Comment by ETH_start | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ETH_start | Hacker News Reader

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AML laws are misnamed. They're really something like "report every transaction to the authorities" laws, or "prove yourself innocent to your bank before you transact" laws.

I'm suggesting that the transaction layer is not the point at which crime should be targeted. Doing so requires the entire population being burdened with prior restraint where every they need to jump through hoops for every transaction, and need to give up their privacy altogether.

If criminal acts are generating illicit revenue, then those acts should be investigated and prosecuted. Investigations should be targeted, and done in a manner that respects privacy rights, with authorities obtaining warrants before searching an individual.

Real criminals and crime leave all manner of evidence trails. The dragnet surveillance approach to combating crime, that requires doing away with foundational rights like the right to privacy and the right to be presumed innocent and to freely associate, is not justified in any way.

I agree with the sentiment here, but financial transactions have to be recorded anyway as proof of who is supposed to have what. If people can be anonymous in these transactions, then they will be used for criminal activity. These scams and such are all money-driven crimes, so the 'follow-the-money' approach seems like it would be the most effective to find the criminals and also used as proof by prosecutors to the courts.

I may be misunderstanding your point, but there’s no law requiring individuals to report their financial transactions to the state. That requirement applies to banks, not peer-to-peer exchanges like cash or crypto. The fact that these regulations even exist is disturbing. They essentially allow people who work for certain state agencies to monitor everyone’s banking-based financial activity without a warrant, something that should never have been normalized.

These banking rules should be scrapped. They force people to give up their privacy and prove their innocence before they can transact. This is a blatant infringement on individual freedom, and it only benefits people who might abuse such powers, as agents of overreaching governments.

When it comes to fighting crime, there is no evidence that dragnet financial surveillance is effective. Criminals have been caught and prosecuted for centuries without the state needing to track every transaction. And since these laws were implemented, there is no evidence they have reduced the volume of financially motivated crime. Organized crime generates hundreds of billions of dollars worth of illicit revenue each year, despite all of the privacy that has been sacrificed.

There are far more focused ways to go after criminals without invading the privacy of the entire population. Law enforcement can geotrack scam websites, use undercover agents to gather evidence, and subpoena social media companies to get the information they need. These methods work, and they respect privacy. There’s no reason to burden everyone with blanket surveillance when the actual criminals leave plenty of other evidence.

Privacy and security are not mutually exclusive. We should repeal these invasive laws and return to a society that respects and protects the fundamental right to financial privacy.

There are in fact laws about individuals reporting cash transactions, such as when entering a country you must declare cash amounts over a certain threshold.

You keep saying that there is no evidence that financial records have ever been successfully used to find and prosecute criminal activity, but I hear about these being the case all the time. A recent one being Trumps payments to the porn star.

> And since these laws were implemented, there is no evidence they have reduced the volume of financially motivated crime.

The counter-point to this is that since the introduction of crypto, the volume of scams has increased - think of those big headline cases like SBF. And of course those countless ones where scammers sieze control of like a hospital's computer system demanding payment in, you guessed it, crypto. If crypto wasn't a thing, then those scams would be much much harder and riskier to execute to the point many wouldn't bother. But with crypto it becomes easier and less risky and the volume of these scams explodes.

I absolutely support privacy rights, but I also don't want people to be scammed because the system makes it easy for the scammers to scam.

An analogy might be that we don't need bank vaults because the police can just find the criminals after they've effortlessly stolen all the cash sitting in the unlocked and unguarded room. Rather than making the cash hard to steal in the first place.

"A recent one being Trumps payments to the porn star."

Trump's crime was in how he reported the payment in a government form, not that he made a payment. So if that's what you want: more laws and thus more laws being broken so that the state has more justification to prosecute people, then yes, financial surveillance laws are effective.

Yes people have been caught using information gleaned through dragnet financial surveillance, but there is no evidence that this surveillance has reduced the total volume of crime. Organized crime for instance doesn't seem any weaker than it was in the past, despite the absolutely enormous sacrifice in privacy and free association rights that much of the world has been forced to endure.

As for crypto and crime, yes crypto crimes were not a thing before crypto existed. The same could be said of cyber crime. It only came into existence with the internet.

But this is just a phenomenon of moving crime from meatspace to crypto space. The pickpockets have just moved into the digital asset space. It doesn't mean a net increase in crime.

We need to go after criminals, but not at the expense of privacy rights. There is no excuse for it, when crypto scammers already leave so much evidence that can be used to track them.

Giving up privacy is giving up a free society. It is also creating profound risks of abuse of power by people with official state power, who gain the ability to search people's private financial activity without a warrant.

Well I'm just happy that people like you have no power.

So you would rather we all be under warrantless surveillance by the state? Looking at the historical record, do you think this makes us more safe?

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