I don't disagree with your premise that KYC enables governments to violate the 4th amendment, but in general, for certain industries this is just generally a really good idea. Banking is the first industry where I encountered KYC, and it strikes me as being obviously good there.
Isn't effectively the majority of what the Snowden leaks covered essentially violating the 4th amendment?
>Banking is the first industry where I encountered KYC, and it strikes me as being obviously good there.
This is not obvious to me as my experience has been largely negative post-KYC/9-11 vs pre-KYC/9-11. I am a legal law abiding citizen [and voter!] and it's just added extra hassle on various occasions and then the background anxiety of knowing an institution with crappy security track records hold a photocopy of my ID. And yet all the things KYC was supposed to prevent still continue unabated: money laundering, terrorist financing, identity theft, and financial fraud.
I'm curious to hear why you think it's obviously good and if you were using these services before KYC.
The people who donated to the Canadian truckers' protest had their accounts frozen by the Trudeau regime because of KYC.
The problem is that there are no checks and balances preventing banks from freezing assets because they want to or the government told them to.
Banking needs to be a right, and unless someone is convicted of a crime involving the bank account's assets, banks and governments should not be able to freeze them. There can be exceptions for fraud like FTX where there will be a significant financial harm to other individuals if the assets aren't frozen, but what we have today is unchecked government financial terrorism against individuals they do not like, and now they want to extend that terrorism to speech.
I am familiar with KYC from a banker's perspective (at least that of a close relative who was a bank manager).
KYC helped them by deny-listing abusive clients between branches, or by allowing the bank to develop heuristics for things like allowing customers to bypass cheque clearing times.
From an end-user perspective, I've had no hangups personally but I do share your grievances about yet-another-shoddy institution holding a photocopy of my ID. My bank truncates passwords when setting them, and when logging in, without telling the user. It boggles the mind.
KYC basically means that the job of collecting evidence to prosecute potential (read: non-existent yet) crimes has fallen to yourself and your bank/cloud provider/etc., rather than forcing the government to collect evidence to prosecute a crime. Essentially an end-run around the 4th amendment and the whole idea of "innocent until proven guilty".
That's similar to what I said in my comment to the department. " Under the fourth amendment, this would be an unconstitutional general warrant. I thought we did away with those long ago. It does not describe the particular things to be seized."
I think we don't understand each other. I'm not giving a moral or legal judgement on what Snowden in particular did. I'm saying, the information he disclosed showed a vast and total violation of American's 4th amendment rights on behalf of the US government.
This KYC requirement seems to me, at a glance, as being a small erosion of our digital privacy.
I don't disagree with your premise that KYC enables governments to violate the 4th amendment, but in general, for certain industries this is just generally a really good idea. Banking is the first industry where I encountered KYC, and it strikes me as being obviously good there.
Isn't effectively the majority of what the Snowden leaks covered essentially violating the 4th amendment?
>Banking is the first industry where I encountered KYC, and it strikes me as being obviously good there.
This is not obvious to me as my experience has been largely negative post-KYC/9-11 vs pre-KYC/9-11. I am a legal law abiding citizen [and voter!] and it's just added extra hassle on various occasions and then the background anxiety of knowing an institution with crappy security track records hold a photocopy of my ID. And yet all the things KYC was supposed to prevent still continue unabated: money laundering, terrorist financing, identity theft, and financial fraud.
I'm curious to hear why you think it's obviously good and if you were using these services before KYC.
The people who donated to the Canadian truckers' protest had their accounts frozen by the Trudeau regime because of KYC.
The problem is that there are no checks and balances preventing banks from freezing assets because they want to or the government told them to.
Banking needs to be a right, and unless someone is convicted of a crime involving the bank account's assets, banks and governments should not be able to freeze them. There can be exceptions for fraud like FTX where there will be a significant financial harm to other individuals if the assets aren't frozen, but what we have today is unchecked government financial terrorism against individuals they do not like, and now they want to extend that terrorism to speech.
I am familiar with KYC from a banker's perspective (at least that of a close relative who was a bank manager).
KYC helped them by deny-listing abusive clients between branches, or by allowing the bank to develop heuristics for things like allowing customers to bypass cheque clearing times.
From an end-user perspective, I've had no hangups personally but I do share your grievances about yet-another-shoddy institution holding a photocopy of my ID. My bank truncates passwords when setting them, and when logging in, without telling the user. It boggles the mind.
2 replies →
KYC basically means that the job of collecting evidence to prosecute potential (read: non-existent yet) crimes has fallen to yourself and your bank/cloud provider/etc., rather than forcing the government to collect evidence to prosecute a crime. Essentially an end-run around the 4th amendment and the whole idea of "innocent until proven guilty".
That's similar to what I said in my comment to the department. " Under the fourth amendment, this would be an unconstitutional general warrant. I thought we did away with those long ago. It does not describe the particular things to be seized."
What is being proposed here will be used as a tool of fear by the government to suppress speech it doesn't like.
Comparing what one individual did in the past to a formal government policy doxxing away peoples' 4th amendment rights is a strawman argument.
I think we don't understand each other. I'm not giving a moral or legal judgement on what Snowden in particular did. I'm saying, the information he disclosed showed a vast and total violation of American's 4th amendment rights on behalf of the US government.
This KYC requirement seems to me, at a glance, as being a small erosion of our digital privacy.
3 replies →
Well yes, so does FISA.
Yes! If they put it into the entire internet infrastructure, it's considered a general warrant. Hmm... I thought we did away with those in 1789.
Thank God for the Constitution