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How Financial Surveillance Threatens Our Democracies (bitcoinmagazine.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The problem with privacy is that people confuse it with anonymity. I agree that privacy is the basic human right and we need to fight to preserve it. But when something is used for illigal activites there should be a way to trace the offender. Still the tracing part should be legal and transparent.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    Anonymity is also crucial for democracy. Anonymity is required for sources to leak material to the press about corruption and malfeasance. Anonymity is required for people to speak honestly and freely. When the government turns against its critics, anonymity is required for those critics to speak safely.

    You can still investigate crimes without eliminating the right to privacy or anonymity. It requires talking to people, finding witnesses, and doing good old detective work. The simple fact of the matter is that police have more tools today to fight crime than they ever have in human history. All of our communications, our phones and CCTV tracking our every move, etc yet crime still happens. Most crimes go uninvestigated and unprosecuted despite this wealth of invasive access. The reason for this is either lack of will or lack of resources, but it surely isn't lack of access. We were told if we traded our privacy and liberties we would be safe from crime, but the truth is that criminals will still crime and rich and powerful people will still get away with crime. The only difference now is that we lost our freedom and privacy along the way. And every day, we are told we need to give up even more freedom and then really, truly, the system will find those bad guys and eliminate them. Except the bad guys are often the ones who run and benefit most from the system. And they've gone so far to convince much of the population that doing things privately (like making transactions) is in and of itself a sign of criminal behavior or intent.

    People 100 years ago in the US would scoff at the idea that the government would be able to monitor every financial transaction they made or read all their mail. Yet all day I see people in these comments saying how this is normal, needed even, for society to operate well.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I agree that there should be a way for whistle blowers to anonymously leak details of wrongdoings of the governments and/or corporations if it servers public interest. And I agree that modern surveillance techniques are way more advanced than few decades ago. However, so called whistle blowing is still against the law and the person who does it should be aware that it will cause a legal response.

    My problem with anonymity is that it's being abused by "shady" people. It could be a dark web drug dealing website or some hard-core child trafficking rings. Unfortunately we live in a world where real things happen behind the scene and no whistle blower is going to change that. Here's an example (Secret Key Cryptography by Frank Robin)

    Circa 1975, IBM proposed the cipher now called DES, the Data Encryption Standard . It became a worldwide standard for secret key encryption. As IBM originally designed it, DES had a 64-bit key. The National Security Agency (NSA) required that the key be reduced from 64 bits to 56 bits, with the other 8 bits used as a checksum. This made no sense. If a checksum were really needed, then the key could be increased from 64 to 72 bits. It was widely believed that the real reason the NSA made this demand was that it knew how to crack messages using a 56-bit key, but not messages using a 64-bit key. This proved to be true.

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    • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    The article doesn't even discuss how financial survillance is related to democracy.

    I just looked for the paragraphs where "democracy" is discussed and it's nowhere stated how it is threatened by financial survaillance.

    Whatever the author states in the article, it's not about a threat to democracy. I go even further and state that monitoring all financial transactions is good for a democracy. Today, almost all transactions are monitored anyway.

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