The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs

The challenge with it is that this doesn't generalize to any shared principle and it's cynical realpolitik dressed up as network science.

I'd argue this paper is less a work of scholarship than an example of collusive, astroturfed, agitprop, where even though russia's oligarchs are an easy target because they are still new money and retain the taint of trade from the corruption that produced their fortunes, the authors are casting aspersions on highly regulated businesses that provide the financial rails for investing and preserving pensions and sovereign wealth.

The only reason you can insure anything or have long term financial instruments at all is because of special purpose vehicles that persist longer than the whims of a given regional governing party. These vehicles are infrastructure that provides financial stability for capital flows that facilitate social stability and growth. I remember the eurozone sovereign debt crisis', and to me the paper just looks like another (tawdry) setup for blaming "speculators and international financiers" for the failed technocratic policies of their peers own makings.

The approach of "going upstream," is guilt by association, and it's unprincipled overreach. The paper is entertaining, and I'm glad that the networkX python library has become so accessible that social activists can use it, but I think we should hold the authors to a higher standard.

Just make it legal to eat oligarchs.

AML is just the financial arm of global mass surveillance.

Completely agree, cash is great, am not aiming to reinvent the bus! There is though a push to remove it, and it's a bit clearer when we aknowledge the goal.

It's easy to say when times are good. Government basically sort of tries & does good. But as others have pointed out, America has some ghastly data-collection-against-the-people situations in the past 100 years alone.

For example, Ralph Van Deman[1]. After being instrumental in the Philippine-American war (1899-1902)'s military intelligence division, creating some of the first (and incredibly far reaching) catalogs of potential enemies & associates & basically anyone anywhere near-by & using torture regularly to extract confessions/information, he came home to America... to start enormous files as leader of the new Military Intelligence on anti-War, labor, human rights & basically any American standing up or making any noise. Or who happened to be a couple degrees of separation away. Sending under-cover agents out to report back with unsigned reports, working under a veil of secrecy, & calling them "enemy agents" for not being happy-dumb American's & advocating voices.

Among many truly awful things, this lead to the sheriff of Bisbee gathering a vigilante posse of 2000, taking over the telephone network, and then leading the group by a car with a machine-gun mount on it (owned by the local mines of Phelps & Dodge), through Bisbee breaking into homes & pulling people out of beds at gunpoint. The strikers were told at gunpoint to get back to work, and 1186 refused & were shoved into passenger & cattle cars & hauled 180 miles under armed guard. Van Deman is far from personally responsible here, but he is an early leader of the modern world in weaponizing information against potential or related threats. You might be innocent, but if you talk to the wrong people or go to the wrong place, suddenly you're suspect, and maybe men with guns will come into your house & put you on a train out & that's that.

Creating systems that resist the impulse to corruption is necessary. "Abuse of power comes as no surprise", is one Holzer-ism. And what's safe today may not be safe tomorrow (power changes hands but records endure). And I think there is some essential need for human privacy at some level, that it's a gross & disgusting world if humans are deprived of a sense of independent identity, are too closely handled from above.

My example comes from American Midnight, which is a very very very long tale about awful things the US did just 100 years ago. It's well written and as the title says incredibly dark. A huge amount of the book touches on the power of information. We've seen other horrific examples in other states. It seems essential we have privacy, that we give people a sense that they have their own lives to live, with free choices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Van_Deman