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We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

federalregister.gov

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Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#371

Post by webspinner »

ryanisnan wrote: post #113
willmadden wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KYC in the context of internet services stands for "violating the 4th Amendment".

I don't disagree with your premise that KYC enables governments to violate the 4th amendment, but in general, for certain industries this is just generally a really good idea. Banking is the first industry where I encountered KYC, and it strikes me as being obviously good there. Isn't effectively the majority of what the Snowden leaks covered essentially violating the 4th amendment?

Well yes, so does FISA.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#372

Post by webspinner »

rangestransform wrote: post #160
ryanisnan wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your premise that KYC enables governments to violate the 4th amendment, but in general, for certain industries this is just generally a really good idea. Banking is the first industry where I encountered KYC, and it strikes me as being obviously good there. Isn't effectively the majority of what the Snowden leaks covered essentially violating the 4th amendment?

KYC basically means that the job of collecting evidence to prosecute potential (read: non-existent yet) crimes has fallen to yourself and your bank/cloud provider/etc., rather than forcing the government to collect evidence to prosecute a crime. Essentially an end-run around the 4th amendment and the whole idea of "innocent until proven guilty".

That's similar to what I said in my comment to the department. " Under the fourth amendment, this would be an unconstitutional general warrant. I thought we did away with those long ago. It does not describe the particular things to be seized."

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#373

Post by webspinner »

freedomben wrote: post #131
ryanisnan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we don't understand each other. I'm not giving a moral or legal judgement on what Snowden in particular did. I'm saying, the information he disclosed showed a vast and total violation of American's 4th amendment rights on behalf of the US government. This KYC requirement seems to me, at a glance, as being a small erosion of our digital privacy.

You're not wrong, but there is an important big difference between this and the Snowden revelations: The Snowden stuff was illegal and was being done in secret, and once exposed they had to stop. It was considered bad and embarrassing. This would be legal , and will set a strong precedent.

They still haven't stopped.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#374

Post by webspinner »

MmmKayWhySee wrote: post #312

I work on KYC systems at a medium/large sized financial institution. The trend of adding KYC requirements to more and more online services is troubling. KYC adds a huge burden to anyone trying to offer a service. Implementing KYC imposes significant burdens on service providers due to the complexity of identifying users across different countries and understanding varied regional regulations. You end up outsourcing y…

I know i'll be done with the internet completely if this rule goes through. I will not want to upload government IDs with inaccessible systems.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#375

Post by webspinner »

chadsix wrote: post #2

Submission Statement: We have exactly 4 days to leave comments to the Federal Government of the United States of America contesting the requirement of KYC by internet service providers. This law is not conducive to a free internet/society.

Yes please do! I did.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#376

Post by webspinner »

plus wrote: post #5
chadsix wrote: post #2

Submission Statement: We have exactly 4 days to leave comments to the Federal Government of the United States of America contesting the requirement of KYC by internet service providers. This law is not conducive to a free internet/society.

I ask this 100% genuinely, since this isn't a subject I've ever given any mind to. Why should we oppose this? What are the potential negative outcomes if this goes through? Can you steelman the argument for why people support this, and explain why you find the arguments unconvincing?

I know for me I'll have to stop using the internet. I can't take any chances. I can't upload government Ids everywhere I go, especially if the systems are not accessible with screen readers.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#377

Post by outop »

logifail wrote: post #356
outop wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did you last travel on a UK domestic flight? You definitely need government issued ID. You are suggesting that having to show any photographic ID is the same as having to show a passport . That's obviously silly. No one has to prove that "they are entitled to not show a passport" by showing British or Irish ID. This is a fantasy. On the boat everyone, British, Irish or other, has to show ID of some kind. No one…

> When did you last travel on a UK domestic flight? You definitely need government issued ID "a spokesperson for the CAA, said: “UK aviation security regulations do not require a passenger’s identity to be checked for security purposes prior to boarding a domestic flight, in the same way when travelling within the mainland on a train or bus. Any further requirement on behalf of the carrier to provide identification m…

Did you read the headline of that article?

You need government ID to get on a domestic flight in the UK. You also need government ID to get on a flight from the UK to Ireland.

As with the sea border and the land border, this completely invalidates your claim about what ID is required to travel between the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

You don't appear to have travelled between the UK and the Republic of Ireland, ever, or to have flown domestically in the UK since 9/11. You stated above that "they do not check ID on UK domestic flights", not "the CAA does not require ID but all airlines do". The first statement is untrue. Not sure why you are making stuff up in support of an urban legend about the UK/Irish border.

Even if there was a difference between the ID required to board a flight from the UK to the RoI and the ID required to board a UK domestic flight (there isn't - both require govt ID, not necessarily a passport), the situation at the boat and at the land border completely disproves your original claim.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#378

Post by Corrado »

chlodwig wrote: post #130
nonameiguess wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the industry-standard or NIST definitions of these terms. Something like Google Workspace Suite is Software as a Service. Something like Heroku (or Dreamhost or Wordpress) is Platform as a Service. Something like EC2 and S3 are Intrastructure as a Service. The distinction is renting out undifferentiated server space that a customer installs their own software onto. If you rent a VPS from Linode and instal…

Well, it may not be the industry standard definition, but it is the definition used in the actual regulation: ------- Infrastructure as a Service product or IaaS product means a product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or “trial” offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that…

> Wordpess.com -- where you cannot actually modify the PHP code yourself -- would not count as IaaS.

However, I am able to write a WP plug-in and install it on my Wordpress.com account. In that case, I am modifying PHP code and running it. Sure, it might not do "AI" stuff but it can do some stuff and I'm assuming that the law would transmute over time to include stuff other than "AI" stuff.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#379

Post by andybak »

reaperman wrote: post #104
rangerelf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely biased. I had no idea what KYC means. I don't think typing it out fully once at the beginning is too much to ask, is it?

In defense of the person who wrote the HN title, I’ve seen KYC discussed in front-page articles roughly weekly for the past several years straight. I’ve learned about as much of it as I care to know (and more, honestly) from HN comments on 1st and 2nd page posts in that time. In just the past year, I can see that there have been about 1,000 comments mentioning KYC, and about 21 1st/2nd page posts that are explicitly…

I've heard of it and I roughly know what it is.

But remembering the meaning of an acronym while scanning front page post titles without much context? No. My brain is pretty ruthless at evicting TLAs that are reasonably distant from my core areas of interest.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#380

Post by AnthonyMouse »

refulgentis wrote: post #333
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then banks invade my privacy, the DMV invades my privacy, etc. That is a reasonable and factually accurate statement. > There's always tradeoffs, I respect people's concern about them, and I wish there was a gentler to say it. The tradeoff here is astonishingly bad. Studies have shown that AML/KYC have an effectiveness of less than a fraction of one percent. They continue to proliferate because their largest costs…

I had to look up what "effective" means in this context, found a couple crypto blogs using it as a talking point citing a 2011 UN study, the study says less than <1% of money laundering proceeds are confiscated worldwide, nothing about the laws. Money laundering is defined as an estimate of any money from illegal activity, including tax evasion.

There have been more than one study and some of them more recent, e.g.:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

AML laws are completely ineffective. People can write long papers about why, but the underlying reason is simple. Money is fungible.

If Alice is selling heroin to Bob and the government knows this, they don't need AML laws to arrest them. If they don't know this, even if all of the financial records were 100% transparent and tied to the name on their birth certificates, they still wouldn't know this, because Alice and Bob would just claim the payment is for software licensing or personal grooming services or whatever they want to make up, and neither the bank nor the government has any way to know otherwise until they independently prove the underlying crime. Worse, Alice and Bob don't even have to pay each other. Bob can just buy whatever Alice asks him to with his money and then give that to Alice in exchange for the contraband. Then there is no financial transaction linking them at all.

The entire concept of it simply doesn't work. It's all cost and no benefit.

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