SUBMITTED BY — THINKER
What occurs to me is that those of us who are Libertarians have so much in common with the “Left” when it comes to surveillance. But, where they don’t yet associate Big Government with loss of privacy and the kind of loss of freedom expressed in this article, I think our end goals — basic, human rights — are the same. Thinker.
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When money becomes information, it can inform on you.
In 2014, Cass Sunstein—one-time “regulatory czar” for the Obama administration—wrote an op-ed advocating for a cashless society, on the grounds that it would reduce street crime. His reasoning? A new study had found an apparent causal relationship between the implementation of the Electronic Benefit Transfer system for welfare benefits, and a drop in crime.
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In the spring of 2014, the Department of Justice began to come under fire for Operation Choke Point, an initiative aimed at discouraging or shutting down exploitative payday lenders. The ends were, on the face of it, benign, but the means were highly dubious.
For many conservatives, Operation Choke Point was a new liberal offensive in the culture war, a backhanded attack on the Second Amendment. There was never any evidence that guns were the primary focus of Operation Choke Point, but the outrage continued, fueled by an alarming number of stories of firearms vendors being cut off by credit-card companies or suddenly having their bank accounts closed.
Alexander is a porn actress. According to her, she was profiled and discriminated against, and failed to receive due medical care. In the end, she developed a staph infection. She couldn’t work, and she struggled to take care of herself, let alone her medical bills, her apartment, her rent, her dogs.
Her friends and supporters—many of whom were also in the adult entertainment industry—started a crowdfunding campaign on the GiveForward platform, hoping to cover her medical expenses. She had raised over a thousand dollars when the campaign was shut down and the payments were frozen.
GiveForward said that her campaign had violated the terms of service of their payment processor, WePay: “WePay’s terms state that you will not accept payments or use the Service in connection with pornographic items.”
A few hours after Alexander received the notice via email, and posted about it on Twitter, she had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
It’s probably fair to say that the federal government never targeted Eden Alexander, and that her hospitalization was not a foreseeable consequence of that bare list of bullet points put out by the FDIC—the list that threw “Pornography” next to “Debt Consolidation Scams” and “Get Rich Products.”
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The poor may be disparately impacted, but the cashless society affects everyone. And so relatively privileged technolibertarians have long feared the cashless society, seeing it as an electronic Panopticon, one of a host of privacy erosions introduced by the digital age. This fear has motivated a number of innovations, from David Chaum’s ecash (described in his 1985 paper “Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete”), to the much-hyped Bitcoin protocol.
Backpage is a website that hosts classified ads, including ads from escorts. It is so prominent it has been called “America’s largest escort site.” According to several anti-sex-trafficking organizations, it is also a haven for sexual slavery. Some sex workers say, however, that if they themselves are prevented from advertising, they are put in harm’s way. “[H]aving the ability to advertise online allows sex workers to more carefully screen potential customers and work indoors,” writes Alison Bass. “Research shows that when sex workers can’t advertise online and screen clients, they are often forced onto the street, where it is more difficult to screen out violent clients and negotiate safe sex (i.e. sex with condoms). They are also more likely to have to depend on exploitative pimps to find customers for them.”
The nuances of this debate were never argued in a legislature or even a court of law. Visa and Mastercard immediately folded in the face of Dart’s letter, and stopped serving Backpage, making it nearly impossible for sex workers (and allegedly traffickers as well) to advertise.
For Judge Posner, Dart’s tactics were troubling. They could be easily replicated, following a formula of “unauthorized, unregulated, foolproof, lawless government coercion … coupling threats with denunciations of the activity that the official wants stamped out, for the target of the denunciation will be reluctant to acknowledge that he is submitting to threats but will instead ascribe his abandonment of the activity to his having discovered that it offends his moral principles.”
Posner made no mention of it in his opinion, but the same strategy had been repeated years earlier, when Senator Joseph Lieberman had convinced the payment processors to cut off WikiLeaks in the wake of the publication of the State Department diplomatic cables. As with Backpage, and was with Operation Chokepoint, this was a “voluntary” decision on their part. The financial blockade would only be lifted (partially) two years later in 2013.
In January 2011, shortly after the WikiLeaks financial blockade was put into place, the founder of WePay posted an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, calling his company the “anti-Paypal.” He wrote that he was particularly concerned with how readily PayPal froze accounts that collected money for good causes.
It had only been a month or two since payment processors—including PayPal—had chosen to blockade WikiLeaks. So predictably, one commenter asked a direct question about WikiLeaks.
“Theoretically, you can use WePay to collect money from people in your social circles, and donate that money to whomever you’d like,” he wrote in response. “That being said, we’ve intentionally tried to keep our heads down and sit on the sidelines for this one. … [W]e pride ourselves on not freezing accounts, but in extreme cases like wikileaks, there is always the chance that authorities will force us to do so.”
Four years later, the company seemed to have decided that a fundraiser for a sex worker’s hospital bills was an extreme case like WikiLeaks.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/cashless-society/477411/?utm_source=nl__040816
Always an eye opener, free society succumbs to the abstract values of numerals in a electronic ether, to be used as a weapon against you. Sorcery !
Gov /banks is already corrupt.Free people must not bow down under the bankers,politicians boot.Utah and Texas legalized silver and gold as a currency.Prelude to secession?Fed up!
A cashless system also has the advantage of forcing everyone into the banking system where no one unfairly escapes paying fees for the use of the systems money.
A sort of hidden and privatized taxation as such.
An advantage for the system, not those using it.
Even if we’re only 2% of the way towards a cashless society, 2% of the way down a 70 degree slope means: no-turning-back.
Gird your loins, Patriots and Christians.
like I said elsewhere, I’ve not seen anyone here who understands money, what it is nor how it’s created.
Re: mark branham says: “like I said elsewhere, I’ve not seen anyone here who understands money, what it is nor how it’s created.”
Really?
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q1prereleasemoneycreation.pdf
mark branham
Ok, ok already. We get it. You’re the smartest dick sucker in the room. Goody for you. But, no one here likes you, gives a fuck about you, or gives a rats ass about what you have to say. Go play somewhere else, asshole.
Or, how about you just fuck off … and, die. I mean that in the most literal sense.
I don’t know where else Mark shared his brilliant wisdom. Maybe Mark found a money tree.
If they outlawed cash, weed & booze would be the new cash.
@Iska Waran… don’t forget the high barter value of Toilet Paper. That is where I’m investing all our fiat dollars.
This is where Maslow got it wrong Suzanna.
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This is a fascinating, complex topic.
The cost of cash to the holder is inflation plus risk of theft. The cost of “cashless” – forced intermediation into the financial system – is inflation, service fees from the bank and forced taxation/confiscation.
I will leave it to the collective wisdom which risk scenario poses greater threat to our money and freedom.
Naturally, in a fractional-reserve banking system, the powers that be and the bankers are going to fight cash like crazy.
“don’t forget the high barter value of Toilet Paper. That is where I’m investing all our fiat dollars.”
Or Tampons.
Going too Venezuela Friday. In the vein of cash vs cashless, what currency should I take? Went with travellers checks to Chile and it was a ducking disaster. Any thoughts?
For a anyone who doesn’t know, some countries make you change your American cash to the local currency, and at shifty rates to boot. Best done before you go. I took a thousand bucks in ones to Paraguay and got fucked at customs.
Embolden? Embolden?
Larry Summers has recently called for pulling the $100. bill.
Indeed, we do KNOW where $ comes from. And the point would be to
install a new system. First we confiscate the ill gotten gains and pay
our creditors off. Then currency is created to run the gov. and people
use “credit” locally in local banks.
A transition period would be tumultuous…so what? The major sticking
point would be to end the socialist welfare system…tumult in that for sure.
The entire US? Not likely. Smaller communities can create the model.
The large multi-million population centers will not survive in their present mode.
@Maggie…the basic needs Maslow listed, (food-water-air-shelter-clothing-sex)
include toilet paper. It can be found within shelter and clothing.