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In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
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Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
>No, that battle is lost. How is it lost? Jurisdictions like New Jersey, Rhode Island, San Francisco and Philadelphia have legislated that businesses must accept cash. There are bills being worked on at the federal level. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4395
Lost in the sense of look around how people are spending their money. I'm very happy for that law, and hope common sense will prevail and cash will be around for a long time. But you can't deny that vast majority of money transactions in the modern world is cashless. Hence my point that the battle is lost - if you take away average person's right of using their credit cards or bank accounts, how are they supposed to…
Falling back on cash helps here, but you are not wrong.
It is an important matter! Needs to be worked through, rights established and enforced.
Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
#93It sounds like the author lives somewhere upper class. I've never been to a business that can't take cash.
many Walmart and other grocery self-checkouts began only accepting cards due to a ""coin shortage"" during covid, and it seems like they now have no reason to revert.
No need for scare quotes; it was (still is?) a real thing. My local rural grocery store has had a hard time getting coins for making change basically since covid started.
Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
#94The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…
The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. Agreed. Recently, I came across a coffee shop and a bakery that proudly displayed "We are cashless. No cash accepted." signs. Not accepting cash is a method of discrimination. It keeps people without bank accounts out of your establishment. The overwhelming number of people without bank accounts are minorities and immigrants. That's why in some cities it is illegal…
Right.
I don't think that they're even able to track this because coronavirus lockdowns meant that they had this massive trough in business anyway.
So now they'll never know that I just don't shop with them. I'm not gonna run around moaning, I'll just go to that cool Chinese takeaway down the road that doesn't have its' head up its' own arse.
It's actually kind of nice because it means I go to more down to earth independent places.
Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
How precisely do the police seize the assets of tens of thousands of people simultaneously? They can't. This is a completely different issue, one which doesn't go away if cash isn't involved. The police could just as easily decide to seize your car or your watch or your computer or the clothes off of your back. On a one-by-one basis. It's mass surveillance vs. targeted all over again.
It is called war and it isn't the police doing it then, it is the military.
The people out number the military by nearly 300-1. If you think a million soldiers are going to occupy the USA without resorting to obscene levels of violence (such that money is not your concern) you're a bit mistaken.
Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
How precisely do the police seize the assets of tens of thousands of people simultaneously? They can't. This is a completely different issue, one which doesn't go away if cash isn't involved. The police could just as easily decide to seize your car or your watch or your computer or the clothes off of your back. On a one-by-one basis. It's mass surveillance vs. targeted all over again.
It is called war and it isn't the police doing it then, it is the military.
I believe the point is that it would require orders of magnitude more resources - a prohibitive amount of resources - for an overbearing government to strip citizens of physical assets, vs. the ease and subsequent temptation of doing so digitially
Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
#97I agree that this needs to be taken very seriously. However, the author overstates his case significantly when he writes: > Doing this to someone—a small business owner in BC, a public servant in Winnipeg, a student in Halifax—who made a small donation to support the convoy is a clear abuse of power. However: > The RCMP, banking sector and federal government said Monday that account-freezing powers bestowed under the…
I actually looked into the incident with the donor's account being frozen. From what I could understand:
1. The person made a donation to the Freedom Convoy.
2. Trudeau signed the Emergencies Act, giving rather broad power to freeze bank accounts without due process or clear recourse.
3. The person's bank account got locked due to an unrelated reason (false positive on the fraud check system).
4. The person either didn't contact the bank, or the bank was ambiguous, so they contacted their MP.
5. The MP, that is generally arguing against the right to freeze accounts [0], used it as an example to illustrate his point.
So, key takeaways:
1. The recently passed legislation makes it possible to freeze the supporters' bank accounts.
2. It has not been done so far.
3. People are on edge, expecting it to be done.
4. Making the power less broad, or putting some provisions about basic life expenses could be a good idea.
Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
#98I'm really happy to see that many people from many places on the political landscape see "debanking" as a line that should not be crossed. A great point I overheard recently was that this precedent is likely to be used in Canada against indigenous peoples protesting resource extraction and other incursions onto their land. Now a blockade can be a "terrorist act," etc., and their finances can be frozen among other thi…
> I'm really happy to see that many people from many places on the political landscape see "debanking" as a line that should not be crossed.
It depends on the politics of the people involved. The Obama DOJ executed Operation Choke Point nearly a decade back.[1]
> Critics of the operation accuse it of bypassing due process; the government is pressuring the financial industry to cut off the companies' access to banking services including access to capital, without first having shown that the targeted companies are violating the law. Critics also say that "it's a thinly veiled ideological attack on industries the Obama administration doesn't like, such as gun sellers and coal producers."
Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
#99The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…
Go talk to Rohan Grey (https://willamette.edu/law/faculty/profiles/grey/index.html), who is one of the few people who cares about this that isn't also a private cryptocurrency shill.
Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
#100What happens when it's not the government doing it? What happens when Facebook's algorithms decide to cut you off from your friends? Or when Google decides to cut you off from your emails and cloud storage? When payment processors decide to kick your business off their network?
> Google decides to cut you off from your emails and cloud storage?
I seem to remember some articles, on this very venue, recounting horror stories of being deplatformed by Google.