It is about KYC. This is how they get their foot in the door.
It is hard not to when you see awful people taking over governments the world over and stealing completely insane amounts of wealth from the people.
This isn't nickel and dime crimes. These are insane crimes that do damage to billions of people on scales you can't even measure. These people should honestly face life imprisonment, but they never do.
And how much privacy do you violate to stop bad actors? You're okay with AML laws, which are a form of warrantless financial mass-surveillance, so how about wiretapping all communications as well?
How about prohibiting end-to-end-encryption, and public access to strong cryptography? As money becomes wholly digital, you will need warrantless mass-surveillance of all communication to maintain warrantless mass-surveillance of all financial transactions.
Perhaps your downvoters (and mine too) in this thread would like to argue that it's a slippery slope akin to surveillance to accept AML laws which a priori purport to protect us from the effects of these crimes while only taking freedom further away and creating more space for despotic selective enforcement. I'm sympathetic to this argument, but only to a point. Another side to this argument is that AML laws should be resisted not just because they are right or wrong, but because they are ineffective.
My problem is while I may have sympathies to these ideas in theory, in practice, proactively addressing, enforcing and prosecuting money laundering is something just about every government has a vested interest in doing because governments fund themselves through taxation. I can understand the desire to limit government AML overstep and surveillance, but wouldn't that simply mean that we leave AML enforcement and surveillance to the private markets? Would it mean we somehow reform society so there would be no nee for money laundering in the first place because we've eradicated criminal enterprise in the first place?
I'll be the first to admit I don't have an answer for you. I'd say I wonder if the downvoters do, but I think we both know the answer to that.
This is merely a convenience they’ve gotten in a coincidental electronic transfer system that required those intermediaries. They didnt have it before and they wont have it after. These governments have not been granted any additional rights over money flows and as the intermediaries become unnecessary, it will be prudent for them to remember bot to waste public resources grasping for the convenience of warrantless surveillance. Their ability to implement seamless automated anti money laundering procedures and enforcement evaporates, and they would be better off unburdening people now instead of trying to push for a right they never actually had. They’ll have to create new tools to deter and prosecute whatever behavior they are actually trying to stop.
This does not bode well for your moral high ground