Moving Bricks: Money-laundering practices in the online scam industry
globalchinapulse.net
globalchinapulse.net
And I love how the article gives the Chinese words for all the terms involved. It feeds my fascination for everything that is Language.
> The Chinese word tongdao, which we chose to translate as ‘gateway’, parallels the English word ‘channel’—a linguistic coincidence that shows the intermediary nature of these businesses, which act as a channel for the circulation of both information and money.
Exposition like this is so rare. I cannot upvote this article enough.
Bricklaying it is ...
[0] - https://www.wired.com/story/pig-butchering-scam-crypto-huion...
these are the epitome of all the use-cases of all the cryptos
Of course, now that most people have bought into money laundering, the goal posts are now getting moved that any attempt at privacy can be considered illegal.
You use or provide a messaging service that has unbreakable privacy - we'll make this a crime too!
Why should it be illegal to use a crypto tumbler/mixer service?
Oh because some people use it for crimes.
Then arrest the CEOs of gun companies, because guns can be used to commit crimes!
Based on what? Is 2008 not "today," because last I checked cryptocurrencies aren't illegal.
On the other hand...
Tornado Cash was made illegal. Pressure is put on exchanges not to service Monero.
Odd that it only happens to actual cash-like crypto?
These are untrue absolutes.
You could store cash/gold in an anonymous safe deposit, but FBI raid and steal this. You cant fly with large cash because again feds steal it. You can't carry it out the country in large without reporting it.
Crypto, same story, KYC at the exits and P2P offramp actors getting treated as 'unlicensed money transmitter' etc which again triggers KYC.
Quickly you realize it's about shutting off all the exits of privacy, not money laundering which only has increased cost consolidating power to more dangerous organizations.
Non sequitur. Banks generally have to have KYC to do business, though there are famous exceptions in history. There is no jurisdiction I know of in which as a customer not providing KYC is itself a crime.
The law here notes even some CFRs are criminally binding, the CFRs explicitly require certain identification.
What happens if the banks don't close it?
Example? Every one I can think of involved the bank not doing KYC, criminals taking advantage of it, and evidence at least some people at the bank knew what was happening. (Usually because authorities told the bank they were doing business with criminals and the bank responded by shuffling things around so they could continue doing that business.)
The difference is if the bank does KYC and the criminal uses a dark identity, the bank will likely get away with it. If the bank just gives each person a random number as their only identifier like the old swiss accounts, then they'll be warned sanctioned entities are using it and ultimately prosecuted when they fail to KYC (i.e. similar but but identical to CZ).
What is a dark entity? Have you worked in finance? Because if you collect KYC and accepted forged or faulty documents, the moment you figure out what's going on is the moment you call your personal lawyer.
Sure. If you're at a financial institution and accept that documentation, you're personally in for a world of hurt. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen, either due to someone being negligent, overworked or happy to look the other way. But if it's caught, it's not great for the individual. (The bank will survive after paying a fine unless it's systemic.)
Sure. But if the addict you mentioned's account goes from overdrafting every few weeks to holding millions of dollars, that should set off internal alarms.
Otherwise, what are you expecting? Direct taxation isn’t really compatible with ‘financial privacy’ and never was.
So you will fail the disclosure and the bank will flag you in the shared blacklist DBs, they close your accounts and you are out of the system. This is happening enmasse to people who invested in and cashed out of real estate abroad(asia/africa/sa) some time ago. I imagine it's the same with foreign stock markets. And you never know what will be required 20 years in the future, thus most financial advisors discourage "moving money around". They even have a whitelist of brokers, stocks and jurisdictions, anything outside that is uninvestable for normal people just because of KYC/AML paperwork requirements.
Do "we" know that's the only goal?
I've reported every digital currency-related gain or loss I've ever had on my taxes, but that doesn't mean I wanted the guy I bought my llama wool socks from to be able to trace my whole holdings. I know how easy it is to do. I learned how to do it in an afternoon.
Believe it or not, some of us just really don't think the world needs an indelible record of what kind of socks we wear, not because we actually think anybody will care, but because we reject the principle that buying socks should require a data record for third parties.
We might be weirder than you, but that doesn't make us dishonest cheats.
Is it? I thought laundering money is only illegal if it's covering up illegal activity. Otherwise how is that different from e.g. the shell corporations that mask the sources of their funds.
I very much understand that, but you missed my point with that constraint: the point was that if your objection is that legal underlying activity can constitute money laundering, then to prove your objection you need to show an example of provably legal underlying activity.
On the other hand, if your complaint is that innocent-before-proven-guilty isn't being upheld by courts, that's a fine complaint, but an entirely separate one from money laundering.
> What did happen in the case of CZs conviction is the state alleged that lack of KYC allows some actors with illegal funds to pass through, making weak KYC checks an element of money laundering.
In other words he did conceal illegal activity. Hence my point.
The point here is that an unwitting actor is somehow guilty if they did not do KYC. By your standard basically every gas station near the border is a money launderer, since they know damn well much of the cash they take and transmit is drug and cartel money.
And that's the genius of this line of reasoning. There is nary a dollar in circulation that hasnt been used in crime.
Not at all. I have authorised large wires without providing KYC or collecting KYC from the other party. My bank knows who I am. And I colloquially know the person I'm sending money to. But I haven't e.g. run them through OFAC.
You claimed "all large financial transactions or storage useful and active in commerce require KYC." That's simply untrue. It's advisable to ensure someone is doing their KYC. But not necessary.
Here's an exercise, look at the FATF black list and then start asking your bank about the process for wiring large sums there. A lot of this compliance is driven through FATF actions that drive any country that wants access to anyone touching dollars or us banks to comply.
So you've moved the goalpost from all large transactions to transactions with explicitly sanctioned (EDIT: listed) entities.
The black list is nominally about weak AML and other factors. It's an example I used because it's a list of places on the shit list in part because they may have weak controls on KYC.
FATF is a big driver if imposing KYC everywhere that wants to interact with a US bank or USD. I'm trying to show you if you actually try to wire somewhere with bad KYC I think you're going to have issues.
Sure. There are three black list countries: North Korea, Myanmar and Iran. "Almost all large transactions" do not happen with people in these countries.
I think you're missing connecting the dots here. Countries with large USD transaction dependence comply with KYC precisely because otherwise they'd not be able to easily accept your wire transfer. They were pressured into it, this KYC requirement that is largely invisible to you. And the threat is well if they don't they end up like Myanmar which I promise your bank will be getting to know what the purpose and identity of any transaction you have with them is.
KYC dominates because of a worldwide regulatory effort, do this or you'll be cut off and it will be a nightmare to trade USD. Almost all large transactions go through KYC or reporting because it's been made difficult and usually illegal not to. Were this not the case you WOULD likely see lots of large transactions to Myanmar as various rich people use it as a haven for stashing funds anonymously ( although I think Panama etc would quickly steal the competitive edge).
So-called anti-money laundering laws criminalize far more than money laundering, like financial privacy.
In any case, I would argue that the focus should be entirely on the crime that generates the illicit revenue, and not the after-the-fact laundering of the proceeds. When the focus is on the latter, laws are inevitably passed that mandate people to submit to warrantless surveillance of their financial transactions. The populace at large should not be made to sacrifice freedom and privacy in a largely futile attempt to track illicit criminal gains after the fact.
No useful money — i.e. no money that is unencumbered enough to be practical to use, and that provisions people with a modicum of protection against arbitrary state seizure — will give the state the ability to significantly prevent criminals from profiting from the proceeds of their crimes, merely by tracking and policing its flows.
So, obviously people know this, but it's important to spell out:
There is an explicit protection for keeping and bearing arms in the constitution. No such language exists for "financial privacy", in fact the fourth amendment explicitly says the government can search and investigate citizens' property, just that they have to get a warrant based on probable cause.
I'm just saying that there is no "right to financial privacy" anywhere. You have a general right to privacy as granted by the fourth amendment. And courts take that seriously. But it's not absolute and the government is allowed to unmask things for law enforcement.
If someone buys, let's say a bike, off an online marketplace, and it turns out to be stolen, they're out the price of the bike. It never belonged to them and gets returned to the owner. But it must be proven that they knew it was stolen for that to qualify as accessory to theft.
If you make any action which has the effect of obscuring evidence of crime, regardless of mens rea, into a crime, you will end up prosecuting innocent people. That's why this legal doctrine works the way it does.
Sure. This isn't how aML law works. Money laundering is specifically disguising the proceeds of illicit activity. If there is no illicit activity, it's not money laundering and it isn't illegal. Using a mixer or running your life exclusively on cash is not illegal.
Another UK example - a boat maker made incredibly high powered speedboats - that happened to be very popular with drugs runners. How how was he supposed to know what would be done with them? But still they end up on the most wanted list: https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/21291272.high-speed-boats-sold-d...
burden of proof should be squarely on the prosecution, period, end of story, don't force people to create evidence against themselves
Nit: it's oppressive and quasi totalitarian, not authoritarian.
But casinos (for example) have a tacit agreement with the "criminal industry" in general, that criminals will be able to inherently launder money through the cash-in/cash-out mechanisms of the casino, in exchange for having to play some table games (and therefore lose at least a small percentage of their money, i.e. give a percentage of their ill-gotten gains to the casino) to make everything look legitimate.
If a given business has a business model where it would not possibly stay afloat over the long term, if not for some appreciable fraction of its customer base making use of the business for money laundering — then the business is a "knowing participant" to the general concept of money laundering, even if they have never shaken hands with any specific criminals. Their MBAs knowingly design the business around enabling money laundering.
Come to think of it, this is a bit like the argument the US DOJ used to take down Napster — which actually, finally somewhat convinces me of the logic they used.
The Napster company's business model depended upon some appreciable fraction of its clientele being IP pirates. For everyone else, Napster was a vitamin; but for pirates, Napster was a painkiller. Napster would never have achieved spread without a core base of pirates to spread it. The Napster company's business model (presumably something like "make the software widely used, then sell ads that display in the client" or something) depended on — was planned around — piracy. Thus, Napster was in tacit collusion with pirates; just as most money launderers are in tacit collusion with gangsters.
The US just got uniquely "lucky" here, in that the people who bought up the casinos from the gangs, had a business plan that involved making Las Vegas et al "family friendly", which required moving as far away from the casinos' previous "gang-affiliated" image as possible. As such, they had no plans related to continuing to tacitly launder money for the gangs; instead looking specifically for that kind of signature and stopping it when they notice it. (The shared Vegas-casino blacklist exists 1% to stop card counters, and 99% to stop organized criminals.)
Elsewhere in the world, this particular story didn't play out the same way, though. So casinos elsewhere are still mostly money-laundering fronts. Not always operated by gangs, but often operated under the implicit business-model assumption of gangs.
What you'll see in your average casino-allowing country — Australia, say — are casino businesses run by regular people, who get very little traffic from regular gamblers (nobody travels to Australia to gamble), who do zero investment into making the casino attractive to regular people... and who instead concentrate all their effort on making sure that gangs — some even state-affiliated, apparently! — can continue to launder money through the casinos with ease.
Though, for an example of very explicit gang-casino involvement, there's the Golden Triangle, containing casinos owned directly by a particular gang — where it isn’t the gang members themselves (or their proxies) cashing in and out to wash money; but instead, customers of the gang’s drug business, cashing in at the casino, and then proceeding to lose all their money at the table, as their way of making payment for a drug shipment from the gang.
For example if a court subpoenaed a document while investigating a crime but then the suspect destroyed the document, you don't need to prove that the underlying crime happened to prove that the suspect attempted to conceal it.
One could construct situations where a third party with no knowledge of the subpoena destroys a document for ordinary reasons, after the subpoena is issued. That person is going to be very closely scrutinized, possibly charged, but it's entirely possible to be found innocent of a crime there. Say a corporation employs a document warehouse and the contract says that documents are to be destroyed after 60 days. A court orders on day 58 that those documents be remanded, but the corporation doesn't tell the warehouse, and the court is not aware that the documents are in that warehouse, so they don't send the subpoena to the warehouse.
The operator of the warehouse is not guilty of destruction of evidence in this case. The party at the corporation whose duty it was to produce the documents is guilty. Assuming this is a high-profile case, there will absolutely be additional subpoenas to demonstrate that the operator was not informed of the need to retain the documents, but mens rea must be demonstrated because shredding documents is not per se illegal behavior.
The US federal law of Money laundering relies on there being an illicit origin, which means it is impossible to be charged with just money laundering and it can only be a tacked on charge (but it may be the only charge that sticks). Merely obfuscating the origin is not a crime, it’s just stigmatized.
Ironically, if you are successful with money laundering, the origin looks licit.
The government acts like that never happens, DOJ always issues these pompous press releases about how nobody can hide in our financial system, but they dont know anything.
If by privacy you mean concealing it from the government then yeah, that’s generally illegal in pretty much any place that has income/capital gains/wealth taxes.
Authoritarian governments typically enforce fiat currency to monitor citizens, especially those with financial ties to anti-establishment entities. They couldn't care less if you're trading tomatoes.
Example? Despotic governemnts in the real world are kleptocracies. They use all manners of currencies because their elites spend what they can steal. To the extent we have highly-surveillable money systems, it's ones people freely engage with, e.g. the U.S. dollar and crypto.
China has semi-effective capital controls, at least on the hoi polloi. (There is massive leakage via Hong Kong and Macau, but that's for the hoi olligoi.) China also has a thriving cash culture, which undermines your tracking motivation argument.
Look at authoritarian countries broadly, however, and you find a mix of strict capital-control regimes to maybe something on paper but zero enforcement [1]. To the extent they have capital controls, it's generally to defend the value of the currency. Not for surveillance. Conversely, thriving democracies have enforced capital controls (again to defend their currency).
Capital controls are not an authoritarian-only policy tool. And the principal motivation for capital controls, i.e. requiring the use of domestic currency, across history, has been economic.
> CCP does not take "what they can". The tax burden is much lower than basically in any liberal democracy in the West
Straw man--nobody claimed the CCP or anyone else takes "what they can." Your metapoint is correct: China is the 34th lowest (7.7%) and the U.S. 184th (12.2%) [2]. But that number doesn't include what the elites extract [3].
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/what-coun...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ta...
[3] https://www.icij.org/investigations/offshore/leaked-records-...
Is what I imagine some spook told the lawmakers. Sarcasm aside, I believe it is control.
Because when this is made available in practice like 99% of the volume is tied to crime. 99% of users aren't criminals. But criminals use it at scale in a way that dwarfs licit activity. (Without tracking how much each person is using it, you can't cut off the scale users.)
This is like complaining about DUIs being illegal because we already have laws banning manslaughter.
> Why is any attempt at financial privacy deemed money laundering?
It's not. Layering per se isn't illegal. It's suspicious but legal, in the same category as carting a semi-automatic into a grocery store in an open-carry state.
> Why does making any tool that help law abiding citizens have financial privacy, also guilty of money laundering?
It doesn't. Practically every prosecution of money-laundering services included evidence of knowledge by the operator that their customers included people committing crimes.
The premise of DUIs is to punish a person acting recklessly. The premise of KYC is to punish a third party for not conducting mass surveillance on predominantly innocent people in case one of them commits a crime. It's hard to see how these are analogous.
> Practically every prosecution of money-laundering services included evidence of knowledge by the operator that their customers included people committing crimes.
This is quite a fig leaf for any entity operating at scale. The customers of any major bank will obviously include people committing crimes -- they have millions of customers. They also have thousands of employees, and then some percentage of them will be criminals as well. Expecting the intersection of these to be literally zero is an unreasonable standard.
More to the point, the underlying problem is what it incentivizes them to do, i.e. manufacture some opaque and arbitrary indicators and then conduct mass surveillance and punish innocent people for running afoul of secret rules.
You don't see how a bank not doing KYC and thereby financing terrorists and Pyongyang could be seen as behaving recklessly?
> quite a fig leaf for any entity operating at scale
Sure. It's why a lot of anti-money laundering isn't prosecuted and why OP's complaint strikes me as silly.
> conduct mass surveillance
U.S. AML law is actually somewhat terrible for mass surveillance. Records are held at each private institution. This is why, if you've ever been party to wire fraud, it takes the Feds hours to days to gather records. It's pull, not push.
The practical arms of mass surveillance are the credit/debit card rails. (And, increasingly, crypto.)
Even if that were a reasonable premise, the analogy would then be automakers not doing KYC and thereby enabling drunk drivers to have cars. Which is a much more controversial claim, and it's not at all obvious why carmakers should be the ones deciding who gets to drive.
Which is the reason the premise is unreasonable. Is it reckless for a general store to sell ski masks without investigating their customers? That's not the right place to address the problem.
> It's why a lot of anti-money laundering isn't prosecuted and why OP's complaint strikes me as silly.
Laws that are commonly violated and selectively enforced are bad laws.
> U.S. AML law is actually somewhat terrible for mass surveillance.
Just having it inside of megabanks is already mass surveillance, because then the bank is using it for things and the user can't switch to a bank that doesn't collect the information because the law prohibits that.
Moreover, the data is dangerous as soon as it's collected even if it isn't currently being centrally indexed, because its existence allows the central database to be created ex post facto. Turnkey totalitarianism is bad.
> The practical arms of mass surveillance are the credit/debit card rails.
How are you distinguishing this? Those companies are financial institutions that have to do KYC/AML.
The crime of DUI is not contingent on the actual facts, risk, and danger presented in a given situation.
The association with realized harm is probabilistic in nature.
Drunk driving is an upstream pre-requisite to drunk crashing.
I’m trying to understand this. It is well documented that consuming alcohol impairs thinking, reaction time, motor function, etc. How is the decision to drive a multi-thousand pound vehicle in the proximity of other humans while in that state not itself reckless?
You seem to be arguing that the problem primarily exists when some percentage of impaired drivers start to drive recklessly. But given the baseline impairment, how is the act of driving not inherently reckless?
Drunk driving crashes don’t just happen because someone decided to go crazy and drive 130mph or something similar. They also happen because the impaired person fails at basic aspects of driving like staying in their lane, stopping in time, seeing pedestrians, etc.
> The crime of DUI is not contingent on the actual facts, risk, and danger presented in a given situation.
DUI is a crime based on the fact that people driving under the influence are significantly more likely to harm others, and the baseline risk is high enough to make driving in such a state unacceptable. Even with laws in place banning it, alcohol is a leading cause of vehicle related deaths and there are quite a few of them every year.
It seem problematic to argue that these laws aren’t based on actual facts and real danger when both are well documented.
> The association with realized harm is probabilistic in nature
The same could be said about almost every kind of harm you can think of. It’s unclear what someone is supposed to take from this statement.
A cop or the law makes no pretension of trying to evaluate if a driver actually put someone at risk in a given scenario. A judge doesn't care if you were alone on the road or how far you were going. A judge doesn't even care if the car is on or moving.
>alcohol is a leading cause of vehicle related deaths and there are quite a few of them every year. It seem problematic to argue that these laws aren’t based on actual facts and real danger when both are well documented.
I would say there is little systemic logic to the rate and severity of penalties. In 33% of pedestrian fatalities, the pedestrian was drunk. In 16%, the driver was drunk.[1]
Similarly, the common DUI threshold is 0.08 BAC.
Being awake for 17 hours (working late) is similar to having a BAC of 0.05%. [2]
Being awake for 24 hours (working a double shift) is similar to having a BAC of 0.10%
Simply talking on a phone while driving has been shown to be similar to a BAC of 0.08%.
Texting while driving is equivalent to a BAC of 0.19%! [3]
The fine for texting while driving starts $20, but the total cost can be over $162 due to court costs.
>The same could be said about almost every kind of harm you can think of. It’s unclear what someone is supposed to take from this statement.
Im just making the point that we we criminalize isnt as clear cut as one might think, and people often conflate actual harm, actual risk, and heuristically approximated risk.
More generally, I think the intersection with probability and criminal justice is fascinating, particularly the criminalizing risk factors. e.g. if we took a similar approach, what percent confidence would we need that someone will commit murder to preemptively lock them up based on risk.
https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/GHSA-Pedest...
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/work-hour-training-for-nurses/long... https://facilities.uw.edu/blog/posts/2016/07/26/texting-and-...
On average, drunk driving obviously poses more risk than regular driving. However, drunk driving isnt always risky, and does not necessarily or uniformly put others at risk at the factual case by case level.
Edit: I think this makes it an interesting intersection between probability, heuristics, and criminal justice. It highlights the difference between a categorical model of the world, and reality, i.e. Probability is an abstraction and property of the model, not the object, in a deterministic universe.
Otherwise I’m not sure how to resolve the contradiction between “drunk driving … poses more risk than regular driving” and “drunk driving isn’t always risky.”
You’re right to wonder how a system based on civil justifiability principles that include concretized injury also allows criminal penalty for risk without harm.
In my excerpt you quoted, I meant what I said, and added an edit that might help.
On average, drunk drivers are more risky than sober drivers. However an individual is not the average. The more information you have about an individual circumstance, the more it can diverge from the average of the model.
For example, for the average smoker, the lifetime risk of developing lung cancer is typically estimated to be around 10% to 20%.
If you know the smoker is 80 years old, the chance they will get lung cancer in their lifetime is much lower.
If that 80 year old smoker is in an airplane barreling towards a mountain, their chance of getting lung cancer in their lifetime is 0% and less than an average non-smoker.
The same is true for anything described by risk (like drunk driving). If you plug in enough details around the circumstance, the risk changes. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down.
>You’re right to wonder how a system based on civil justifiability principles that include concretized injury also allows criminal penalty for risk without harm.
Thats a big part of what I was thinking. Drunk drivers can cause tremendous damage, and make up a clear portion of vehicle accidents, but I think the actual chance of accident per individual drunk trip is quite low in terms of percent. Lets say for argument it is 5%, which I think is very conservative.
If we were to use all data available, I wonder how well something like future violent crime could be predicted. At what point is that a rationale for incarceration based on risk alone? For context, the Average recidivism rate for the category of violent instant felons (spontaneous violence) is over 60%. Average recidivism rate for groups with particularly serious criminal records (Criminal History Category VI ) are over 85%![1 pg 14], and that is without all of the invasive but theoretically available information like psychological reports, medical records, race, income, and family history, ect.
What are the implications here for the viability of criminalizing risk without harm. I know these two cases are not the same, but I am still processing the differences, to see what distinctions can be made. Surely we shouldn't incarcerate based on risk alone. I suppose that is why I am posting these provocative but good faith questions.
https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
I'm struggling to see how you could truly analyze the additional risk of being > .08 as zero but 1) I expect you're about to make an example and 2) I reckon the example is out there.
A one foot journey on a flat road during the day in good weather seems a bit degenerate, no?
Your "at what point is that a rationale for incarceration based on risk alone" reminds me a little of banning fireworks. We're not banning fireworks because we hate fun, we're banning them because of the risk of a deleterious effect that is not possible without an explosive. Do we incarcerate for fireworks possession? We usually do not. This is a thing that is worth thinking about.
I guess you could say we're not imprisoning because of the risk; we're imprisoning because drunk drivers are unable to follow a very bright line rule. Why would I be imprisoned for driving 180 mph? Same reason.
Hell, being drunk just sitting in a parked, no ignition driver seat is illegal in some places.
Not sure how the second one is reckless in this context.
But those laws are controversial for exactly that deviation from the norm, so it can't be held up as an instance of a widely agreed upon law which is uncontroversial to emulate.
If anything, the consensus is we need harsher DUI laws and enforcement.
Also, in general any kind of "people support harsher X" where X is Think Of The Children-related will be true, but that's a heuristic for discovering bad laws that should be repealed because of the known effect that Think Of The Children rhetoric causes people to support bad laws.
Nobody expects the intersection to be zero - not the banks, not the regulators. The rule is that banks must take prudent measures, and the definition of that has evolved over time (as financial crime has evolved over time).
Google "risk-based anti-money laundering approach" or if you'd like a more thorough introduction, listen to the Dark Money Files podcast.
I have libertarian sympathies too, especially since most AML rules were originally established to fight the war on drugs (my sympathies lie with the dealers, sorry). But I'm pretty happy to make life hard for terrorists, bad governments, and kleptocrats - who, unlike the characters in Reefer Madness, are not just bogeymen.
Any suspicion toward a US citizen for open-carrying a semi-automatic weapon (which you realize is like half of the handguns in circulation, right?) is entirely due to one's own prejudice and misconceptions. It is objectively not suspicious. The individual is openly carrying it, not hiding it. Concealed carry should not be suspicious either, but open carry should be less suspicious.
This would be a good moment to examine your biases against a fundamentally protected human right as recognized by our constitution.
It literally couldn't be any more suspicious. Carrying a jar of bees into a public space isn't illegal either but I'd be very suspicious of anyone doing it, and it doesn't even need any special protection in the constitution.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean you have to be completely and unquestionably accepting of it in public spaces.
Nothing should be suspicious about exercising any of your rights as recognized by the US bill of rights and other constitutional amendments. Any of them. You can choose to be suspicious, but again that's a product of your own misconceptions. A gun is not a jar of bees. I'm not interested in debating straw man arguments. If you have a real argument to make, I'm all ears.
If you are just suspicious of anything "dangerous" without appropriate context then I question your peace of mind.
I was raised around law-abiding gun owners and have never felt unsafe in the presence of a firearm under normal circumstances provided the wielder is not intoxicated or otherwise exhibiting alarming behavior. It sounds like you just aren't used to guns.
I wouldn’t describe any of them as legal scholars. Their knowledge extended to two amendments and not much more. I wouldn’t describe many of them as confident or brave either.
They could angry post with the best of them though. Loved arguments.
Concealed carry > open carry > no carry
The fact that concealed carry is undetectable and indiscernible from no carry does mean it is free from suspicion.
As a 2A proponent, a protected right is no protection from bias or suspicion. If I see an open carry in a strange context, I will wonder WTF they are doing.
A friend of mine was open-carrying his pistol in his holster once and stopped at Walmart for some groceries. A woman called the police on him and claimed he was waving his gun around and threatening people.
So the police show up, talk to both of them, thankfully didn't shoot my friend, reviewed the footage and ended up arresting the woman for making a false 911 call.
Things like this give me little sympathy for people who find someone wanting to be safe in public "suspicious".
That said, I think there's a difference between being suspicious and keeping your head on a swivel vs freaking out, calling the cops, or taking radical action
Ummm. Taxes?
Money laundering is very clearly accounting fraud. If embezzlement is a crime, then money laundering is just embezzlement in reverse.
I feel like you are down an absolutist rabbithole about privacy. There are certain practical limits to privacy. You cannot blight yourself from other people's vision. You cannot operate in a society (whether it be grocery shopping, owning property, driving a car) without existing in some form. "Privacy" only makes sense in the context and is not some maximalist ideal that you can apply to any situation.
Why should guns be illegal, we already have a crime against killing.
Breathtakingly idiotic.
My point is that the argument "the underlying activity is already illegal so the things that make it possible shouldn't be ", is stupid. It comes from a place of ideology. The ideology of "let's organize everything as they should be, not how they are". So I presented a similar arguments (with guns) which I hoped everyone here would see is a good one. And you did, so task successful! :-)
The logic being that an object which can be used for murder should be outlawed by virtue of the fact that it can be used for murder, such as a monkey wrench or a kitchen knife.
Like it or not, some people have a use for guns that doesn’t involve violence and it’s reasonable to allow non-violent uses for things when such a use exists.
> the underlying activity is already illegal so the things that make it possible [should also] be
Oh! It’s like how I could commit criminal fraud by telling a lie in an email and, therefore: SSDs, routers, modems, keyboards, speech; all outlawed because they can be used for crime.
It’s just like how I can launder money by keeping my financial life private and therefore a private financial life should be outlawed. I hope you can see why one might reject this line of reasoning. Indeed, the underlying activity is already illegal so things that make it possible don’t need to be.
That is not “breathtakingly idiotic”.
There's nothing imaginary about trying to hide money that you stole from someone, so that it can't be taken back from you.
It seems they only describe that Telegram has been used extensively by criminals for the same reasons everyone else use it:
Great ux, reasonable privacy (for what we needed).
Note: all that is in a flux now. Personally I trust Telegram less now as it seems the same exceptions the French has made for themselves can also be used by russia or any other terrorist regime.
I have however thought that the actual reason was because Russia depends on it.
They seriously even use it to coordinate artillery strikes although lately I have seen evidence they now sometimes use Discord.
I am not sure, and being convinced that Pavel Durov has actually visited Russia several times the last few years make me question my assumptions.
However I still see Russian opposition being more scared now after Pavels visit to France because now the terms of service has been updated to tell us that they will ahare our ip address and phone number with law enforcement if they feel compelled to or something to that effect.
If it is actual indiscriminate bombing or targeting of civilian targets not used in war crimes, human shields, storing military equipment & munitions, command& control, etc., then yes.
This is rather clearly described in the laws of war.
If militants hides behind civilians or use civilians as shields for military infrastructure, the lives of the civilians is their responsibility.
This might seem counterintuitive at first but is perfectly obvious once you stop and think:
If it was legal to use civilians as human shields and it would shield your military infrastructure everyone would do it.
Because the laws of the war is so clear about it nobody does it except Hamas and they only do it because they know western media and commentators will blame Israel despite international laws being very very clear in this matter.
Everyone does it. We just call it espionage. That said, when a Western espionage mission goes awry and it results in collateral damage, the government doing the fuckery is properly blamed.
I'm talking about Hamas literally
a) putting missile ramps and ammo depots in busy areas
b) preventing civilians from leaving after Israel has dropped leaflets, called phones in the area and dropped noise bombs
I don't see how the west does anything similar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_raider
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vacc...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-talks-with-congo-and...
What made you believe that Russia hasn't had a firehose into Telegram's backend for the longest time?
Also because I see over time how hopelessly incompetent Russian authorities are.
Also (but this is more shaky, I never verified) because supposedly a good number of Telegram employees are Ukrainian.
That sentence is definitely in the "services like Telegram should not exist" camp. I wouldn't call the entire article a "hit piece" but the author is definitely trying to sway minds in favor of more government crackdowns on apps like Telegram.
> Her dissertation explores how the illicit market intersects and coexists with Cambodia’s political and economic systems in the cybercrime sector, breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence and intersecting with transnational business networks to form a global illicit network.
"Breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence" would seem a good thing only if you think that distributing violence more widely should be a social goal.
I think that a reasonable and useful distinction can be made between
"Breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence"
distributing violence more widely should be a social goal.
The second would be criminals.
The usual construction is:
- in order to have a peaceful and ordered society, citizens renounce the use of violence and interact only by peaceful means
- citizens of a city/region/country delegate the use of violence to the government (the "sovereign state")
- the government's use of violence is carefully circumscribed by laws and use of governmental laws outside these circumstances is forbidden
Which ends up defining government as the agent with the exclusive authority to use violence in a geographic region. And by extension has a monopoly on the use of violence, for the safety and freedom of all concerned.
"Breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence", in this interpretation, would be to say that some or all people have recourse to violence, and in the worst case are not restrained by law or government. It's in this sense that I think that "breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence" amounts to distributing access to violence more widely.
The consistent application of these ideas would require that citizens not have the right to resist government application of force. In my view, the second amendment is not a carve-out of (i.e. an exception to) this doctrine if it is understood to be applicable to resisting force applied by other citizens, not by government.
Sorry, English is not my first language :-)
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To try to explain were I come from in this discussion:
I live in one of the Nordic countries in the suburbs.
From what I know two of my immediate neighbors have firearms. I suspect there are a lot more nearby because gun ownership is very common and most people don't talk about it - I only know they have guns because they sometimes go hunting.)
Growing up I knew about three houses with complete, working assault rifles and emergency depots of ammo. (This was completely normal until a spectacular robbery were the robbers used stolen assault rifles early in the 2000s.)
Switzerland and Austria I understand is the same.
All three known as very peaceful countries.
From what I read most of the absolute worst crimes against humanity has happened by the government against the citizens, not by citizens against citizens.
I am aware of the risks of pervasive weapons ownership but I think of it as an insurance policy against much much worse problems.
So I feel quite confident that there is a huge difference between having access to violence and using violence.
Owning a gun doesn't break the government's monopoly on violence because owning a gun isn't violent. Firing a gun at a shooting range isn't violent. (Most people don't consider hunting violence.)
Reasonable 2nd Amendment supporters grant the state its monopoly on violence. They just want the means by way to revoke it. (Or, more realistically, make its abuse more difficult.)
Around here people are often very well armed but only military and politice are allowed to use firearms.
Power being capability and willingness. Guns give a private citizen capability, same as anyone who can make a fist. They do not extend to signalling a willingness to shoot someone. (Threats, on the other hand, are illegal. Partly because they're no fun for anyone involved. Partly because that crosses from potential to actual.)
Also this always get mentioned and everyone confuses encryption and end-to-end encryption.
What seems to never get mentioned here unless I do is that there is more to security than end-to-end encryption or not:
WhatsApp would (will? I don't use it since years ago) happily upload your data unencrypted (actually unencrypted not not-end-to-end-encryted!) to the biggest data harvester of all -Google if you or anyone you chat with enabled cloud backups.
Signal had months I think where they had a weird bug were tje client would send pictures to people without the user triggering it.
Facebook Messenger besides leaking all your communication patterns to the second largest data harvester also have this nifty feature were if someone reports your message an unencrypted message goes to Facebook.
Facebook was also the ones that suggested people uploaded nudes so the could "know what they should remove", wasn't it?
Signal also had a nasty exploit that would let anyone who sent a specially crafted message take control over the signal users computer if they opened the message in the desktop client.
Telegram is also the only one that I am aware of that has reproducible builds for both Android and IOS. For every other client you have to trust them. With Telegram you can (could at least last I checked) check out the source, build it and compare it to the version on the App Store.
What I mean is not that one should trust Telegram (there are things I use Signal for), only that when it comes to security engineering there is a lot more to consider than end-to-end encryption and HN really struggles to see this.
Signal I think is very good with the two major exceptions:
- AFAIK they don't publish reproducible builds
- They've (IIRC and AFAIK) at times had lower quality when it came to the non cryptographic parts.
So if someones lives depend on e2e-encryption Signal is the only recommended messenger IMO.
For following public news channels from Ukraine and the Middle East there is no alternative to Telegram.
And if I have to organize something and not everyone is ready to install Signal (i.e. all the time around here) I try to use Telegram. That way I'm at least not spoonfeeding Google and Meta at the same time.
If FSB sits on my weekend plans that is annoying but no big deal.
(I was however rather annoyed when I realized local police used Telegram a while ago. I think that was very irresponsible.)
Signal says it's had reproducible builds since 2016: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/main/reprod...
I realize now that while I wrote reproducible builds on both Android and iOS further up the thread I forgot to in my last reply. It was an honest mistake, I forgot.
Telegram is open source.
And has reproducible builds.
So anyone can audit it and verify that
a) end-to-end encryption either works or does not (but I guess someone had told us if it was broken)
b) it is not enabled by default
c) in the default mode data is sent encrypted to Telegrams data centers, after that you have to trust Telegram not to snoop in it.
Does not mean it is perfect or even good, but for its use cases it is a lot better than HN gives it credit for.
People who are critical of encrypted apps like to use Telegram as the chief boogyman but the real reason that Telegram is preferred by criminals isn't the encryption, it's that Telegram has a history of not moderating at all, allowing huge private groups, and refusing any cooperation with law enforcement or CSAM reporting groups.