Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trade-of here is individual liberty vs what we know the consequences will be from allowing truly anonymous exchange. For all things in life: cui bono. Illegal operations (the vast majority of which are doing tremendous damage to society) stand to gain the most from anonymous money exchanges. So that's who end up using the service. So even die hard libertarians who value personal freedom such as anonymity a great…
>So even die hard libertarians who value personal freedom such as anonymity a great deal have to acknowledge that the real life consequences of exchanges like Liberty Reserve are a net negative to society. I'm not sure I agree at all with this statement. Replace "liberty reserve" with Bitcoin and I certainly don't agree that it's a net negative to society. Unless by "society" you mean the current status quo, in which…
How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
51–60 of 62 posts
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Umm, no, you shouldn't be able to do everything you want with your money. A payment processor has a fiduciary duty for its customers. So if you are sending $100,000 to Nigeria to pay for puppies, the Payment processor better stop this transaction to protect you form being scammed. Now maybe you are smart and savvy enough to be not scammed but an average joe isn't. There are many rules in the payment industry but KYC…
In actuality it's way worse than just being scammed out of your property. People are being deprived of their freedom and dignity, something even the most die-hard libertarian will find challenging about this "total freedom in moving my money anonymously" position. http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/americas/face-human-traffick...
The news has had many articles that say the strip clubs and whorehouses in or near New York City are filled with women who are forced to be there. Forced in the manner said here - "they travelled with an escort who held a gun to their backs" and so forth.
The news even said a strip club which I visited a few times, Gallagher's, was like this. It's just ludicrous. There's no way girls were forced to stay at this strip club. It's risible. I talked to some of the girls there before I read the nonsense article about them. Some were from other countries. They were there for the money.
There are very poor girls all over the world who would and sometimes do work in a strip club or whorehouse if they could make a lot of money. Just like girls in China go to work in Foxconn factories for the same reason.
With so many willing women, why go through all the trouble of hiring a full-time guard to watch three women? What happens when he goes to sleep? They pull out the gun when they travel around? It's possible, but highly improbable.
What is she going to say, she wanted to move to the US to make money doing sex-related stuff, then didn't like it any more with those people and still wanted to stay? These stories that people are in locked rooms with guards who escort them around by gunpoint with their families at home under the gun as well - it sounds like something a 21-year-old Indonesian prostitute who wanted a visa to stay in the US would say. The joke is that anyone would believe this. It's laughable. I mean what else is someone who knowingly came to the US for prostitution going to say? Her only option is to say that. Oh, and she wants to stay in the US as well, of course. I don't have the ability to say if her story is true or not, but it makes no sense. Every hole in the story is plugged by some improbably sounding story ("You were moved from apartment to apartment, why didn't you escape when they were continually moving you?", "Uhh...someone was holding a gun to my back, yaa, that's it". This is what she actually said. It sounds ludicrous).
Of course the shady nature of whorehouses in the US is helped by the fact that it is completely illegal in New York, unlike Nevada or European countries. If there were legal brothels, then business for places like this one would dry up.
The hypocrisy is the US helped drive Indonesians into poverty when the CIA helped an Indonesian coup massacre hundreds of thousands of trade unionists etc. in the 1960s. The hypocrisy is the US has a religious hysteria about sex. The hypocrisy is the US has laws on the book making prostitution illegal, which is what could create something like this theoretically happening. Women in poverty come to the US and work for pittance wages sowing shirts and pants together, but we never hear about how they have the gun at their back as they move from place to place and are enslaved etc. But when religious fundamentalists hear sex is involved, then some form of hysteria sets in.
Then we hear excuses for the PRISM Big Brother government controls everything stuff because of all this hypocrisy. It's a win-win for big money and big government - ban a woman willing to have sex from a man with money from conducting a transaction (driving it underground and allowing situations like this to potentially happen), massacre the Indonesian left and drive Indonesians into poverty, and then get support for Big Brother tactics to stop the invented tales of prostitutes who "escaped their captivity" but surprisingly "still want to stay in the US".
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite frankly, I don't care . They as executives are trusted to handle every dollar, every share. They are the stewards leading their company, making the decisions, creating the profit or loss. When they succeed, they take the praise and the reward. When they fail... it's too hard for them to manage everyone? What? The buck stops there. It must stop there. It is THEIR PROBLEM to control the misbehavior of those who t…
This sounds like an easy way to make sure nobody wants to be an executive of a major bank. Why would anyone want to take charge of an organization where the actions of any one of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees can get them thrown in jail? Do you have the ability to monitor that? Or anyone you know? Would you bet your freedom on it? Do you want bank executives to be the sort of people who play…
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#54Many of the largest banks in the world launder much greater sums and get away with the lightest slap on the wrist. Wherever money changes hands you will find ethically challenged people making a profit. Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-t...
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Money_laundering might be more interesting to a hacker. As I've discussed previously[1], Taibbi is not noted for being a reliable systems expert on the international banking system. The simple facts are damning enough without layers of editorializing cruft from an unreliable source. For example, consider the assertion that people need to go to jail for fraud in the HSBC case…
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
In actuality it's way worse than just being scammed out of your property. People are being deprived of their freedom and dignity, something even the most die-hard libertarian will find challenging about this "total freedom in moving my money anonymously" position. http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/americas/face-human-traffick...
I have seen stories about "human trafficking" in the news for a while. They tend to sound very unrealistic and are all tinged with either hype or hysteria, depending on the source. The news has had many articles that say the strip clubs and whorehouses in or near New York City are filled with women who are forced to be there. Forced in the manner said here - "they travelled with an escort who held a gun to their back…
Despite all the evidence to the contrary provided by human rights organizations around the world?
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen stories about "human trafficking" in the news for a while. They tend to sound very unrealistic and are all tinged with either hype or hysteria, depending on the source. The news has had many articles that say the strip clubs and whorehouses in or near New York City are filled with women who are forced to be there. Forced in the manner said here - "they travelled with an escort who held a gun to their back…
So, your argument is that your intimate knowledge of criminal enterprise and everyone's lives leads you to believe that anyone who claims to be a victim of human trafficking is a liar because it sounds unlikely to you? Despite all the evidence to the contrary provided by human rights organizations around the world?
The definition of "human trafficking" is mutable as well. Some people use it to describe women who willingly come to the US. In fact laws and proposed laws cover this as well.
Human rights organization....one of the most well-quoted is Human Rights Watch. It used to be called "Helsinki Watch". In fact, it's founder, Robert Bernstein is always criticizing it because he is even more right-wing then when he founded it as an anti-communist group. He is someone with an ideological axe to grind. Just like "Freedom House", a "human rights" group funded by the US government. Or the National Endowment for Democracy another "human rights" group. Most human rights groups are funded by the US government, or billionaires, or their foundations. In my mind, and many others minds, they reflect the ideological concerns of these groups.
Of course it's impossible to prove this woman didn't travel to house to house with a gun to her back as she said. It's just risible and ridiculous at the sound of it. These ridiculous fairy tales are said to be possible, and therefore worthy of attention, laws, and Big Brother PRISM as was the original topic. Amy Goodman and friend being almost beaten to death covering the massacres of Timorese by US-backed Indonesians - that doesn't bear much discussion of. That's very real, but mostly ignored. Or the CIA-backed murder of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian unionists. No, what is needed is this excuse for Big Brother, due to the ridiculous sounding stories of whores who - surprise! - want to stay in the US despite coming here illegally.
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the Bank Secrecy Act was passed alongside RICO. The target was organized crime, not drugs. Nixon coined the term "War on Drugs" in 1971, but aggressive drug prohibition in the U.S. dated back long before that, and the explosion in imprisonment as a result of drug prosecutions didn't really kick in until a decade later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Arrests_and_incarc... . While "financial crimes…
"organized crime" to the level that necessitated the RICO act only came about because of the war on drugs (in that particular case, alcohol was the drug in question).
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. The entire concept of "financial crimes" has only been applied in a widespread manner with the advent of the war on drugs, which many of us oppose for a variety of very valid reasons.
Actually, the Bank Secrecy Act was passed alongside RICO. The target was organized crime, not drugs. Nixon coined the term "War on Drugs" in 1971, but aggressive drug prohibition in the U.S. dated back long before that, and the explosion in imprisonment as a result of drug prosecutions didn't really kick in until a decade later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Arrests_and_incarc... . While "financial crimes…
Watch Ken Burn's documentary on prohibition and soak in all the parallel's to today's war on drugs: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
"organized crime" to the level that necessitated the RICO act only came about because of the war on drugs (in that particular case, alcohol was the drug in question).
While it's true that organized crime grew up during the bootlegging era, organized crime was on the upswing in the 1960's and 1970's, at a time long after prohibition had ended and before the modern drug war had started. Clearly, the fuel to feed organized crime existed without prohibition. Given that fact, it's hard to say that those organizations wouldn't have grown bigger and more sophisticated during that period…
Re: How to Launder Billions of Digital Dollars
#60All you need is a bank, no detergent necessary.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/02/tide_becomes_...