DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit Is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits

What of observed human history gives you any hope that such a thing will happen?

All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc.

I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.

Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.

So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?

If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.

How is that not No True Scotsman? You disagree with the outcome of the described libertarian structures so it can't be actual libertarianism?

The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business?

What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.

In order to make competition flourish, you require a strong government which squishes anti-competitive behavior.

Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”.

Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly.

I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.

Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times.

There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.

A major point of libertarianism is to tear down government structures that hinder libertarians from engaging in world domination and retain government structures that hinder other people from hindering libertarians from engaging in world domination.

Doesn't matter what it is in principle.

How is communism self-serving when, you said it yourself, the main concept is assigning resources to everyone?

All politics is self-serving in one way or another. If you disagree you are likely lying to yourself about your motivations.

The important thing is not to ignore your self-serving motivations, but to understand them and think long term rather than short term. Things quickly fall apart when everyone pushes for short term gain.

In the Netherlands the Nazis were able to exterminate Jews much more thoroughly than they had in Germany, because the Netherlands kept such meticulous records of the name and address of every Jew.

And everyone else, but the Nazis were after the Jews.

They say that and then act the opposite. The cognitive dissonance is astonishing. Consider the MAGA deep state narrative and how it literally now exists because of them.

Its one thing to not trust ones government.

Its another to do something truly effective about it.

Alas, the American people seem to be utterly paralyzed. Catatonic, even.

When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.

It's also clearly the wrong question for this decade. Private / public sector cooperation and all of the barriers between them that have been degraded and chipped away has left us with a very broken economic system that looks less and less like capitalism every day.

Which proves they don't know anything because the surveillance is barely related to the data centers.

Be careful with the shallow dismissals. There's often truth in the isolated statement while it misses the mark in context. Thus dismissing it directly will easily make you look like you don't know what you're talking about.

For example:

> you don't have a right to provacy in public

You don't. That much is simple enough to work out given various highly entrenched cultural and legal values that have stood the test of time. The problem is that a network of surveillance cameras isn't remotely the same thing as an unrelated individual snapping a wide angle photograph of a street that you just so happen to be walking down.

So it's more like we need (but currently don't have) a legally recognized right not to be systematically surveilled in public spaces. Or better yet to make blanket surveillance outright illegal (which would also resolve many of the issues surrounding adtech).

> the environmental concerns are overblown

In many cases they are. In a few they aren't. As usual some businesses in some cases are exploiting holes in the regulations.

I think public sentiment about surveillance is complicated.

People have a lot of fears about being done injury by rogue antisocial actors. Ranging from nuisances like dog shit everywhere, stolen Amazon packages and car break-ins to life-defining traumas like sexual assault. Broader surveillance, in some form, is the first step towards getting traction on these kinds of problems. Leftist commentators prefer the more "grass-roots" varieties like cell phone videos and word-of-mouth name-and-shame campaigns, but, in general, disseminating awareness of antisocial behavior and coordinating a punitive response of some kind is the goal.

I think this internal tension in public opinion pre-dates LLMs, and my personal opinion is that the surveillance applications of AI are secondary drivers of the bipartisan anti-AI sentiment, which is more about revulsion at the possibility of a future where not only "artist" but "mathematician" may be lost as vocations.

>they need the workers to be scared

See also: US healthcare (typically) being tied to your employer.

...you're not going anywhere, worker.

Do you really think the government only tells you things that are true?

That's cold comfort if you'd rather avoid a wrench beating.

In practice, KYC does little to stop any of that — but does do a lot to enable mass surveillance and oppression.

I just tried to pay my elderly neighbors cell phone bill here in California. I will spare you the details. Is all of this really required?

It reminds me of a time when credit and credit cards were flying fast. Large losses started appearing on consumer credit accounts by the tens of thousands. A casual look into it indicated that it was the employees and leaders of the sector, who read and understood the credit agreement that put liability ultimately on the company. The actual credit card employees, adjacent accountants, quick witted cons, all siphoning money from credit cards in very large numbers. Why say this? Actual customers with increasing security requirements were largely not at all involved with the growing fraud. It was the participants in the credit industry seizing the opportunity to steal, with relative impunity. Things have changed and changed again since then with scale, local rules, fraud detection systems etc.

The point of the rant is that ordinary people's rights are squeezed, privacy vanishes, routine humiliating document production and security, required because the people in the industry that created those is cheating.

Yes of course there is cheating on taxes over tip money, or no-show jobs for relatives.. but what kind of society is being built with constant oversight into ordinary people's activity ?

cash indeed

Who decides who we're sanctioning and who is a "terrorist"? Not me, that's for sure! My money is my business and I don't need the state nanny watching who I send it to.

The criminal money and money laundering has been researched since 19th century. It has stayed at constant 2-5% of world GDP. However the cost of compliance has gone up exponentially.

Today banks use $250B/year on KYC checks. You could fix the world hunger and still have $50B leftover money with this amount.

when terrorism can be defined as "having a book" and can result in indefinite detention without charge or access to an attorney maybe i'm not 100% gung-ho by default on everything labelled anti-terrorism

Why should our rights be restricted when law enforcement is impotent?

Hard disagree, low level crimes should not be so heavily enforced. A bit of blackmarket activity is not only beneficial but neccessary for any stable economy. It can't be allowed at mass scale, but you can't effectively micromanage every transaction and account for every situation for every single good or dollar.

It's rich coming from a person affected by ukrainian propaganda that is one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. Maybe you should back your opinion with facts. Citation is desperately needed.

Money laundering isn't even a real thing. It's an excuse for the government to arrest people who are linked to people who are linked to people who they don't like.

I suspect the argument is more the particular KYC required by American law, eg, as long as your bank can identify you as a particular customer, they shouldn’t be required to collect certain information by law.

Though if I were going to rant, it would be about how constructive surveillance, such as requiring banks keep certain records and then claiming those records aren’t protected from search because they’re third party business records and not those of a private citizen, would be a much higher priority to fix.

"regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties"

Any such kind of regulation is not compatible with financial privacy. Maybe you could argue corporations don't deserve financial privacy, but an individual should have the right to send money to someone without being spied on the same way they should have the right to send a private communication to someone without being spied on.

You know exactly what he means.

> the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.

There is much more to it than that. If that were all KYC was, it wouldn't need regulations, because banks would need to do it anyway.

I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for. And unlike, say, a traffic stop where when the cop starts fishing for things unrelated to the stop, you can exercise your right to remain silent, in the banking scenario the consequences for that can be losing access to your account, losing funds, and everything that follows from that.

Some of the info required by KYC:

* Why the customer wants an account

* Expected types of transactions

* Expected source and approximate volume of funds

* For businesses, the nature of the business and expected banking activity

* Source of funds

This can all translate into very invasive questions, especially when you do something that a computer system or middle manager thinks is suspicious, like sending money to your mother in another country.

> I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".

Yeah. This often results in ludicrous positions.

On the other hand, EFT flattens scale. Physical cash gets harder to handle in large quantities. Electronic money does not. It's equally easy to transfer a billion as a cent. So it's hard to get situations where small amounts have privacy and large amounts have scrutiny.

Explaining the intellectual position without saying that I accept it (my actual views on this are "it's complicated"):

Arguments against KYC usually go hand-in-hand with the belief that AML statutes are a constitutional overreach and grant the federal government powers that they should not have. The logic is that the government's only role is to provide a stable currency and enforce contracts, and that anything else is involving the government in business that it has no business being in. What's done between two consenting parties should remain between two consenting parties.

Note that such a position usually doesn't have a problem with banks having information on their customers, for the purpose of judging credit risks. But it holds that such information should only be used for judging credit risks, ie if you are just depositing and withdrawing money that has already been earned, the bank should be agnostic to this. And they also object to this information being shared with a central clearinghouse where it can be used to cut off all access to the banking system rather than just one specific bank who objects to the source of funds.

Call me old school, but money should be as free as the bank note - untraceable and anyone getting it could use it freely.

> I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it.

This is both a straw man position and begs the question. KYC laws aren't the option to identify either party, it's the requirement to identify both. The default throughout pretty much the whole of human history across cultures has been not having KYC laws. A logical and compelling argument must be made for implementing and unholding such laws.

> Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law?

The anti-KYC position is that it should be possible for some financial transactions to be anonymous by law.

> How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers?

While they would not be required to be blind, most have been and by default would like to be. Maintaining identity records reliably tying people to transactions is a significant burden for banks for exactly the same reason it would be an incredible burden on you to keep track of which atm/cashier/couch cushion every dollar in your wallet came from.

Some banks may nevertheless consider the option a net positive, and require their customers to provide identification. People would be able to choose if they want to use those banks or not. If the benefits get passed along to the consumer, many likely would choose to.

> How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?

Presumably by going after the criminal infrastructure handling the money before it passed a bank. Giving up privacy rights tends to make law enforcement easier, but it is a common and reasonable opinion that we should not be trying to maximize the ease of law enforcement at the expense of privacy.

Maybe true, but it's not dollar denominated. Cash is.

I no longer have a credit card (nor cell phone [nor email]), so everything is cash or crypto (USA forty-something male). Semi-retired datacenter electrician.

As for "wrench attacks," mine is mostly held in offsite multi-signatures, so good luck (to us both!) on your attack. Multiple hidden guns might help here.

This is exactly "information retrieval charges" from the film "Brazil"

> I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

I use this type of point all the time, and every time to blank stares.

Me> The Flock surveillance network is bad - it is an invasion of privacy and gives way too much power to people that should not have that power. It _can_ be used to solve crimes, and does. But so could not allowing anyone out of their house without a permit. But that, too, would be stupid and harm society

Them> _blank stare_ But.. it saved a child once.

I’m not sure that informants are the way to go either. More often than not in history, this has just been used as a tool to mess with the lives of people you do not like.

I think finding better systems with fewer false negatives and fewer false positives is very difficult and might even be impossible for many things. It might be my lack of imagination, but I often think about the measures taken to prevent child abuse. As I see it, you’re either going to get kids left in abusive situations or you’re going to have kids unjustly removed. Both are terrible. I’m not going to argue where the action bias should be. We live in an imperfect world.

I think preventing other crimes is similar. There will always be injustice on some side of the issue. And I’m not trying to argue that that means the status quo is great! But I don’t think we will eventually hone in a perfect system. Maybe just circle around some imaginary point, refining rules and processes until the whole thing breaks down.

What's wrong with that?

The comrades in the US want the existing system removed. So, for now, while it remains, they want no policing, no oversight, no enforcement because weak governance advances their goals. Later, when the system is replaced with their preferred system, they will want maximum policing, maximum enforcement, maximum purges of undesirable elements because strong governance advances their goals.

This behavior isn't a flaw, it's a feature.