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Comment by tchaffee | Hacker News Reader

And if it's for human trafficking? Payment processors are made up of people, and people have to have the freedom of drawing a moral line they won't cross. The real problem as I see it is that payment processing is a near monopoly. Better competition and smaller players would almost guarantee that every transaction except the most egregious would have a willing payment processor. Diversity is so often the best answer over a one size fits all rule.

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How do you know it's for human trafficking? Are you deputized by the government to act as judge and jury?

If you think something might be for human trafficking, you report it to law enforcement and let them deal with it. They'll gather evidence, build a case, make arrests, and hand things off to a DA/prosecutor who will file charges. Or, at some point, someone will decide it's not human trafficking, or at least that there isn't enough evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and drop the case.

All that is just due process, and a payment processor should not be given that responsibility. Both because I don't think they'd want it (it costs money and carries liability), and because we shouldn't trust them with it (private corporations shouldn't be allowed to apply the force of law).

> How do you know it's for human trafficking?

It's a thought experiment. There are surely cases in life in which you know for sure that crime is being committed. What you're asking for though is that due criminal process be a part of denying a payment. Which seems extremely heavy handed.

If my payment processing company doesn't want to help sell guns, or help with human trafficking, or hell, doesn't want to support the meat industry, then I should be able to run my business according to those ethical choices. My company isn't sending someone to jail. They are just refusing to accept a payment. There is no need for due criminal process to refuse a payment.

Should it be illegal to start a vegan payment processing company?

> There are surely cases in life in which you know for sure that crime is being committed

These are the cases of having evidence, right? Which should be reported.

> I should be able to run my business according to those ethical choices. My company isn't sending someone to jail. They are just refusing to accept a payment. There is no need for due criminal process to refuse a payment.

And if two or three large businesses cover 99% of a given market (payment market), how about some anti-monopolistic legal protections? Them colluding to stop the meat industry, continuing your example, would be a monopolistic practice.

> if two or three large businesses cover 99% of a given market (payment market), how about some anti-monopolistic legal protections?

Yes, that's the actual problem. Breaking up the existing near-monopoly and creating a functioning market with thousands of competitors would be a far better solution than trying to force the existing payment processors to process all payments, regardless of risk or ethical considerations.

If you know it is for human trafficking, why would you cut off the payment instead of arresting the people?

Where did I say instead? You should do both.

Because arresting people requires evidence and due process, which is work.

If there's no evidence or due process, then you don't know.

Won't know what?

You don't know if the money was used for trafficking. Are you reading what you are writing?

Are you reading what you are writing? People can (and do) know things without having enough evidence to stand up in court. It’s how 99% of everything works, frankly.

Banks right now are denying transactions because they ‘know’ it’s fraud, based on ML models and probability and no other evidence.

If you require someone to not ‘know’ something until they have enough evidence they could prove it in court, they won’t be able to function. Even investigators don’t have to meet that bar.

> People can (and do) know things without having enough evidence to stand up in court.

But "people" cannot use that knowledge to deny access to money to other people if they don't have evidence that can stand up in court. Yet banks can. That is wrong. That is giving banks too much power without accountability. Yes, some of the entities they cut off will "deserve it", at least in your eyes; but many others won't. We already know how this plays out: it's the same every time a centralized entity wants more power. They claim it's to "protect" us against something, but it's really just to enrich them at our expense. Don't take the bait.

Since banks are the ones who control access to money, and banks are doing it, who are these other people that you are talking about that aren’t allowed to do it?

Banks are doing this at the behest of the gov’t.

Oh, and those sanctions and the like - what do you think they actually look like paperwork wise?

You seem to be arguing that what is, isn’t?

If you want to say that what is, is bad, then hey I’m not arguing against that! I’m just pointing out what is going on right now in front of us, and has been for a very long time.

> who are these other people that you are talking about that aren’t allowed to do it?

I don't know. You used the word "people", not me. If you just meant "banks", it would have been clearer to say so.

> Banks are doing this at the behest of the gov’t.

Yes. That doesn't make it right. The government should not be allowed to deny people access to money without due process either.

> You seem to be arguing that what is, isn’t?

No, I'm arguing that what is is not what should be.

> If you want to say that what is, is bad, then hey I’m not arguing against that!

Good! That wasn't clear to me from your previous post. If you agree that what is going on now is bad, then we're in agreement.

Sanctions are a different animal. I have no problem with a government producing a court order or other legal instrument ordering that some entity be cut off from the financial system. (Certainly sometimes this is done for political reasons, rather than cases where actual harm is being done, which is unfortunate, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect to be fully able to prevent things like that.)

KYC and AML laws require private corporations to deny people access to essential services for arbitrary reasons, without due process. These laws are garbage.

I don't think anyone is arguing that what is, isn't. They're arguing that it shouldn't be.

In other words, they don't know. They just have a fuzzy feeling, nothing more than that.

Would you be okay with the police being allowed to randomly enter your home and seize whatever stuff they want, just because they have a hunch? Or would you rather they have to get a search warrant first, which requires at least some form of evidence?

What makes you think I’m okay with any of it?

You might also want to look up ‘exigent circumstances’ and ‘parallel construction’.

The entire point of this subthread is that this way of doing things is garbage. Banks shouldn't be allowed to deny transactions because they "know" it's fraud, but we've allowed our governments to force them into the position of doing law enforcement, something we should not want them to do. But people who think the government should outsource its responsibilities seem to think this kind of thing is a good idea.

Similarly, a payment processor shouldn't be allowed to deny a transaction because they "know" it's human trafficking. Evidence of such a thing should be given to law enforcement, and due process should determine what, if anything, is done.

Denying a payment isn't the same as putting someone in jail and therfore shouldn't require the same standard of due process. Allowing a business to accept credit cards is not a basic human right.

If you don’t have evidence or due process, then you don’t know it’s for human trafficking.

And yet, people know things all the time without evidence and due process.

They think they know. Many times, they're right too, but sometimes they're wrong. That's why evidence and due process are important.

Evidence and due process are important for convicting someone of a crime. You're not violating a basic human right when you deny a credit card transaction. The requirement for evidence and due process should be far lower, if even needed at all.

> You're not violating a basic human right when you deny a credit card transaction.

This doesn’t work when it’s something basic like payment processing. It’s the same reason we decided as a society that people can’t “trust their gut” and deny housing to people based on the color of their skin.

Housing is a basic human right. However you can deny housing to someone because they belong to a hate group.

Running a profitable online business is not even a basic human right. No one owes you payment processing. Forcing someone to be a supplier to a hate group violates their basic human rights. If payment processors were discriminating against a protected class such as race or age then you might have a point.

The whole reason we have notions of due process and evidence is because people are very commonly wrong when they make these sorts of judgement calls from their gut.

We are talking about denying a payment, not throwing someone in jail.

It's not just work, it's accountability. That's what they're trying to avoid.

Both really.

And frankly, you can’t run a business meeting the judicial bar required to really he sure, not that the courts are usefully right here either. Did OJ Simpson murder Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman? That depends on which court you ask, and how many asterisks you’re willing to allow on the answers. And that took 10’s to 100’s of millions to get there.

The banks get the ‘privilege’ of being fined for transactions that occurred and were later judged ‘bad’ based on the results of a in-depth, very expensive investigation after the fact that determined they didn’t try to ‘know’ well enough who they were dealing with.

Pretty cozy for regulators. Pretty impossible position for banks.

> Because arresting people requires evidence and due process, which is work.

Such work is paramount in order to maintain the foundations of an accountable society. The alternative being suggested here is no better than witch hunting in the worst case, wherein certain groups/classes of people are barred from doing their business online just because of the sensitive nature of a given topic. (drugs/medicine, pornography, gambling, political donations, etc.)

There is no ‘alternative being suggested’ here - merely the current reality being described.

Doing business online is not a basic human right. Access to a fair trial and due process before throwing you in jail is a basic human right. Comparing the two is a major false equivalence.

Because you can’t arrest people that are out of the jurisdiction. It’s much easier to find the victims than the perpetrators.

It's odd to me that the way to combat this is to freeze money. Yes, money is the lifeblood, but that means you can also follow the money to the source. Wouldn't you want to do that instead of freezing it and killing the lead?

Depends on the case. If you already know who belongs to a terrorist organization then maybe stopping the money and limiting the ability to terrorize would be a higher priority.

Well, it looks like a lot of this is designed to make the job of law enforcement easier because politicians that seem "tough" on crime have better election prospects. Freezing the money is far more dramatic and provides nice numbers for said politician's re-election campaign.

Sometimes the people who own that money are out of jurisdictional reach.

> Payment processors are made up of people, and people have to have the freedom of drawing a moral line they won't cross

Not for services deemed important enough:

> U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who cited her religious beliefs in refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples

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