The consensus is that there is a profound difference between slipping someone a dollar bill and slipping them coffers full of cash. We don't need to know where that dollar bill goes, most likely. We do need to know where those coffers went. Scale matters. Quantitative changes are qualitative changes.
Anti-money laundering laws may not prevent organized crime. But organized crime massively benefit from their absence. Solutions don't need to be 100% effective to be useful.
The difference between communications and finance is that finance is integral to the state. Currency and taxes are a core instrument of the state (even its capability for direct physical violence requires finance to maintain and exert). Even so, privacy only applies to SOME forms of communication just as it still applies to SOME forms of finance (though for the latter this is more often de facto than de jure). If you want true communications privacy, you need to build parallel systems that don't interact with public or compromised ones and even then there's the risk of someone taking information from one system to another and leaking it (this is why OPSEC/INFOSEC/COMSEC is such a big deal).
> Anti-money laundering laws may not prevent organized crime. But organized crime massively benefit from their absence. Solutions don't need to be 100% effective to be useful.
Yes but there should be a cost-benefit analysis. The current system of low reporting thresholds across the board and filing SARs on anything that moves does not produce actionable intelligence 95% of the time. No one is against BSA recordkeeping requirements for instance. I am against a system that treats everyone as guilty until proven innocent (thousands of people have had Paypal or Coinbase decide to freeze their funds indefinitely for "compliance reasons") and incentivizes "derisking" left and right. See https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/account-closed-how-bank-de-... (or https://archive.ph/D3amw).
UBO laws are a great example of poor cost-benefit analysis. Actual criminals will just get stolen identities or homeless people to put down as owners while the 99.9% of law abiding people have millions of unnecessary added compliance hours every year.
Anti-money laundering laws may not prevent organized crime. But organized crime massively benefit from their absence. Solutions don't need to be 100% effective to be useful.
The difference between communications and finance is that finance is integral to the state. Currency and taxes are a core instrument of the state (even its capability for direct physical violence requires finance to maintain and exert). Even so, privacy only applies to SOME forms of communication just as it still applies to SOME forms of finance (though for the latter this is more often de facto than de jure). If you want true communications privacy, you need to build parallel systems that don't interact with public or compromised ones and even then there's the risk of someone taking information from one system to another and leaking it (this is why OPSEC/INFOSEC/COMSEC is such a big deal).