An interesting "case" came up in the Australian Parliament the other day, where a member (MP) told how he was having breakfast at a cafe with his kids before school, and his card didn't work. After arranging for someone to get his kids to school, he finally got through to the bank, which informed him that they needed to verify his driver's license, so to get his attention, they locked his accounts.
Nice work.
Now how knows how crypto people feel.
After bringing this up, others then told their own stories, of getting trapped in carparks and restaurants, and getting embarrassed as if they were unable to pay their bills. A small inconvenience perhaps, but it speaks to the power of control that a bank has over our lives - a corporation.
This are quotes from the MP:
“For the convenience of the bank wanting to know what your ID was, even if you had been banking with them for decades, they could switch off your banking like that. Disconnect you from your ability to be a part of your economy.”
He argued it warranted suspicion into how digital identification is used in the banking sector and customers’ vulnerability in the digital economy.
“At the heart of this is trust,”
Buddy... you are in for a world of pain. You are starting to sound like a crypto supporter. Especially since this conversation is centered around digital identification to combat "money laundering". But interestingly, the majority of money laundering is performed in cahoots with the banks themselves. The estimation is that between 2 - 4% of the global GDP is transferred through laundering. For the banks not to know, is impossible, as this short article might hint at. Yet, in the "fight" against money launderers, they are forcing everyone to go through the institutions that enable it for oversight.
The logic is unsound.
But, this has nothing to do with money laundering at all. It is about control over the masses, being able to track and restrict through digital gateways who can do what, when, with their "own" money. It is about being able to better categorize and follow the flows of money, to see opportunity to skim even more from the masses, using automated algorithms that will ensure the maximization of profits.
They keep saying that there will be "strong privacy provisions", but what does this actually mean, when the corporations we aren't private to, are the ones who are taking advantage of knowing who we are. Again, this is illogical. Not only that, banks are for profit corporations, yet we are being forced to use them, to be their customers, if we are to be part of an economy, which of course, we have to be.
To legally walk down the street, you have to wear Nike, Adidas or Puma shoes.
It is overreach, isn't it? But, it does point to the concerns of the governments, where they are not for the wellbeing of citizens, they are there for the benefit of the corporations. While we pay our taxes, they use them to enable more profits, and consolidation of wealth into the hands of the very few.
Remember the "Panama papers" scandal?
Did anyone get punished for the Panama Papers?
U.S. taxpayer Harald Joachim von der Goltz was convicted of wire and tax fraud, money laundering, and a host of other crimes relating to the Panama Papers scandal. He was sentenced to four years in a U.S. federal prison. Time will tell who else will be charged in connection with this scandal.
But, that individual was not the only one. The person who uncovered it:
Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia
(26 August 1964 – 16 October 2017) was a Maltese writer, journalist, blogger and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta and was known internationally for her investigation of the Panama Papers, and subsequent assassination by car bomb.
When it comes to "privacy" pretty much nothing we do digitally is private, because a corporation of some kind is always collecting our information and even if not identifiable directly, can cross-reference it with thousands of other points of data to know who we are. Even if we are hidden from each other at our surface level, we are completely naked below the surface. Digital identification looks to leverage our nudity, collecting all of our information into a digital avatar that can have pressure applied to it like a Kewpie Doll, when behavioral control is required. We saw it applied over the last few years, for instance where Canadians protesting lockdowns had their bank accounts frozen.
There is much more to this than the inconvenience of not being able to pay for breakfast or get out of a carpark, it is about mass population control. And with the increasing application of AI systems, it will be algorithm based, applying rules to all, and those who do not comply, will be punished, and no one will know, except the one harmed by the algorithm.
It is another way we are being divided, being disconnected from each other, unable to see what is happening at a meta level, because we are compartmentalized, shoe-boxed into an individual environment, and as long as we don't do anything "wrong", we won't notice the change.
But, what is wrong?
Participating in any kind of resistance to mass control.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]