I understand that folks here think that the general anti-AI sentiments that can be found in some of US culture are often misguided.
It's likely projection on my part but I have a deep suspicion that people understand that mass surveillance by the state is the main use case for all these LLMs, camera systems, and increasing large data centers.
In Norway, as an act of sensibility and kindness, prior to WWII, registers were kept at all town halls as to your religion. The point was, people wanted to be buried in the proper cemetery. It was a plus, people registered willingly.
Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers.
So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better.
People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better
No its much worse. At least democratic governments have some semblance of democratic accountability and of course some inability to work at scale. At worse they can just pay the private company, they generally will have lower capabilities unless they can hit an infinite money glitch (in which case they can use that to pay private companies)
There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.
You seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to become one of the 6 people that own everything.
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.
What of observed human history gives you any hope that such a thing will happen?
All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc.
I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.
The US would have thrived on any system because it started the game with a continent whose indigenous population was small, pluralistic, nomadic and technologically backward, and whose natural resources were abundant or completely untouched. The colonists had access to the technology of the leading power in the world at the time, and had imported slaves in bulk from another technologically backward continent to jump-start their economy by the time the US was established.
That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable.
Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism.
[1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
Doubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip.
After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.
The problem is, people who are the most spoken about personal freedom are the ones also voting conservative all the time. The libertarian square is still on the right.
By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late.
Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT.
In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. With the added irony of corporations saying data centers will create jobs, simultaneously as they run record-breaking layoffs and increase outsourcing. "Misguided."
Interstate transportation of marijuana is illegal in the US.[1]
But why is DHS doing this? Stopping interstate drug trafficking is DEA's job, and DEA is in the Justice Department, not Homeland Security. Homeland Security should be looking for illegal aliens and labor contractors who move them.
> Putting one of those participant’s phone numbers into WhatsApp reveals a profile picture of a law enforcement patch. A pawn with wings sits in the center, surrounded by lightning bolts. The patch reads, “Laredo Sector Tech Ops PITT,” indicating there is also a Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team in the Laredo Sector.
I get the vibe they're using ALPRs to identify drivers, and then going from there to find crime? Seems like criminal investigations should start with an actual crime. At the minimum, I would think that there would need to be some suspicion of criminal involvement to obtain a warrant to get financial records. Apparently this administration considers driving down the interstate suspicious enough to toss the constitution out the window.
We've long since transitioned away from "identify the crime and find the person" Law Enforcement to "target the person and find a crime" Law Enforcement.
The article doesn't seem to explain why the BP targeted these folks and not other license plates gathered by the reader. Presumably there's some pattern, right?
Shutting down the isp doesnt let them read what you've sent. There wouldn't be intensive government efforts to eliminate private encryption if it wasn't effective.
Did you know they can just beat you with a wrench anyways?
The "maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss they'll be appeased and stop" strategy fails when matched up against those who will never be appeased and stop.
With Monero it doesn't matter for future transaction privacy if it's KYCed just like it doesn't matter for cash. Financial institutions know you have purchased Monero like if you withdrew cash from an ATM, but then it goes off their radar.
KYC stands for Know Your Customer, the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.
I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it. Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law? How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers? How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
Explaining the intellectual position without saying that I accept it (my actual views on this are "it's complicated"):
Arguments against KYC usually go hand-in-hand with the belief that AML statutes are a constitutional overreach and grant the federal government powers that they should not have. The logic is that the government's only role is to provide a stable currency and enforce contracts, and that anything else is involving the government in business that it has no business being in. What's done between two consenting parties should remain between two consenting parties.
Note that such a position usually doesn't have a problem with banks having information on their customers, for the purpose of judging credit risks. But it holds that such information should only be used for judging credit risks, ie if you are just depositing and withdrawing money that has already been earned, the bank should be agnostic to this. And they also object to this information being shared with a central clearinghouse where it can be used to cut off all access to the banking system rather than just one specific bank who objects to the source of funds.
> I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
Yeah. This often results in ludicrous positions.
On the other hand, EFT flattens scale. Physical cash gets harder to handle in large quantities. Electronic money does not. It's equally easy to transfer a billion as a cent. So it's hard to get situations where small amounts have privacy and large amounts have scrutiny.
> the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.
There is much more to it than that. If that were all KYC was, it wouldn't need regulations, because banks would need to do it anyway.
I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for. And unlike, say, a traffic stop where when the cop starts fishing for things unrelated to the stop, you can exercise your right to remain silent, in the banking scenario the consequences for that can be losing access to your account, losing funds, and everything that follows from that.
Some of the info required by KYC:
* Why the customer wants an account
* Expected types of transactions
* Expected source and approximate volume of funds
* For businesses, the nature of the business and expected banking activity
* Source of funds
This can all translate into very invasive questions, especially when you do something that a computer system or middle manager thinks is suspicious, like sending money to your mother in another country.
I suspect the argument is more the particular KYC required by American law, eg, as long as your bank can identify you as a particular customer, they shouldn’t be required to collect certain information by law.
Though if I were going to rant, it would be about how constructive surveillance, such as requiring banks keep certain records and then claiming those records aren’t protected from search because they’re third party business records and not those of a private citizen, would be a much higher priority to fix.
"regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties"
Any such kind of regulation is not compatible with financial privacy. Maybe you could argue corporations don't deserve financial privacy, but an individual should have the right to send money to someone without being spied on the same way they should have the right to send a private communication to someone without being spied on.
The criminal money and money laundering has been researched since 19th century. It has stayed at constant 2-5% of world GDP. However the cost of compliance has gone up exponentially.
Today banks use $250B/year on KYC checks. You could fix the world hunger and still have $50B leftover money with this amount.
It's not a fair comparison. Money laundering controls likely have also been implemented since the 19th century in some way shape or form. Therefore, that 2-5% figure also includes the effect of those controls. This might just the natural equilibrium below which the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
Access to information and interconnectedness have also increased exponentially so it might make sense that the costs have increased proportionately.
Finally 200B/year would not solve world hunger if nefarious actors grift away most of that money (especially because you wouldn't be able to track them with out some form of KYC)
You also have to ask if money laundering is bad enough of a crime to warrant all of the overkill responses to it. At some point the medicine becomes worse than the disease. Lawmakers tend to get into these inescapable loops:
Crime X exists -> Try solution Y -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y0 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y1 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y2...
I think the problem here might be that while Crime by its definition might be the same, the way that it is executed changes drastically so Solution Y/Y0/Y1/Y2 are not required to exist in terms of severity (very likely solution Y was severe enough if you were tried and convicted of the crime) but they are needed because the way Crime X is executed changes (especially this Crime X)
I just tried to pay my elderly neighbors cell phone bill here in California. I will spare you the details. Is all of this really required?
It reminds me of a time when credit and credit cards were flying fast. Large losses started appearing on consumer credit accounts by the tens of thousands. A casual look into it indicated that it was the employees and leaders of the sector, who read and understood the credit agreement that put liability ultimately on the company. The actual credit card employees, adjacent accountants, quick witted cons, all siphoning money from credit cards in very large numbers. Why say this? Actual customers with increasing security requirements were largely not at all involved with the growing fraud. It was the participants in the credit industry seizing the opportunity to steal, with relative impunity. Things have changed and changed again since then with scale, local rules, fraud detection systems etc.
The point of the rant is that ordinary people's rights are squeezed, privacy vanishes, routine humiliating document production and security, required because the people in the industry that created those is cheating.
Yes of course there is cheating on taxes over tip money, or no-show jobs for relatives.. but what kind of society is being built with constant oversight into ordinary people's activity ?
Who decides who we're sanctioning and who is a "terrorist"? Not me, that's for sure! My money is my business and I don't need the state nanny watching who I send it to.
> Government should require regular, mandatory reporting by technology service providers to document abuse of their systems including financial support of violence, harassment, and terrorism.This includes implementation of mandatory financial abuse reporting requirements for internet services operating in the United States, including social media services, infrastructure providers, banking institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, crowdfunding sites, video streaming platforms, and the like.
> [These companies] should be required to investigate and report the details of harms and abuse of their service. There should be … penalties applied to services that refuse these tracking and reporting responsibilities.
when terrorism can be defined as "having a book" and can result in indefinite detention without charge or access to an attorney maybe i'm not 100% gung-ho by default on everything labelled anti-terrorism
They route through all kinds of intermediaries that handle the banking by proxy — eg, as we saw in the Panama Papers and similar leaks.
Reporting $600 in CashApp isn’t about stopping cartels, terrorists, etc; it’s about harassing sex workers and street dealers, profiling side businesses, etc.
I want crypto to work like cash so bad, but in practice it's too complicated for your average person and I'm not sure anyone has the incentive to make it simple.
Monero works like cash and there's nothing complicated to get the privacy. With QR codes it's not bad but sync time and 20 minute confirmation is a convenience proble.
I'm increasingly finding businesses that simply don't accept cash. Want a beer at the Clippers game? Can't pay with cash. Even a local bar near my house stopped accepting cash about a year ago - a bar!
I worked a little on a finsec program in the early 90s. I had an anonymized dataset with bank account deposits and withdrawals and credit card transactions. I don't know how complete it was, but dividing by the US population the total number of records made it pretty feasible that it was the whole thing.
I remember back in ye olde dark ages when "big data" was the hot buzzword people of a certain bent couldn't get enough of this kind of stuff. Everyone was jacking off nonstop to the idea that we could just hoover up everyone's data ad then "efficiently" or "proactively" dispatch enforcement resources. People talked all sorts of big talk about stuff like cross referencing people's Home Depot spend with permit requirements, identifying small businesses that don't have healthy enough financials to be fully compliant, cross referencing invoices and delivery receipts to identify overloaded trucks, and generally finding all sorts of ways to fine the crap out of people for the pettiest of petty deviance. They considered this a noble goal.
Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that such systems and tactics would be used to go after <checks notes> weed dealers and brown people.
"We're proud to announce today that we're rolling out a trial phase of the Torment Nexus, as made famous in the scifi novel and accompanying film entitled 'Whatever You Do, Do Not Create the Torment Nexus'."
I’ve been under investigation for money laundering twice in the last three years - not because I’ve laundered a single dime, but because I have no discernible employment and move large capital sums around the globe almost constantly, and my bank accounts and tax returns inarguably look fucking weird. All 100% above board - I just made some good investments a while back.
I even had the feds come knocking because they decided they needed to check I wasn’t trafficking narcotics. We had a nice chat, they decided they didn’t need to search the place, and six months later I got a letter confirming the case had been archived. Like one of the folks in the article, I had weed on me when they rocked up. Thankfully, in Europe, that’s basically just a “shrug” by law enforcement, unless you’ve got clear intent to distribute. From how it all went, they had quite clearly decided this was a waste of their fucking time before they even arrived.
None of this is a good thing, and none of it is terribly new, either - reporting on finances has been going on for decades, but the integration is getting tighter.
The main problem as I see it is that it has a horrendous false positive rate, and you end up with innocent folks like yours truly having to waste their time and energy proving that they are innocent of a crime that a machine dreamt up.
It does sound like you should have been investigated though. Like, this sounds like the (or a) system working. What would the alternatives be? Don't investigate for money laundering? Or have so much info that they can eliminate you as interesting without even having a visit?
No one who works for DHS or with them deserves your respect. Fuck these coward officers and their disrespect for The Constitution, the 4th amendment and people’s overall rights. I hope something tragic happens to them.
Deny, Defund, Depose the federal terrorist groups: DHS, ICE, CBP, PITT etc.
I understand that folks here think that the general anti-AI sentiments that can be found in some of US culture are often misguided.
It's likely projection on my part but I have a deep suspicion that people understand that mass surveillance by the state is the main use case for all these LLMs, camera systems, and increasing large data centers.
That certainly is my own worry, at least.
>mass surveillance
Its not mass surveillance by the state, exclusively.
Its also the potential for mis-use and corruption by criminal networks.
Plus, there's that whole degradation of culture factor. Sure, you trust your government today. But do you trust the government of tomorrow?
Anyone who thinks this is misguided is probably seeking to profit from it at some point.
And that is precisely the problem.
In Norway, as an act of sensibility and kindness, prior to WWII, registers were kept at all town halls as to your religion. The point was, people wanted to be buried in the proper cemetery. It was a plus, people registered willingly.
Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers.
So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
Think about it the way the US thought about them pesky Rooskies during the Cold War:
Don't look at intentions. Look at capabilities.
Mass surveillance? You could be right.
Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better.
People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better
No its much worse. At least democratic governments have some semblance of democratic accountability and of course some inability to work at scale. At worse they can just pay the private company, they generally will have lower capabilities unless they can hit an infinite money glitch (in which case they can use that to pay private companies)
They understand that they don't need to care as long as there are enough others getting eaten before them.
There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.
You seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to become one of the 6 people that own everything.
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.
What of observed human history gives you any hope that such a thing will happen?
All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc.
I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.
> I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea.
The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. And the US thrived on it.
The US would have thrived on any system because it started the game with a continent whose indigenous population was small, pluralistic, nomadic and technologically backward, and whose natural resources were abundant or completely untouched. The colonists had access to the technology of the leading power in the world at the time, and had imported slaves in bulk from another technologically backward continent to jump-start their economy by the time the US was established.
That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable.
Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism.
[1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
Doubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip.
After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
That isn't remotely what libertarianism is.
Remember Cambridge Analytica and PRISM?
I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.
The problem is, people who are the most spoken about personal freedom are the ones also voting conservative all the time. The libertarian square is still on the right.
By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late.
Age old story in human history.
> are often misguided
Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT.
In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. With the added irony of corporations saying data centers will create jobs, simultaneously as they run record-breaking layoffs and increase outsourcing. "Misguided."
It's projection on your part. The general public (excluding the "very online" subset thereof) is barely even aware of mass surveillance.
Not true. The major rallying cry in my home state is "no more surveillance data centers!"
Interstate transportation of marijuana is illegal in the US.[1]
But why is DHS doing this? Stopping interstate drug trafficking is DEA's job, and DEA is in the Justice Department, not Homeland Security. Homeland Security should be looking for illegal aliens and labor contractors who move them.
[1] https://federal-criminal.com/drugs/marijuana-cross-border-tr...
> Putting one of those participant’s phone numbers into WhatsApp reveals a profile picture of a law enforcement patch. A pawn with wings sits in the center, surrounded by lightning bolts. The patch reads, “Laredo Sector Tech Ops PITT,” indicating there is also a Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team in the Laredo Sector.
https://www.aviatorgear.com/p-52057-laredo-sector-tech-ops-p...
I get the vibe they're using ALPRs to identify drivers, and then going from there to find crime? Seems like criminal investigations should start with an actual crime. At the minimum, I would think that there would need to be some suspicion of criminal involvement to obtain a warrant to get financial records. Apparently this administration considers driving down the interstate suspicious enough to toss the constitution out the window.
We've long since transitioned away from "identify the crime and find the person" Law Enforcement to "target the person and find a crime" Law Enforcement.
>I get the vibe they're using ALPRs to identify drivers, and then going from there to find crime?
This has gone on for a LONG time, but the change to empower it with AI tools that are presumed accurate is the new amplification.
The article doesn't seem to explain why the BP targeted these folks and not other license plates gathered by the reader. Presumably there's some pattern, right?
The violation of privacy and government breaking the social contract is why we must keep developing encryption and cryptocurrencies.
In what universe does using encryption to evade the government function as a survival strategy?
Real life doesn't work that way. The government always has the $5 wrench. Or, well, the ability to just shut down your ISP.
It is obviously working when the government says it is working too well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49499394
Shutting down the isp doesnt let them read what you've sent. There wouldn't be intensive government efforts to eliminate private encryption if it wasn't effective.
If you're at the point where the CIA is beating you with a $5 wrench, your encryption is working excellently.
That's cold comfort if you'd rather avoid a wrench beating.
Did you know they can just beat you with a wrench anyways?
The "maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss they'll be appeased and stop" strategy fails when matched up against those who will never be appeased and stop.
This tells me you should always pay cash if you are having a beer.
And that's why need to keep using cash and non-KYC'd crypto.
With Monero it doesn't matter for future transaction privacy if it's KYCed just like it doesn't matter for cash. Financial institutions know you have purchased Monero like if you withdrew cash from an ATM, but then it goes off their radar.
KYC should not be legal to begin with.
KYC stands for Know Your Customer, the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.
I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it. Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law? How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers? How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
Explaining the intellectual position without saying that I accept it (my actual views on this are "it's complicated"):
Arguments against KYC usually go hand-in-hand with the belief that AML statutes are a constitutional overreach and grant the federal government powers that they should not have. The logic is that the government's only role is to provide a stable currency and enforce contracts, and that anything else is involving the government in business that it has no business being in. What's done between two consenting parties should remain between two consenting parties.
Note that such a position usually doesn't have a problem with banks having information on their customers, for the purpose of judging credit risks. But it holds that such information should only be used for judging credit risks, ie if you are just depositing and withdrawing money that has already been earned, the bank should be agnostic to this. And they also object to this information being shared with a central clearinghouse where it can be used to cut off all access to the banking system rather than just one specific bank who objects to the source of funds.
> I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
Yeah. This often results in ludicrous positions.
On the other hand, EFT flattens scale. Physical cash gets harder to handle in large quantities. Electronic money does not. It's equally easy to transfer a billion as a cent. So it's hard to get situations where small amounts have privacy and large amounts have scrutiny.
Call me old school, but money should be as free as the bank note - untraceable and anyone getting it could use it freely.
You know exactly what he means.
> the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.
There is much more to it than that. If that were all KYC was, it wouldn't need regulations, because banks would need to do it anyway.
I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for. And unlike, say, a traffic stop where when the cop starts fishing for things unrelated to the stop, you can exercise your right to remain silent, in the banking scenario the consequences for that can be losing access to your account, losing funds, and everything that follows from that.
Some of the info required by KYC:
* Why the customer wants an account
* Expected types of transactions
* Expected source and approximate volume of funds
* For businesses, the nature of the business and expected banking activity
* Source of funds
This can all translate into very invasive questions, especially when you do something that a computer system or middle manager thinks is suspicious, like sending money to your mother in another country.
I suspect the argument is more the particular KYC required by American law, eg, as long as your bank can identify you as a particular customer, they shouldn’t be required to collect certain information by law.
Though if I were going to rant, it would be about how constructive surveillance, such as requiring banks keep certain records and then claiming those records aren’t protected from search because they’re third party business records and not those of a private citizen, would be a much higher priority to fix.
"regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties"
Any such kind of regulation is not compatible with financial privacy. Maybe you could argue corporations don't deserve financial privacy, but an individual should have the right to send money to someone without being spied on the same way they should have the right to send a private communication to someone without being spied on.
KYC is necessary because you do not want for money laundering to be easy. Nor sanctions avoiding, nor terrorist sponsoring.
Why should our rights be restricted when law enforcement is impotent?
The criminal money and money laundering has been researched since 19th century. It has stayed at constant 2-5% of world GDP. However the cost of compliance has gone up exponentially.
Today banks use $250B/year on KYC checks. You could fix the world hunger and still have $50B leftover money with this amount.
It's not a fair comparison. Money laundering controls likely have also been implemented since the 19th century in some way shape or form. Therefore, that 2-5% figure also includes the effect of those controls. This might just the natural equilibrium below which the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
Access to information and interconnectedness have also increased exponentially so it might make sense that the costs have increased proportionately.
Finally 200B/year would not solve world hunger if nefarious actors grift away most of that money (especially because you wouldn't be able to track them with out some form of KYC)
You also have to ask if money laundering is bad enough of a crime to warrant all of the overkill responses to it. At some point the medicine becomes worse than the disease. Lawmakers tend to get into these inescapable loops:
Crime X exists -> Try solution Y -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y0 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y1 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y2...
> Crime X exists -> Try solution Y ...
I think the problem here might be that while Crime by its definition might be the same, the way that it is executed changes drastically so Solution Y/Y0/Y1/Y2 are not required to exist in terms of severity (very likely solution Y was severe enough if you were tried and convicted of the crime) but they are needed because the way Crime X is executed changes (especially this Crime X)
I just tried to pay my elderly neighbors cell phone bill here in California. I will spare you the details. Is all of this really required?
It reminds me of a time when credit and credit cards were flying fast. Large losses started appearing on consumer credit accounts by the tens of thousands. A casual look into it indicated that it was the employees and leaders of the sector, who read and understood the credit agreement that put liability ultimately on the company. The actual credit card employees, adjacent accountants, quick witted cons, all siphoning money from credit cards in very large numbers. Why say this? Actual customers with increasing security requirements were largely not at all involved with the growing fraud. It was the participants in the credit industry seizing the opportunity to steal, with relative impunity. Things have changed and changed again since then with scale, local rules, fraud detection systems etc.
The point of the rant is that ordinary people's rights are squeezed, privacy vanishes, routine humiliating document production and security, required because the people in the industry that created those is cheating.
Yes of course there is cheating on taxes over tip money, or no-show jobs for relatives.. but what kind of society is being built with constant oversight into ordinary people's activity ?
cash indeed
Who decides who we're sanctioning and who is a "terrorist"? Not me, that's for sure! My money is my business and I don't need the state nanny watching who I send it to.
Southern Poverty Law Center decides:
> Government should require regular, mandatory reporting by technology service providers to document abuse of their systems including financial support of violence, harassment, and terrorism.This includes implementation of mandatory financial abuse reporting requirements for internet services operating in the United States, including social media services, infrastructure providers, banking institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, crowdfunding sites, video streaming platforms, and the like.
> [These companies] should be required to investigate and report the details of harms and abuse of their service. There should be … penalties applied to services that refuse these tracking and reporting responsibilities.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/nonprofit-indicted-ba...
when terrorism can be defined as "having a book" and can result in indefinite detention without charge or access to an attorney maybe i'm not 100% gung-ho by default on everything labelled anti-terrorism
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481385
In practice, KYC does little to stop any of that — but does do a lot to enable mass surveillance and oppression.
> In practice, KYC does little to stop any of that
Source? The fact that it's not infallible doesn't mean that it's ineffective.
Here is a good book on the topic of ineffectiveness of anti-money laundering:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DVLLL1X3?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...
Podcast if you do not want to buy the book:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-09-08/odd-lots-wh...
They route through all kinds of intermediaries that handle the banking by proxy — eg, as we saw in the Panama Papers and similar leaks.
Reporting $600 in CashApp isn’t about stopping cartels, terrorists, etc; it’s about harassing sex workers and street dealers, profiling side businesses, etc.
I want crypto to work like cash so bad, but in practice it's too complicated for your average person and I'm not sure anyone has the incentive to make it simple.
Monero works like cash and there's nothing complicated to get the privacy. With QR codes it's not bad but sync time and 20 minute confirmation is a convenience proble.
I'm increasingly finding businesses that simply don't accept cash. Want a beer at the Clippers game? Can't pay with cash. Even a local bar near my house stopped accepting cash about a year ago - a bar!
Good luck with that...
https://schwartzcohenlaw.com/can-police-lawfully-seize-your-...
Civil asset forfeiture is banned in Maine, Montana, New Mexico, and North Carolina from a quick search.
Minority Report anyone?
unquestionably, which is weird, because you asked a question!
I saw a film about this…
> The DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows that Border Patrol is analyzing the financial activity of Americans to find people to pull over...
> It is not clear how exactly Border Patrol is monitoring Americans’ financial activity.
Can anyone take a guess how they are monitoring financial activity?
Buying it from CapitalOne like everyone else?
spending taxpayer money on buying the taxpayers data from credit card companies.
imagine paying someone to buy your own information to spy on you, pretty incredible system that we've come up with
Explicitly bypasses your rights too! Cops don't need a warrant if they can buy it with your money.
I worked a little on a finsec program in the early 90s. I had an anonymized dataset with bank account deposits and withdrawals and credit card transactions. I don't know how complete it was, but dividing by the US population the total number of records made it pretty feasible that it was the whole thing.
I remember back in ye olde dark ages when "big data" was the hot buzzword people of a certain bent couldn't get enough of this kind of stuff. Everyone was jacking off nonstop to the idea that we could just hoover up everyone's data ad then "efficiently" or "proactively" dispatch enforcement resources. People talked all sorts of big talk about stuff like cross referencing people's Home Depot spend with permit requirements, identifying small businesses that don't have healthy enough financials to be fully compliant, cross referencing invoices and delivery receipts to identify overloaded trucks, and generally finding all sorts of ways to fine the crap out of people for the pettiest of petty deviance. They considered this a noble goal.
Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that such systems and tactics would be used to go after <checks notes> weed dealers and brown people.
Be careful what you wish for I guess.
The people you're talking about probably still consider that a noble goal, though. In fact some of the people like that are CEOs of tech companies.
This comes straight out of Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism book. If you haven't: read it.
One more reason the bail on the Visa/MC network asap
To what? Straight cash? Or do you have an alternate network?
"We're proud to announce today that we're rolling out a trial phase of the Torment Nexus, as made famous in the scifi novel and accompanying film entitled 'Whatever You Do, Do Not Create the Torment Nexus'."
palantir?
it's called malfeasance
I live in Europe.
I’ve been under investigation for money laundering twice in the last three years - not because I’ve laundered a single dime, but because I have no discernible employment and move large capital sums around the globe almost constantly, and my bank accounts and tax returns inarguably look fucking weird. All 100% above board - I just made some good investments a while back.
I even had the feds come knocking because they decided they needed to check I wasn’t trafficking narcotics. We had a nice chat, they decided they didn’t need to search the place, and six months later I got a letter confirming the case had been archived. Like one of the folks in the article, I had weed on me when they rocked up. Thankfully, in Europe, that’s basically just a “shrug” by law enforcement, unless you’ve got clear intent to distribute. From how it all went, they had quite clearly decided this was a waste of their fucking time before they even arrived.
None of this is a good thing, and none of it is terribly new, either - reporting on finances has been going on for decades, but the integration is getting tighter.
The main problem as I see it is that it has a horrendous false positive rate, and you end up with innocent folks like yours truly having to waste their time and energy proving that they are innocent of a crime that a machine dreamt up.
It does sound like you should have been investigated though. Like, this sounds like the (or a) system working. What would the alternatives be? Don't investigate for money laundering? Or have so much info that they can eliminate you as interesting without even having a visit?
No one who works for DHS or with them deserves your respect. Fuck these coward officers and their disrespect for The Constitution, the 4th amendment and people’s overall rights. I hope something tragic happens to them.
Deny, Defund, Depose the federal terrorist groups: DHS, ICE, CBP, PITT etc.
Another headline to trigger the comrades.
Do you not realize that all countries monitor capital movement so that, for example, the rulings of their judiciaries are enforced?
Do you not realize last remnants of privacy died years ago?
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
Buy something or get out! /s
FUD - the article literally says they don’t where the data came from.