a party during the election campaign, potentially giving it a major boost at the ballot box.
“In the eyes of 18- to 25-year-old voters he is now a hero,” the expert said.