Sure, there are people who have been using it for savings (or speculation, based on your perspective), and hedging against potential inflation, but those are abstract things. 

Two things happened in 2020 that should have put Bitcoin on everyone’s radar before the price did. 

• In Nigeria, the #EndSARs protests erupted in response to obscene police brutality. Among other more harsh responses, protest organizers found their accounts frozen and payments disrupted. At least 20 activists had their bank accounts frozen as the central bank works to investigate their sources of funds. Activist groups like the Feminist Coalition reported problems as well. 

  The Nigerian diaspora and other sympathizers who want to fund the cause have found a workaround: Bitcoin. 

• In Belarus, protests also erupted as a dictatorial president attempted to hold on power by obviously stealing the election with a rigged vote. These were met by the violent crackdowns and internet shutdowns typical of a dictator. The machine of the state has been openly working against the population. And political activities can make a person unhirable for fear of association. 

  Enter BYSOL, a non-profit that began making grants via Bitcoin to protesters who lost their jobs. Per CoinDesk BYSOL is aware that the government is using their financial surveillance capabilities to monitor their funds. In this case I think privacy is warranted. 

Nigeria and Belarus. Not one but two moments that I would consider watershed for Bitcoin. At the same time. On different continents. 

In 2020 Bitcoin was used to challenge authoritarians around the world, and that is incredible to see. A threshold was crossed. I think it’s just the beginning. 

For more information on these, check out: 

Decrypt - Nigeria Is Emerging as a True Bitcoin Nation

WhatBitcoinDid - How Bitcoin is Helping Protesters in Belarus with Alex Gladstein & Jaraslau Likhachevski (podcast)

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Facebook and Vietnam continue their battle over censorship on the platform. Vietnam wants Facebook to “comply with local laws.” Better said, Vietnam wants Facebook to censor material that criticizes the government. 

In April, Facebook revealed that Vietnam had beaten it into some level of compliance by using the state-owned telecommunications companies to slow the website’s bandwidth to a crawl. 

Guess what? Vietnam wants more censorship now. Per Reuters:

“We made an agreement in April. Facebook has upheld our end of the agreement, and we expected the government of Vietnam to do the same,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing the sensitivity of the subject.

“They have come back to us and sought to get us to increase the volume of content that we’re restricting in Vietnam. We’ve told them no. That request came with some threats about what might happen if we didn’t.”

The official said the threats included shutting down Facebook altogether in Vietnam, a major market for the social media company where it earns revenue of nearly $1 billion, according to two sources familiar with the numbers.

I have a feeling that this game will continue and be replicated in any country with sufficient Facebook users to make a dent in their margins. 

While reading about proposed expanded uses of China’s pandemic tracking app, I caught something that raised a question. 

There have not been many concrete examples of the Chinese government tracking individual spending, though I don’t think anyone doubts they do. 

In Venezuela, a food charity with opposition ties is raided and their bank accounts frozen. NYT reports: 

The government has accused the food charity, Feed the Solidarity, of channeling foreign donations for political subversion, without providing evidence. The charity and its allies called the accusations and raids a callous political ploy that threatens the lives of the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

. . .

Mr. Patiño said the charity will have to interrupt its service next week because the  freezing of their bank accounts prevents them from purchasing food.

The crackdown began last week when banking regulators and secret police raided Venezuela’s largest private bank, Banesco, to investigate the charity’s money transfers to vulnerable families, according to Mr. Patiño. The bank issued a statement distancing itself from Mr. Patiño, but did not respond to request for comment on the regulator’s raid.

It seems to me that, by operating, this charity was creating goodwill toward ideological opponents of the Maduro regime among the populace. So, accuse them of some vague financial crimes and shut down their bank accounts. No more food, no more problem. 

Here’s some articles I found interesting but didn’t discuss for the sake of space. 

The Markup - How Private Is My Pay App?

FT - Fear is the new normal for Hong Kong democrats

Coda - Coming soon: Turkmenistan’s government-backed email and messaging app

Bloomberg - Turkey Has No Cure for a Gold Craze That Leaves Lira Vulnerable

Rest of World - China’s fugitive writers find a home online

Vice - China Is Creating a Watch List of ‘Stubborn Taiwan Separatists’

The Guardian - Cambodia: mass trial begins of 130 government critics charged with treason

The Guardian - Encrypted apps and false names: new Taiwan book club takes no chances

Finally, if you are like me and know that mac & cheese is the best Thanksgiving side, please enjoy this reaction to a horrible looking avocado version. 

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Last January, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority announced it was "committed to protecting the public from harmful and unlawful content present on the internet such as blasphemy, hate speech, violence & extremism, and pornography." 

Grindr didn’t stand a chance. 

Having knocked out dating apps, Pakistan moved on to the real prize--social networks. Pakistan soon blocked TikTok, again citing immorality and indecency. These rules are often used to stymie the expression of young women. In Egypt, several female TikTokers were arrested and charged for benign dancing videos. 

On the block, ByteDance said: 

ByteDance responded that it was committed to following the law and in regular contact with Pakistani regulators. “We are hopeful to reach a conclusion that helps us serve the country’s vibrant and creative community online,” it said in a statement.

So, ByteDance commits to following the law of Pakistan. Even if the law is oppressive and easily abused. Luckily for them, this type of censorship is built into TikTok’s DNA. In just 10 days, TikTok caved to Pakistan’s demands and agreed to police morality and decency on the platform.

An important thing to note here is that while the US has mulled a TikTok ban as well, Pakistan’s is actually about end user censorship. Our proposed ban is more of a geopolitical game. 

What about Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube? This long read from Coda has the full story, but I’ll pull out some interesting bits. 

On YouTube, Pakistan has been turning the screws for a while: 

In recent months, the Pakistan Telecom Authority has made repeated requests that YouTube immediately block content deemed “vulgar, indecent, immoral” or containing “nudity and hate speech” to viewers in the country. The renewed push to limit the influence of social media is backed by Pakistan’s top court. In July, while hearing a case in which a man was accused of writing blasphemous content, a Supreme Court judge hinted at a ban on the Google-owned video-sharing site.

Twitter just ignores them, which is awesome.

“Senior management of Twitter has been approached multiple times through emails/letters on different issues like blasphemy, defamation, and fake content. Meetings were also proposed but they did not attend or respond at all,” PTA chairman Amir Azeem Bajwa wrote in an emailed response to questions for this article.

This month new guidance was released for social media companies in Pakistan.  

Social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter will be obliged to publish community guidelines warning users not to post content in breach of a number of conditions relating to copyright, blasphemy, defamation or to share material that offends the “religious, cultural and ethical sensitivities of Pakistan.”

Platforms will have 24 hours to comply with government requests for the removal of content, except in cases of emergency, where the PTA can demand removal within six hours.

In short, Pakistan is done playing games and wants compliance now. 

I will be watching closely to see how American social media companies react to this. I expect they will push back at least a little, because they don’t want the PR hit for censoring young women dancing or political dissent. But that’s a lot of users in a growing market. 

So, will Facebook be willing to stand up for what’s right and accept a ban in Pakistan, ceding the users to more censorious competitors? And will restrictive governments get better at playing this competitive dynamic to tighten speech controls? 

I’ll keep an eye on this, so go ahead and subscribe for the follow up. 

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An opposition Telegram channel used by protestors in Belarus has been declared “extremist” by the government. 

The decision to act against the Telegram channel is unprecedented even for Belarus, where authorities have at times shut down the country’s internet to prevent people organizing protests and blocked access to independent online media sites. The channel is effectively the country’s main news source about the protests, with nearly two million people subscribed, a staggering number for a country of about nine and half million. The channel has lost about 10,000 subscribers since the court case was announced.

Yet another in the long list of examples of words like “extremist” having looser definitions than we might imagine. 

In Nigeria, the #endSARs protest movement has erupted in opposition to a regime of brutal police violence. Social media has been a major part of these protests, pushing the issue to the global stage. With global attention comes global support, including financial support. 

Local protest groups have reported having their bank accounts frozen by the government, and at least one has switched to Bitcoin to evade this ban. 

Read more: Nigeria Protests Show Bitcoin Adoption Is Not Coming: It’s Here

This case, more than anything else in recent memory, shows how banking controls can be weaponized to crush dissent. Fortunately, there are now options for people under such controls. 

Though most coverage of the protests did not mention Bitcoin, or even bank accounts being shut down, at least Reuters caught it: “With Instagram, hashtags and bitcoin, young Nigerians boost anti-police protests”

There was another article about how cryptocurrency is bad. It moved around in the typical circles. Here’s a paragraph from that article.

It’s not surprising to me that someone with this worldview might think it’s useless. See above. 

In the last newsletter I mentioned an odd bit of Zoom censorship. Here’s how that’s going:  Zoom Deleted Events Discussing Zoom “Censorship”

Adam Saeed, a student at University of Leeds, said he used his personal Zoom account to organize the event. He told BuzzFeed News that the company deleted his event and disabled his account without explanation. He contacted the company’s customer support line, but said he has not yet heard back.

“It cannot be a unilateral decision saying, ‘You violated our terms of use,’ they have to prove that,” he said. “We have to have the right to contest this and present our case.”

Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU who organized the event in conjunction with the American Association of University Professors, called the situation “absurdist.”

“Everyone working in higher education right now depends on Zoom and we cannot be in a position of allowing a corporate, third-party vendor to make these kinds of decisions,” Ross said. “It’s simply unsustainable.”

Zoom is responding to what it perceives as compliance risk. But clearly they are miscalibrated. 

Here’s an interesting bit of FinCEN news that went a little under the radar. 

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Cambodia is among the several countries using the pandemic to crack down on free speech and dissent. Human Rights Watch has been documenting cases of people who express fear about the virus or criticize the government’s response being detained and forced to sign pledges that they will stop spreading fake news. Naturally, government critics are the ones criticizing the government. 

Now, it’s taking the next logical step: building a China-style firewall. Here’s Coda on the newly proposed “National Internet Gateway”: 

The gateway will be managed by one or more government-appointed operators who will collaborate with state institutions such as the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, the Telecommunication Regulator of Cambodia. The operator will have the authority “to take actions in blocking and disconnecting all network connections that affect safety, national revenue, social order, dignity, culture, traditions and customs.”

. . .

Technology experts fear the decree will be used to block online criticism of the government. “While the authorities have said this is primarily due to tax reasons and stopping disinformation about Covid-19, it could also be used for more nefarious purposes, i.e. blocking sites which could have content that would be critical of the government,” Marc Einstein, chief analyst at Tokyo-based IT research and consultancy firm ITR told me during a telephone call.

Lumping in reasonable things like online safety and tax collection with the nebulous “social order” is a classic tactic in these situations. Protests disrupt the social order don’t they? After all, isn’t that usually the point of protesting? 

This is hardly the first time despotic governments have looked to China’s firewall for inspiration. In 2018 Reuters reported on the trend: 

Freedom House research director Adrian Shahbaz said that governments had begun justifying increased censorship and diminished digital privacy protections by saying the policies combat the spread of fake news and help catch criminals.

In effect, countries are using the curbs to violate human rights, he said.

Freedom House said China has been leading the charge. It has hosted seminars on cyberspace management since early 2017 with representatives from 36 out of 65 countries tracked by Freedom House, including nations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The 65 countries represent 87 percent of the world’s internet users, the group said.

Discussions with Chinese officials preceded new cybersecurity measures in Vietnam, Uganda and Tanzania over the last year, Freedom House said after reviewing Chinese state media articles and government press releases.

Meanwhile, Chinese technology companies have provided or are set to provide internet equipment to at least 38 of the tracked countries and artificial intelligence systems for law enforcement in 18 countries, the report said.

Catching criminals and combating the spread of fake news sounds great! 

If you’re interested in learning more, here’s a recent Washington Post editorial on the subject: China is exporting its digital authoritarianism

In this NYT op-ed justifying China’s clamp down on democracy, the Hong Kong Executive Council gave away the game for its draconian national security law: 

(I’m setting aside the fact that the NYT even published this.) 

By keeping this definition intentionally vague, it gives the government incredible discretion over what activities are illegal. 

By the way, Sarah is a great follow if you are interested in free speech issues around the world. We recorded a podcast on the topic together last month. 

FinCEN day finally came. Everyone’s heard of the FinCEN files by now, and I imagine there are endless stories that will trickle out as journalists pore over the leaked financial data. 

Here’s a few reactions that went against the grain that I think are worth signal boosting here. 

From my boss Jerry Brito’s newsletter: 

The only thing that’s interesting to me about this story is how the media is reacting to the leaks. Imagine if every communications company in the U.S., from AT&T and T-Mobile to Twitter to Gmail to Facebook, had to keep a record of every private conversation between their customers and had to file “suspicious conversation reports” with the government whenever some chat seemed fishy. Do you think BuzzFeed’s reaction to a leak of such reports would be, “Wow, the mass surveillance regime the government has over all Americans’ conversations isn’t very effective, and these companies are profiting from conversations between criminals”?

When it comes to money and banks, however, many (including the Fourth Estate it seems) give up any concern over individual privacy or the extent of government surveillance power. The frog has been boiled, it seems, 

A thread from our friends at The Modern Money Network: 

One from my colleague Andrea O’ Sullivan, in Reason:

It's a bit strange that while Ed Snowden's revelations of major communications surveillance programs were met with mass outrage and years of discussion, these "FinCEN files" exposing our inefficient financial surveillance programs barely received mention. And when the media did discuss the FinCEN files, it was mostly to criticize banks for allowing these transactions to go through.

And another from Open Privacy: 

Protests continue in Belarus as the illegitimate election is rammed through. The regime is attempting to clamp down on resistance via increasingly draconian measures. 

A non-profit named BYSOL is helping people who have lost their jobs due to protest activities $1,500 a month, paid in bitcoin. 

Coindesk reports: 

BYSOL chose bitcoin as a way to transfer funds as other ways are under the total control of the government, Russian-language publication Forklog reported. The name of the fund is an abbreviation: BY (Belarus country code) + SOLidarity.  

Yaroslav Likhachevskiy is one of the founders of BYSOL and the CEO of Deepdee, a Belarussian-Dutch startup that develops AI solutions for health care. He told CoinDesk that bitcoin is the only payment method that can’t be controlled by the authorities. The regime is strictly monitoring bank transfers and can freeze funds related to protest activities.

Belarus law enforcement is paying particular attention to any money transfers by people and entities related to BYSOL, Likhachevskiy said. He shared with CoinDesk an order issued by the Belarus Ministry of Interior, which told the country’s banks to disclose information about all transactions related to Likhachevskiy and other people helping BYSOL. 

Likhachevskiy said he was once a crypto skeptic, but now he believes bitcoin can really be helpful.  

This is an excellent example of a case where the state is abusing its policing powers over the bank system to suppress dissent, so dodging them is clearly justified. 

A Palestinian activist and former hijacker named Leila Khaled was set to give a Zoom webinar talk through San Francisco State University. Israeli and Jewish groups protested the event, eventually pressuring Zoom to cancel it altogether.  

It worked. Then Facebook and Youtube blocked the event as well. 

Look, I’m not going to defend what this person did. But it’s worth pointing out that our platforms blocked an academic conference with someone deeply embroiled in one of the world’s most important issues. They did this to protect themselves from risk. That’s worrying. 

This rat is kind of a fun story

But I’ve since learned that it’s not only fun but relevant to my work! The non-profit the rat works for takes cryptocurrency donations. So go support the hero rat. 

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In Hong Kong, a media tycoon and democracy activist, Jimmy Lai, is arrested. His company is publicly traded. So people who support his advocacy start buying his stock up as a show of support. This causes the stock to jump over 1,000% in a few days. 

Now local authorities have arrested 15 people for market manipulation relating to the stock. I’ve never heard of mass stock buying as a form of activism. I guess that could be a form of market manipulation? The actual accusation seems to be more benign, but I don’t believe them. 

Also in Hong Kong: A museum is raising money to digitize its collection of historical materials that may soon be banned or destroyed under the new regime. The ethereum public blockchain has been used in similar situations where censorship is a risk, though not at this scale. 

Nic Carter attempted financial terrorism on my Venmo account 

It’s been a source of frustration for Persian and Cuban Venmo/PayPal users that they can’t reference their heritage when making transactions. This is because their cultures are flagged for potential sanctions violations (North Korea, well, okay you can have that one). 

Recently this absurd compliance system was back in the news because science nerds found themselves unable to purchase plushies and other toys relating to a beloved creature—the tardigrade. 

It turns out, there’s another Tardigrade. One that is not so cute but perhaps similarly resilient. 

This isn't only an algorithmic fluke or extreme prejudice against indestructible moss-piglets, but a US sanctions issue that can be traced back to a coincidentally-named shell company used by a weapons dealer who's been banned from traveling by the UN for a decade.  

Slobodan Tesic, one of the biggest arms and munitions dealers in the Balkans, owns a company called Tardigrade Limited that he used to export weapons to Arab and African companies, according to a Cyprus-based news outlet reporting on the new US sanctions last year. He’s been called “the biggest dealers of arms and munitions in the Balkans.”

So the word “tardigrade” got put on a list, and now anyone trying to use this word has to jump through hoops to get their transaction cleared. Science nerds can deal with it and call their stupid microscopic water bear something else. 

Anyway, Nic did send the transaction. In case you were wondering, it did not lock our accounts. It just freezes the money. Now both of us are being questioned about the transaction and asked for receipts and documentation. I don’t think they are going to like our explanation. 

Here’s something to watch:

FinCEN has a LOT of records of financial transactions. At the very least, there are records of every transaction over $10,000. By the way, that amount does not adjust for inflation. 

The $10,000 threshold was also set low enough that criminals anxious to get a million dollars’ worth of cash into the banking system might think twice. After all, they might have to give up potentially incriminating information.

Back in 1970, $10,000 would have purchased around what $68,000 would today (see chart below). Today, it doesn’t even purchase a new car. So transactions that didn’t come close to triggering CTRs in 1970 now set them off. This means ever more invasions of privacy and higher costs of compliance.

Financial records are incredibly sensitive. Access to those can tell you a lot about a person. Our banks are required to turn this info about us over to the government. Until now, the expectation has been that at least they will be kept safe there. 

If a leak of these records bears out it could have serious ramifications on our trust in this surveillance system. Sure, this is probably a targeted leak, but it’s a reminder that at the end of the day humans have access to this information and we trust them to keep it safe. 

Russian Intelligence seems to have caught on. I’m always surprised when people don’t know about this. There was a deliberate attempt to access FinCEN’s financial records on prominent Hillary Clinton supporters. As Buzzfeed reported: 

Analysts at an elite agency within Treasury first warned supervisors in 2016 that the Russians were “manipulating the system” to conduct “fishing expeditions.” And they raised fears that the Treasury’s internal systems could be compromised by viruses contained in emails from the unofficial Russian accounts. But staff continued using the Gmail back channel into 2017, despite repeated internal warnings that Russia could be trawling for sensitive financial records — including Social Security and bank account numbers — to spy on, endanger, or recruit targets in the West.

I will be watching closely to see what comes of the FinCEN leak. But in particular I’ll be watching for reactions to what will be a revelation for some: that such a trove of data exists in the first place. 

They made me host a podcast again. 

This time I got to talk to free speech advocate Sarah McLaughlin. If you’re at all interested in the censorship topics I cover in this newsletter, you will probably enjoy the podcast. Sarah focuses on campus free speech with a side interest in blasphemy. 

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Facebook blocked a group with over 1 million members in Thailand because it is critical of the Thai monarchy. In Thailand it’s illegal to criticize the monarchy. This isn’t some ceremonial law that never gets enforced. People are regularly jailed for breaking it. 

Facebook says it is mounting a legal challenge because this is an unjust law and so on. But they are still complying, because it’s the law and that’s what companies have to do. The company faced a $6,300 per day fine as long as the group remained accessible in Thailand. 

The Thai law can cause problems, such as in 2019 when a member of the Thai monarchy considered running for office. How can you run against someone you can’t legally criticize? 

But given Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws, it’s hard to imagine her opponents or political analysts openly criticizing her. They certainly have good reason to be wary. Some form of lèse-majesté law has been on the books since 1908, though the law was expanded and has been more strictly enforced since a military coup in 1976.

You can’t even make a joke about the king’s dog. Or publish an article ABOUT a man being charged for making a joke about the king’s dog. 

With tools like fines and throttling (Vietnam’s preference), countries with unjust laws can compel companies to enforce on their behalf. This is why it’s essential to support tools for online privacy that do not depend on trusting a company to protect your identity. What’s worth more to them: your political speech or $6,300 a day? 

If you’re reading this I probably don’t have to tell you about Buzzfeed’s massive investigation into China’s re-education camps for minority muslims. But if you haven’t read it, here’s the thread. 

There’s a lot to it, but what stood out to me was very specific. One of the given reasons for why someone might be thrown into these camps is having the wrong software on their phone. A woman interviewed was told she was imprisoned for having installed WhatsApp. 

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been poisoned, according to German doctors. If that does not silence him, a Putin ally has plans to destroy him financially.

A notorious ally of Vladimir Putin says he will use Russia’s corrupt courts to destroy Alexei Navalny financially if the stricken opposition leader ever recovers from a chemical agent believed to have been slipped into his tea.

…

On Tuesday night, his company Concord announced that it would do everything it could to collect a court-ordered fine of 88 million rubles (around $1.2 million) that he bought from Moskovsky Shkolnik (Moscow Schoolboy), a company Navalny was found guilty of defaming in a video report, according to the Moscow Times.

If it’s true that this court order will come via an unfair court system, then the legal bankrupting of a major opposition leader is particularly gross. Banks will have to comply. And that will be that. 

Navalny, for his part, at least has had people thinking about these risks for some time. 

China’s Central Bank Digital Currency may be a factor in its takeover of Hong Kong, where the US dollar reigns. 

But there’s one element of the new payment system that will give some Hong Kongers pause: 

The digital yuan won’t offer the same anonymity as cash, and that could be a showstopper. With Hong Kong still digesting the implications of a national security law recently imposed by Beijing, users could have apprehensions about revealing their financial lives to Chinese authorities. That’s probably why the Xinhua report was quick to deny plans to pilot the tokens in the city.

Some citizens have already shown an awareness of the risks that come with using a surveillable payments system.

That’s a pretty big hurdle. 

Did you know blasphemy laws are still enforced around the world? In Russia, vague language in a relatively new blasphemy law is abused by some in the religious right to punish artists and stifle criticism. As CodaStory reports: 

However, the Kremlin also had a clear political motive for banning blasphemy. In the wake of huge street protests against rigged elections in 2011 and 2012, the Russian government began a rhetorical pivot towards traditional values, leveraging religious and patriotic sentiment to bolster its popularity.

And in Nigeria, an Atheist activist was arrested and hasn’t been heard from since.

But her husband, Mubarak Bala, president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was not one to filter his words. On April 25, he logged on to Facebook again and typed a post calling the Prophet Muhammad a terrorist.

Three days later he was arrested by the state police after being accused of violating anti-blasphemy laws, which can carry a death sentence. He has not been seen since.

Gotta talk about my day job quickly. 

Here’s our take on the FATF/travel rule stuff that has people concerned. 

We will probably do a podcast or something about this soon. The basic gist is we interpret the FATF sentence mentioning “whitelisting” to simply be exploring options, not signaling any imminent change, and we’re confident FinCEN is not considering any such changes anytime soon. 

As for the “travel rule” it’s the same rule that’s applied to cryptocurrency since 2013, and while the threshold may be tightened to meet FATF’s June 2019 recommendations, there really is no new risk we haven’t known about. 

Also, we published this nice summary of our policy positions. Probably should have had something like this before now. Here it is: The ideal regulatory environment for Bitcoin

Obviously I am going to end this week’s newsletter with the funniest thing I’ve seen all year 

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For one thing, it’s now illegal to publish content counter to “family values.” Of course, this is being used to punish young women who express themselves freely. 

At least nine young women have been prosecuted for their TikTok videos, CodaStory reports:

Most of Eladhm’s videos feature her mouthing the words to pop songs or dancing to Arabic electronic music in fashionable dresses and crop tops. That wouldn’t be a crime in most countries, but in conservative Egypt she has become one of at least nine female TikTok users prosecuted in recent months on charges related to inciting debauchery and prostitution. 

The girls are all from middle or working-class backgrounds, and some monetized their followings to earn thousands of dollars. While their content did not violate the app’s community standards, Egyptian authorities have enforced their own red lines, without clearly demarcating them. 

At least one tried to flee and was tracked by her cell phone: 

The next month, the nation’s Ministry of Interior issued a warrant for the 22-year-old’s arrest, accusing her of publishing videos and photographs that violated family values. Eladhm, who is the daughter of a retired policeman, fled her home in Cairo, but officers eventually found her in a suburb of the city by tracking her cellphone. She was sentenced in late July to two years in prison and fined nearly $19,000. 

On top of that, these women are having their funds frozen. They broke the law, so their banks are presumably complying with lawful court order. From CodaStory’s follow up: 

All were charged with “violating family values” and inciting debauchery under a controversial cybercrime bill passed by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in August 2018. This week, the Egyptian state went one step further, passing an order from the prosecutor general and a Cairo criminal court to freeze Eladhm and Hossam’s funds.

Frozen funds will make it that much harder to flee or fight it in court. My friend Angus summed up my thinking nicely: 

Of course, cash is more immediately useful to someone who is fleeing an unjust law. But, setting aside the personal security risk of holding paper cash, even in America it’s not so easy to move around with it.

Belarus Has Shut Down the Internet Amid a Controversial Election:

The outages come as governments around the world, including in Iran, Ethiopia, and India, have increasingly used internet blackouts as a tool of repression and authoritarian control to try to quash mass protests and unrest. Connectivity outages around elections have also become more common; so far this year, the governments of Burundi, Guinea, Togo, and Venezuela all disrupted social media platforms during their elections or the night before.

Breaking our reliance on centralized internet chokepoints is essential to fighting authoritarianism. 

Defcon is going virtual this year, because of the thing. 

In the past, Defcon has been cash only, paid at the door. The stated reason for this is to protect the hacker audience by preventing an accumulation of personal data that could then be targeted by law enforcement. 

However, this year they are using PayPal. This is so they have enough personal data on each attendee to identify anyone who violates the code of conduct. 

It's a far cry from past Defcons, which had a strict cash-only policy out of privacy concerns for its attendees. An FAQ for Defcon said this about credit card payments in 2019: "Do we take credit cards? Are you JOKING? No, we only accept cash -- no checks, no money orders, no travelers checks. We don't want to be a target of any State or Federal fishing expeditions."

That reason makes sense. But it does make me wonder if law enforcement will ask PayPal for the information. 

Germany has an extremely strict online hate speech law. It’s often hailed as an example we should follow here in the US. 

Unfortunately, it’s also hailed as the model for internet censorship laws in much less open societies. The latest example comes to us from Turkey. 

Germany's "hate speech" law has been a solid generator of collateral damage since its inception. German lawmakers may believe they've ushered a new era of online enlightenment with the law, but it's inspired a number of censorial governments to create their own versions and point to Germany when anyone asks why they're silencing dissent and criticism. EFF says thirteen countries, including Venezuela, Malaysia, Russia, and the Philippines have all cloned NetzDG to better serve the continued restriction of their citizens' free speech rights.

If you can ban hate speech, and have discretion over what constitutes hate speech, that might be a tempting thing to abuse. 

Here’s an op-ed about the international reach of WeChat censorship. 

It reminded me of this example of extranational censorship in San Francisco. As Vice reports:  

Left, who asked not to be identified by his full Chinese name, said he first received a warning message from WeChat administrators. Then he began receiving strangely specific messages that appeared to come from four of his friends on WeChat, all asking him for his location, what hotel he was staying at in San Francisco, what his room number was, and what his U.S. phone number was.

Then his cell phone received a warning message that someone in Shanghai was trying to log into his account.

Finally, when he wouldn’t tell them where he was staying, the same accounts all simultaneously began urging him to return to China as soon as possible.

Left told VICE News the he believes his friends only sent the messages after they were coerced by agents from the Ministry of State Security in an attempt to get him to reveal his location, and part of a much wider effort by the Chinese government to crack down on any dissenting voices who are sharing content related to the coronavirus outbreak.

It seems to me clear that there is something to that op-ed. 

By the way, we launched a podcast. I’ve hosted a couple of episodes and even been a guest on the show. It’s not really about anything in particular. Here’s two recent ones. 

Payment processors like Square do not want to pay for these chargebacks. So they are holding in escrow more merchant funds than usual to account for the increased risk: 

Thousands of small enterprises that use Square to process their credit card transactions — including plumbers, legal consultants and construction firms — have complained that the company recently began holding back 20 to 30 percent of the money they collected from customers. The withholdings came with little warning, they said, and Square asserted the right to hang on to the money for the next four months.

Payment processors exist because to send each other dollars online, we have to trust each other. But we don’t know each other, so we agree to both trust a company like Square or PayPal. This works out fine most of the time, with the processor as a sort of silent partner that takes their cut. 

But the processor doesn’t trust you either. And since you have to trust them to do business, they can use their position as the middleman to simply not give you your end of the transaction until they are satisfied that the risk has passed. Even if that means you can’t make payroll. 

There is a new anti-terrorism law in the Philippines. Per The Guardian:  

An anti-terrorism law that grants sweeping powers to president Rodrigo Duterte’s government is facing mounting legal challenges, as rights groups warn the legislation signals a new, dark chapter for the Philippines.

The act, which lawyers say uses a vague and overly broad definition of terrorism, permits warrantless arrests and allows authorities to hold individuals for weeks without charge. It is to be implemented later this month, though at least six petitions against the law have already been filed in the supreme court.

Here’s what has critics worried: 

Persons found guilty of the following acts will be punished with 12 years of imprisonment:

• Threatening to commit terrorism

• Inciting others to commit terroristic acts

• Voluntarily and knowingly joining any terrorist group or association

• Being an accessory in the commission of terrorism

That is very nonspecific. And with the Philippines’ track record on human rights, it seems like it will be way too easy for dissent to be branded as terrorist incitement. Meanwhile, the government argues that passing the bill is essential to keep the country in the good graces of FATF, the global anti-money-laundering watchdog. Fighting terrorism definitely sounds good, but not when the definition of terrorism is so broad. 

Also, they just shut down their leading national broadcaster for criticizing the government. 

And, they just convicted a prominent journalist for “Cyber Libel.”

In Myanmar, journalists are being forced to publish in secrecy, even forgoing bylines to protect their identity. 

Reuters reports:

Suu Kyi’s government has stressed the importance of media freedom for building democracy. Before she came to power, Suu Kyi spoke of the need for the law to protect reporters.

But her administration has brought charges against 31 journalists ranging from unlawful association to terrorism to criminal defamation since she came to power, according to local rights group Athan, and in recent months the civilian-led information ministry has blocked dozens of news websites, including DMG, accusing them of distributing “fake news” and “fearmongering”.

If the climate for free expression continues to deteriorate around the world, I think we can expect more anonymous and pseudonymous publishing. The tools to do that should be encouraged. 

Notes from the currency crisis in Lebanon: 

This is interesting too. In Venezuela people want PayPal money less than Zelle money: 

And there’s the situation in Zimbabwe: 

Both Zimbabwe and Lebanon have banned money related apps recently as well: 

• Zimbabwe has banned all mobile money services as its currency troubles worsen

• Lebanon’s currency is collapsing. The government’s solution? Ban exchange rate apps

I am standing up for soup tube innovation. I hope you will too.

Think this is good? Bad? Reply to let me know.

Also, Zoom censored public conversations about Hong Kong and Tiananmen Square. 

In statement, Zoom said it was obliged to respond to requests from Chinese authorities as long as users in China participated in videoconferences.

“Like any global company, Zoom must comply with laws in the countries where we operate,” a company spokesman said.

Noticing a trend here? Complying with local laws may not be the ethical standard for content moderation. 

Companies are being forced into compliance by China’s great firewall. 

Authorities also use a punishment system – blocking a domain for a short period of time if they run afoul of censors. Ultimately, China will block the site forever if the company does not acquiesce to demands.

And the model is being successfully exported to other would-be despots, emphasis mine: 

In 2017, Tanzania’s Deputy Minister for Communication Edwin Ngonyani expressed admiration for China’s internet control and said the country would follow Beijing’s path at a meeting sponsored by the government of Tanzania and China’s internet regulator.

“Our Chinese friends have managed to block such media in their country and replaced them with their homegrown sites that are safe, constructive and popular,” said Ngonyani.

Citing the Arab Spring, he said that social media, if left uncontrolled, could help topple governments.

In 2018, the Tanzanian government imposed a new set of sweeping regulations to police the internet. Content creators are required to get licensed and could be punished for posting banned material, including content that uses bad language or causes annoyance.

I don’t think they are supposed to say those parts out loud. 

Russia’s internet clampdown is progressing smoothly as well. 

According to the report, published in February, the number of internet pages banned by Russia’s state communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, jumped from over 161,000 in 2018 to nearly 273,000 in 2019. During the same period, the number of state-sponsored cyber attacks against individuals rose from 20 to 32. 

If you’re NEAR a crime, police can compel Google to hand over your information. And they really like doing it. 

Unlike a traditional search order that identifies a particular suspect, geofence warrants require Google to trawl its massive library of location data, commonly known as the “Sensorvault,” to identify people who were in the area when a crime was committed. They are relatively new, and increasingly widespread: Between 2017 and 2018, Google saw a 1,500% surge in the number of requests it received, and from 2018 to 2019, the rate increased over 500%.

This technological dragnet is unbelievably indiscriminate and intrusive. Thankfully it is facing legal challenges. 

Amid the currency crisis, Zelle has become a popular tool for locals in Venezuela to access the stability of the dollar. To use Zelle on the ground you need a counterpart with a US bank account. It has become a necessary tool for survival. 

Wells Fargo apparently does not think the compliance risk is worth it, and is cutting off Zelle access for people using their accounts like this. 

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, people are piling into luxury goods to get out of cash. The state has limited buying foreign currency dramatically 

Of course, by “people” I mean only people that can afford fine art and ski chalets. Perhaps one day there will be an accessible store of value that is more divisible and easily stored. 

Syria is having a currency crisis as well. 

Good luck trying to use something like Zelle to survive there. 

People got mad at Coinbase. 

This kind of thing happens all the time. But it’s interesting to see how easily cryptocurrency lets you vote with your dol-- coins. Withdrawing that many dollars from a bank would be a pretty involved process. With cryptocurrency you can easily self custody in a matter of minutes. Imagine if traditional banks had this much competition. 

Meltem Demirors has been thinking about this for while. Take a look: The Great Race for Assets

This is incredible to me. How does this thought process even happen?  

Sci Hub is a place to access academic research for free. These articles are usually rather expensive. This is not legal. But it’s widely regarded as an incredibly useful tool that’s generally good for humanity. 

Sci Hub can’t use PayPal or anything like it because of that aforementioned illegality. 

But here’s how you can support them with Bitcoin. 

I think the CHAZ is hilarious. Not gonna bother trying to explain it here. But here’s some posts. 

Twitter rolled out a new feature. If you follow me you probably noticed that I hate it. It allows people to limit who can reply to their own tweets to everyone, only people tagged, or only their following/followers. 

The only people tagged one is fine. That would allow for civil interviews without the peanut gallery intervening. Here’s a great example of Udi Wertheimer interviewing Vitalik Buterin, in the type of conversation that would be a magnet for idiots derailing it. 

I also understand that this would allow people like journalists to control dumbass anti-vaxx and Qanon replies to them. And keeping weird reply guys out of people’s mentions is good too. I know I get some and can only imagine how bad it is for others. 

BUT 

It seems like a bad thing that now someone can say something wrong and protect themselves from replies calling it out, while still reaping the retweets, likes, and visibility, for whatever inflammatory thing they said. 

Will Oremus at OneZero, nailed my concerns: 

And more worrying than the possibility that reply controls won’t work is the possibility that they’ll work too well for the wrong people.

Yes, you can reply through a quote tweet. But that’s not under the original, it has to be sought out. We all know that the quote tweet is terrible for conservation health, since you want your quote tweet to get likes and retweets too, so you err toward bad faith dunking. 

And, as Will says,

The value of a reply on Twitter is that it’s visible to everyone who sees the original tweet, making it an ideal venue for asking questions, adding context or related ideas, correcting false information, or mounting a critique. Quote-tweets collapse that context, putting the response to the tweet into the feeds of an entirely different audience. Replies were one of the few places where people from different filter bubbles could routinely mix it up with others who see the world very differently.

I also question the wisdom of turning the masses back into a silent audience for the networked *big accounts*. To me that seems to be the opposite of what makes Twitter great. 

That all being said, I think we will quickly adopt a norm where turning off replies for anything less benign than a good morning post will be seen as a cowardly act that will be pointed out in many quote tweets. 

Vice went to Lebanon, where people can only withdraw up to $100 of their own money at time. 

The people are pissed. Some banks have been set on fire in recent riots. 

Things have gotten so bad there that Lebanon is flexing the same internet censorship muscles it has used to block things like Grindr to censor apps that tell people the exchange rate for their currency. 

Coda reports: 

In September last year, a parallel market for the pound emerged for the first time since 1997, when it was pegged to the U.S. dollar at a rate of LL1,507.5. The official peg was established in order to curb hyperinflation following Lebanon’s 15 year civil war.

As the country’s situation has worsened, unofficial exchange rates have crashed to more than LL4,000 to the dollar. Lebanese authorities have cracked down on currency traders, blaming them for the collapse of the pound. Desperate to stem the bleeding, the government has now blocked dozens of apps that provide information on the currency’s true market value.

Apparently exchange rates are a tricky thing in countries with collapsing economies and governments desperate to hide the damage. 

Here’s a story about how headlines get out of control. 

A think tank publishes a report saying ISIS could use Bitcoin. We’ve known this for a while; anyone *could* use Bitcoin. They have experimented with it here and there. The report also mentions in several places that most authorities currently do not consider cryptocurrency to be a major tool for terrorists. 

The expert then thinks out loud in a news article: 

“I’m wondering if from 2017 to 2020 there has been $300m that we have not found and that’s why I’m thinking this might have been one of the ways it might have been used,”

All he said is it’s a possibility they might use bitcoin for some of it. That’s all. 

Here’s what we get:

Then Decrypt, a cryptocurrency publication, picks it up: 

Now the entire $300 million “war chest” is in bitcoin. 

Then we get the Sun, which I think is widely regarded as garbage:

Now we have not only a huge war chest, but it’s sitting and waiting to be used in a bloody comeback campaign. The expert did not say this. 

So why do I care? Because no one ever follows back to the source. I read the report. It contains no evidence that ISIS has ANY substantial amount of money in bitcoin. The quote that started all of this is just speculation because they have used it before. 

Update: blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis has published a thorough debunking of the original report.

Millions of people saw those headlines. So now it’s out there in the world that ISIS has $300 million in bitcoin. Sick. 

This from Elle explains the recent surge in the already rising platform: “OnlyFans, Influencers, And The Politics Of Selling Nudes During A Pandemic”:

OnlyFans is just another logical extension of how creators are monetizing and personalizing their labor. In recent years, free podcasters turned to Patreon over using ads; freelance journalists began creating paid Substack newsletters over taking sparse assignments; YouTube gamers moved their business to Twitch. But, just like any platform, the creators are at the whims of the VCs who invested in them, and if the fees don’t add up, will have to find another place to be hosted. Viners had to become TikTokkers, and if OnlyFans tanks, adult entertainers face lost fan bases and disappearing archives. 

It also covers the recent drama with mainstream influencer Caroline Calloway getting on the platform, which seems to be marking a turning point for the social acceptance of selling sexual photos of oneself online. 

So we’ve got millions of people selling nudes. And for the most part people seem fine with it, if not supportive. One group that is not fine with nudes are the centralized payment processors. 

Here’s PayPal: 

We permit U.S.-only transactions for certain sexually oriented physical goods that are physically delivered to the customer. Videos, DVDs, and magazines are examples of physical goods. (We don’t allow transactions for such goods outside the U.S.)

We don’t permit PayPal account holders to buy or sell:

• Sexually oriented digital goods or content delivered through a digital medium. Downloadable pictures or videos and website subscriptions are examples of digital goods.

• Sexually oriented goods or services that involve, or appear to involve, minors.

• Services whose purpose is to facilitate meetings for sexually oriented activities.

So no nudes online. The second and third items are actually illegal. But liability is the name of the game when it comes to financial regulation. It’s a lot safer to cut off whole communities with an axe than to use a scalpel to target illegal activity. 

At the moment the only way for OnlyFan’s creators in the US to withdraw funds is ACH to a bank account. But bank accounts are not a steady thing for those in the adult world. 

Read more: The Banks’ War on Porn

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Covid-19 Behind Bars is an independent journalism project that tracks the spread of the virus in prisons. Unfortunately, links to that page were recently flagged by Twitter as virus misinformation. 

It seems to have been corrected, but only after some big accounts signal boosted the problems. 

This website publishes 3D printed gun files. They are legal. It also uses PayPal to sell patches and stickers. Those are also legal. 

PayPal suspended their account. 

This store was lucky to have withdrawn its cash before this happened. Typically money can be locked up for months or years after one of these suspensions. 

This guy found a wad of money in his house and asked his central bank what to do. 

The bank had an answer that I’ll admit is pretty funny. 

That wad of bills is worthless paper now. Last year the Kenyan central bank invalidated all 1000 Kenyan Shilling notes in circulation. This was done to combat financial crime. A similar thing happened in India with its demonetisation not too long ago. 

Someone made Amazon for Animal Crossing

Of course a bunch of people immediately jumped on this bit of the story:

I thought Animal Crossing was supposed to be an escape from modern life. But you’ve got mortgages, Central Banks tampering with rates, and hyperinflation. I’ll stick to blowing things up. 

Reuters reported this in April and I am surprised it didn’t get more attention. Facebook was forced into better compliance with the government’s legal activist suppression orders. 

Facebook's local servers in Vietnam were taken offline early this year, slowing local traffic to a crawl until it agreed to significantly increase the censorship of "anti-state" posts for local users, two sources at the company told Reuters on Tuesday.

The restrictions, which the sources said were carried out by state-owned telecommunications companies, knocked the servers offline for around seven weeks, meaning the website became unusable at times.

There are two problems here. The state control of telecoms and facebook being a nice big and easy target to negotiate with. Of course my mind went to mesh networks and decentralized social media. One day… 

A Financial Times journalist reflected on their experience living under extreme contact tracing and passporting while in Wuhan. 

At one point in Wuhan, I received a call from a government minder. She said several journalists’ codes had turned yellow and asked if mine had too. When I replied it had, she told me I should not leave my hotel room until it turned green, despite knowing this was a glitch. “We must adhere to the conditions of the system,” she said.

And what worries me most: 

In China, many of the restrictions on movement are now being lifted and life is returning to normal. But the code system still lingers in many places. The temptations of keeping such a system of control in place, or even to centralise and strengthen it, must hold a strong attraction for the Chinese government.

I understand that it’s an emergency and people who are fretting about privacy can be seen as just getting in the way. But to say the concerns are totally unjustified is nuts. 

Meanwhile, in India 

Probably not good: 

From one sample of data we obtained, we found thousands of users’ precise geolocation from across India. TechCrunch was able to identify people’s homes using the latitude and longitude records found in the database.

This hits on a critical part of the discussion around privacy. Yes there is risk of authorized users of the data abusing it somehow. But perhaps even greater is the risk that this centralized honeypot of valuable user information might leak or be abused by an attacker somehow. 

I am always interested in insider threats. So much of our thinking around privacy involves trusting the people who have regular access to our data. But people can be bribed, as the makers of Roblox learned.

A hacker bribed a Roblox worker to gain access to the back end customer support panel of the massively popular online video game, giving them the ability to lookup personal information on over 100 million active monthly users and grant virtual in-game currency.

With this access, the hacker could see users' email address, as well as change passwords, remove two-factor authentication from their accounts, ban users, and more, according to the hacker and screenshots of the internal system. The screenshots shared with Motherboard include the personal information of some of the most high profile users on the platform.

This is a sensitive topic for me because someone once used insider access to SIM swap me in an attempt to steal my precious coins. It is apparently quite common to bribe or blackmail support reps of the major phone companies.  As Brian Krebs has covered often: 

If you are somehow under the impression that you — the customer — are in control over the security, privacy and integrity of your mobile phone service, think again. And you’d be forgiven if you assumed the major wireless carriers or federal regulators had their hands firmly on the wheel.

No, a series of recent court cases and unfortunate developments highlight the sad reality that the wireless industry today has all but ceded control over this vital national resource to cybercriminals, scammers, corrupt employees and plain old corporate greed.

Trust can be broken people. 

American journalists working in China have been expelled recently. Here’s a thread reflecting on some of their work documenting the horrible abuses of the Chinese government. 

And an iconic tweet for anyone who tries to use Alipay’s transaction speed and adoption as a measure of its benefit to society. 

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That sounds pretty bad. I was all set to get in on the outrage. But then I read the rest. The article is not a defense of the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to internet control. To the contrary, it lays out how we sadly aren’t exactly a shining beacon of free online speech over here either.

The result a decade later is that most of our online speech now occurs in closely monitored playpens where many tens of thousands of human censors review flagged content to ensure compliance with ever-lengthier and more detailed “community standards” (or some equivalent). More and more, this human monitoring and censorship is supported—or replaced—by sophisticated computer algorithms. The firms use these tools to define acceptable forms of speech and other content on their platforms, which in turn sets the effective boundaries for a great deal of speech in the U.S. public forum.

And the larger point is that this ‘temporary’ crackdown on harmful speech (public health misinformation) is not some extreme emergency measure, but rather the world we have lived in for some time--just with the censorship knob turned one click further.

What is different about speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated “normal” to return to. We live—and for several years, we have been living—in a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech. Governments will not stop worrying about these harms. And private platforms will continue to expand their definition of offensive content, and will use algorithms to regulate it ever more closely. The general trend toward more speech control will not abate.

So that subhed doesn’t seem to be arguing that authoritarian control is “correct.” Their point seems to be that the Chinese approach is how it was always going to be, and we shouldn’t delude ourselves about where we are headed, good or, more likely, bad.

A bank blocked donations to a charity without explaining why: 

And in a new brief from Oxfam describes the added financial pressure that the pandemic has placed on remittances to Somalia. 

Not only do many [in the] Somali diaspora have less money to send, but many are still unable to send home even the reduced amounts they can afford due to preexisting and prohibitive banking restrictions. The aggressive approach of governments, particularly the United States, has left banks unwilling or unable to shoulder the risk to support MTOs who are sending money to what are deemed “high risk” places. Regulations which do have important intentions, have had unintended consequences, and have Somali families as collateral damage. Oxfam has called on governments to address these barriers in the past, and now their failure to act has exacerbated this crisis.

More reading: Scrutiny over terrorism funding hampers charitable work in ravaged countries

The Chinese government’s attempts to control the narrative around their virus response continues. As Quartz reports:  

A group of volunteers in China who worked to prevent digital records of the coronavirus outbreak from being scrubbed by censors are now targets of a crackdown.

Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the software development website, was arrested together with his girlfriend by Beijing police on April 19. The couple were accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a commonly used charge against dissidents in China, according to Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei, another volunteer involved with the project. Chen Mei has been missing since that same day. On April 24, the couple’s families received a police notice that informed them of the charge, and said the two have been put under “residential surveillance at a designated place.” There is still no information about Chen Mei, said his brother.

Speaking of... we had some thoughts on how a US digital currency, if it’s inevitable, should be designed.

If we are really going to do this we need to do it right. Or not at all. 

The Lebanese currency crisis is getting worse. Here’s what I said about that. 

The new currency, which doesn’t have an official name but is known by its internal shorthand “DC/EP,” or “digital currency/electronic payment,” will share some features with cryptocurrencies including bitcoin and Facebook Inc.’s Libra, PBOC officials have said. While it won’t boast the anonymity that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies tout, China’s central bankers have vowed to protect users’ privacy.

As you can guess, that last line is of interest to me. I have seen this mentioned here and there but have not seen any details of how this new payment system will be private. 

And I don’t mean private as in ‘we promise not to look at the data.’ I want to see private as in ‘we don’t have the data.’ As the article says: 

China’s central bank has said that shifting to a government-run digital payment system will help combat money laundering, gambling and terror financing. It has also hailed digital currencies as a way to improve the efficiency of transactions in its financial system.

That sounds all fine and well. After all, who likes terrorism? The problem though is that the Chinese government has used the excuse of combatting terrorism to justify brutally repressing and punishing the Uigyer muslims in the country. So remember, the usefulness of restricting privacy invasions to only law enforcement purposes depends a lot on who is making what laws. 

We’ve really gotten ourselves into a free speech, freedom of assembly, and platform neutrality pickle with this virus. 

What happens when believing and acting on a falsehood could be genuinely dangerous? Not in some existential ideological sense, but more like they could actually get sick and spread that to others. 

Facebook took a proactive step of banning pages for organizing the reopen protests. This raises some questions. 

The protest pages were removed because the gatherings would violate stay at home orders, but protests break laws all the time. Some would argue that things like staging a sit-in or occupying buildings are breaking the law too. I can see that this is a different situation, but I think Facebook may have opened a platform neutrality question it shouldn’t have.  

Of course, the protesters are really not helping themselves if they want to be taken seriously:

The problem though is that reopening the economy is a real political opinion that real people have. And we have built our system on the notion that people with ideas should be able to share them. 

I have no idea how to unwind this. 

By the way, when I posted about all this, I got a bunch of responses saying it’s fine to block those protest pages because they are astroturf. They were all citing a viral reddit sleuthing thread that ended up being wrong, but of course the correction never gets nearly as much airtime.

A thread on that.

Also, people say protests are astroturf all the time, all across the political spectrum. It’s not like those are paid actors out there. 

Some more reading: Facebook bans some anti-lockdown protest pages

Here are some more things: 

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The association is also abandoning plans for Libra to take the distinctive open architecture of Bitcoin, one of the best-known cryptocurrencies, which has a so-called permissionless quality that allows anyone to build on it. Such a design had led to widespread concerns that terrorists and others could use Libra for underhanded reasons.

Libra will now be a closed system in which only partners with the approval of the association can build infrastructure, such as wallets, for the coins.

And Jerry pointed out the key paragraph from their blog post:

In the first Libra white paper, we announced a path to eventually transitioning the network to a permissionless system. In the months since, a key concern we heard is that it would be challenging for the Libra Association to guarantee that network compliance provisions would be maintained. In the updated white paper, we present the approach we are exploring to offer new entrants the ability to compete for the provision of core network services and participate in the governance of the Libra network while ensuring the Association’s ability to meet regulatory expectations.

So it seems we will not get the permissionless Libra we hoped for. That’s too bad. For a refresher on what’s important to us, here’s a light 60 page read on that. 

Or a summary version here.

NY Post continued with its tradition of engagement bait articles that give everyone a good layup for quote tweet jokes. 

In defiance, I decided to actually think about what they posted. If we do enter some future cashless society in which all money is managed on central bank blockchains or whatever, that would allow us to create some pretty granular rules. 

Joe Weisenthal wrote a bit about this a while ago (about JPM Coin): 

So what's the point? Well, it's early, but these types of fiat-backed, bank stablecoins could usher in a future of "un-fungible money." What does that mean? Well, with normal money, all dollars are basically the same. But with something like JPM Coin, money could have rules attached to it. Parents of college-age children could give them money that is only able to be spent on books or food at the cafeteria. A charity might specify in code that their dollars only go to a certain cause, and not be used for administrative expenses. Investors in a startup could, theoretically, put in dollars that only go to buy Facebook ads, and can't be used for fancy offices or the CEO's salary.

It’s not hard to imagine that in this future cashless world a member of Congress or the President could demand that stimulus dollars are invalid at liquor stores, or for foreign goods, or meat, or any of a dozen other things. 

It turns out that your bank has the legal authority to seize your emergency stimulus check to pay off any debts you may have. 

That journalist reached out to five banks, of which only JPM got back to say they would not take advantage of this ability. I would be shocked if any bank were dumb enough to actually seize the money from what are likely their most vulnerable customers. It would be a PR disaster. (Update: a bank was dumb enough to try it in perhaps the worst way possible)

But it is still concerning that they can do it. And a reminder that the cash in your bank account might not be as much yours as you may think. 

The central bank of Lebanon is using its power over financial intermediaries to take huge cuts of remittances to the country. 

In a tough economic situation like this cryptocurrencies could be useful for someone looking to preserve their wealth and/or help people back home. 

There’s been a ton of talk of contact tracing lately, so I’ll get through this one quickly. Here’s something: 

This is a perfect example of what I am dubbing “””private””” vs private. In this case the data is only private because humans are following rules that can be bent or broken. But I’d prefer a system where data is private because it’s not shared at all. 

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At the core of existing tools for contact tracing and digital identity are centralized servers, usually in the full control of corporations or governments who could abuse the private information recorded therein. Bitcoin has proven that a peer-to-peer network can work together to record important data (who has sent or received valuable coins) without the need to trust a central server. New technologies like Zcash, Monero, and Bitcoin’s Confidential Transactions have proved that these decentralized databases can even be privacy protecting for individual users. Now it may be time to use these decentralized databases to record information essential to fighting the pandemic.

We know that getting such a system built and, even more difficult, getting buy-in from the many stakeholders of such a thing would take a huge lift. However, just as Bitcoin got more people started on thinking about the drawbacks of centralized systems, this conversation will hopefully get people wondering if there maybe could be a better way to handle identity and credentialing in some future emergency.

Here’s more reading on other approaches, from Wired: Clever Cryptography Could Protect Privacy in Covid-19 Contact-Tracing Apps

Today Apple and Google announced they are getting involved as well.

An activist posted a message that the Chinese government didn’t like in Animal Crossing: 

Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong democracy activist, took his protests to the game last week and on Twitter posted a screenshot of his island decorated with a banner saying: “Free Hong Kong, revolution now.”

With predictable results: 

However, since Joshua Wong’s Twitter post, searches for “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” have showed no results on Pinduoduo. On Alibaba’s Taobao, some vendors are trying to circumvent the crackdown by directing potential buyers towards listings that sell the game without using its title in the description.

You may remember that I quite liked the Minecraft Library of censored journalism. It works because many authoritarian countries haven’t banned Minecraft yet. But clearly that’s possible. 

Meanwhile, China activists also have a history of using uncensorable cryptocurrency blockchains to publish “””disruptive””” material. Now it seems a new tool will make it that much easier to post to the chain: 

Love to see that. Censors can get bent. 

This FT  headline raised my eyebrows: “China and Huawei propose reinvention of the internet.”

Concern around New IP stems from how much control governments or operators could have over IP addresses. Critics say that the new protocol would require the network to have “tracking features” responsible for authenticating and authorising new addresses being added to a network, humans at the other end, and the packets of information being sent around the web.

During its presentation at the ITU, Huawei also made it clear that New IP would have something described as a “shut up command”, where a central point in the network could effectively cut off communication to or from a particular address, according to a source who was present. He described this feature as a “fundamental departure” from the current network model which acts as an “agnostic postman that simply moves boxes around”.

So, we have better IP tracking and ”shut up command” that a central authority can send to any address on the network. And the plan has the support of Russia and Saudi Arabia. Yikes. 

Shouldn’t be a surprise that I’m not a sports guy. So Barstool has not really been on my radar. But now they are (accidentally?) building a finance vertical and the results are fascinating. 

Their daily trading livestreams, paired with the increasing accessibility of sophisticated financial instruments for my degenerate sports gambling friends, is going to be a sight to behold. 

Here’s just one of many examples: 

I am excited to see how this trend begins to take shape in casual conversations. Hopefully my friends start to build up domain expertise in random niches of the economy. That would be pretty funny. 

Some cracks are showing in Sweden’s cashless society dream. 

“What we found is the country is becoming increasingly digital and cashless without planning to do so,” said Access to Cash chair Natalie Ceeney “What we’ve found in our research is the vast majority like digital payments. They work for most of us. But there’s a small segment of society they don’t work for.”

Ceeney outlines how that segment includes people on low incomes, who feel cash gives them greater control, enabling them to prevent their remaining money being eaten by direct debits. For people living in rural areas, often the infrastructure doesn’t exist to rely on digital payments. And charities report how cash enables people who experience domestic abuse to hide money away if their abuser has taken control of their bank account.

That last sentence reminds me of this story from Afghanistan:

An FCC Commissioner wrecked a someone: 

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As WSJ reports: 

The federal government, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state and local governments have started to receive analyses about the presence and movement of people in certain areas of geographic interest drawn from cellphone data, people familiar with the matter said. The data comes from the mobile advertising industry rather than cellphone carriers.

The aim is to create a portal for federal, state and local officials that contains geolocation data in what could be as many as 500 cities across the U.S., one of the people said, to help plan the epidemic response.

The “mobile advertising industry” has been at the forefront of tracking our movements online and, apparently, in real life as well. It’s a little unnerving that they can do this, and even more so that their normal business outside of a crisis is to sell this capability to other companies. 

Here’s more on the subject from Motherboard, about companies that even more concerning: We Saw NSO's Covid-19 Software in Action, and Privacy Experts Are Worried

We’re in an economic crisis, which means some people are thinking about withdrawing cash. A few US banks have reported running low on cash already. For some reason most of the stories I’ve seen have to do with New York. 

If you’re reading this your money is probably safe. The FDIC has been out messaging the good advice that you’re most likely fine if your money is in a US Bank, and it’s safer in a bank than under your bed. 

However, in other countries the situation may not be so cozy:

• Egypt's banks told to limit withdrawals and deposits

• Nigerian banks limit debit card withdrawals abroad

• Polish banks limit foreign currency withdrawals due to coronavirus

OnlyFans is having a moment: 

Now, I don’t know what OnlyFans is. But I have heard that lots of payment processors don’t like the types of payments being made to and from the site. If people are doing things that are legal, maybe the payment processor shouldn’t care what they are doing. If only there was a better way. 

Lots of people are worried about the EARN IT act, which is the latest chapter in the government’s long running war on encryption. Here’s a good tweet about that.  

Cloudflare launched a tool for families to censor the internet for their kids. Seems like a fine enough idea. I know I looked at some pretty weird stuff as a kid and it probably screwed me up for life. 

The problem is that their filter blocked LGBTQIA+ and sex education content. There are situations where that could be lifesaving material for a person. 

It seems they got the message. But it’s another example of how badly calibrated content censorship tends to be. Youtube has run into similar issues with demonetizing this category. 

And in censorship of a different sort, Turkmenistan straight up banned their media from mentioning the word “coronavirus” to stymie criticism of its response. 

Someone found a way to bring payment processing  to animal crossing. 

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Then it was dropped. But the idea is still floating around. Public option bank accounts are not really in our cryptocurrency wheelhouse. This language has gotten people talking about “digital dollars” (which are already mostly digital btw) and there is some thinking that it’s a cryptocurrency thing. So far it hasn’t been, and it probably won’t be anytime soon. We’ll keep an eye on it anyway. 

Using geolocation and other data to track and alert people who either have or might have the virus makes sense in the midst of a global emergency. But it’s hard to square that need with the knowledge that once a trove of personal data exists it seems to exist forever, and once a government or other powerful entity has access to data they tend not to let it go. 

Here are some articles that got me thinking more about that. 

From the New York Times, “As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets”: 

As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians. Health and law enforcement authorities are understandably eager to employ every tool at their disposal to try to hinder the virus — even as the surveillance efforts threaten to alter the precarious balance between public safety and personal privacy on a global scale.

Yet ratcheting up surveillance to combat the pandemic now could permanently open the doors to more invasive forms of snooping later. It is a lesson Americans learned after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, civil liberties experts say.

Also NYT, “To Track Coronavirus, Israel Moves to Tap Secret Trove of Cellphone Data”:

The existence of the data trove and the legislative framework under which it is amassed and used have not previously been reported. 

...

The Shin Bet has been quietly but routinely collecting cellphone metadata since at least 2002, officials confirmed. It has never disclosed details about what information it collects, how that data is safeguarded, whether or when any of it is destroyed or deleted, who has access to it and under what conditions, or how it is used.

From Wired, “How Surveillance Could Save Lives Amid a Public Health Crisis”:

Government officials are anxious to tap the information from phones to help monitor and blunt the pandemic. White House officials are asking tech companies for more insight into our social networks and travel patterns. Facebook created a disease mapping tool that tracks the spread of disease by aggregating user travel patterns.

Such efforts clash with people’s expectations of privacy. Now, there's a compelling reason to collect and share the data; surveillance may save lives. But it will be difficult to draw boundaries around what data is collected, who gets to use it, and how long the collection will continue.

Here’s a thread from the author of that last one with some more thoughts from smart people: 

There’s also thinking about decentralized, private, contact tracing happening in the cryptocurrency world. Something to consider. 

This seems sensible. 

Reporters Without Borders built a censorship-free digital library in Minecraft. 

As Gizmodo reports: 

Minecraft is still accessible in countries that tightly control what is reported about their governments, and Reporters Without Borders is now using this loophole to bypass internet censorship.

“Their forbidden articles were republished in books within Minecraft, giving readers the chance to inform themselves about the real political situation in their countries and learn the importance of press freedom,” says The Uncensored Library on its website.

It’s also quite impressive looking. 

I love to see gamers rising up to defeat censorship. Though I wonder how much longer Minecraft will be accessible in those countries. 

Speaking of censorship, this reporter mentions that some people have turned to “blockchain” and various coded languages to share a critical article in China. 

Historically Ethereum’s public blockchain has been used for this. I wish there were more information. 

Someone sent their dog to get Cheetos. 

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In CoinDesk, Jill Carlson added to the conversation by laying out the particular properties of Bitcoin that could make it appealing as a safe haven. 

Bitcoin is, in many ways, the ultimate safe haven asset. It can be self-custodied, so even when systems of trust and rule of law breaks down, it can be held. It is open and borderless, with relatively liquid markets in every country in the world. It is censorship-resistant, meaning no government nor institution can, practically speaking, prevent investment or transaction in bitcoin. Bitcoin has a fixed supply, much like gold. Bitcoin is digital, which makes it practical to hoard, hold and transport. For doomsday preppers, dystopian sci-fi fans and apocalypse predictors, there is a lot to like about bitcoin. 

As we know, and I am constantly reminded of by my skeptical friends, that has yet to play out. But I still think there is something to it. Here’s an anecdote from Lebanon (More info in the thread).  

Bitcoin (well, actually in this case a stablecoin) was not helpful to them because they did not anticipate the crisis, so they couldn’t get their money into the coin. But I suppose the point of a safe haven is to be there before the storm hits. 

Hiring hitmen on the dark web has long been an urban legend and probably the plot of some slasher movies. The New York Times covered a new paper that dug a little deeper and asked “Can You Really Hire a Hit Man on the Dark Web?”

But don’t expect someone to get the job done. Experts and law enforcers who have studied these sites — almost all of them on the so-called dark web or dark net — say they are scams. There has not been a known murder attributed to any of them.

Looks like the answer is no. 

The University of Toronto’s CitizenLab published a research paper on the Chinese government’s censorship of social media as it attempted to contain fallout from its apparent mishandling of the situation. 

Here are the key findings: 

• YY, a live-streaming platform in China, began to censor keywords related to the coronavirus outbreak on December 31, 2019, a day after doctors (including the late Dr. Li Wenliang) tried to warn the public about the then unknown virus.

• WeChat broadly censored coronavirus-related content (including critical and neutral information) and expanded the scope of censorship in February 2020. Censored content included criticism of government, rumours and speculative information on the epidemic, references to Dr. Li Wenliang, and neutral references to Chinese government efforts on handling the outbreak that had been reported on state media.

• Many of the censorship rules are broad and effectively block messages that include names for the virus or sources for information about it. Such rules may restrict vital communication related to disease information and prevention.

Let’s not forget the uncensorable monument to whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang, made possible by public blockchains and cryptocurrency. 

Maybe I’m paranoid, but in general I suspect that government access to private data operates on similar principles as those found in the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. 

For those of you who don’t know, the first Rule of Acquisition is “once you have their money, you never give it back.” 

Speaking of, the value needed for a financial transaction to trigger a currency transaction report has been slowly shrinking over time. The rule sets it at $10,000, but back when it was set $10,000 was worth $68,000 in today’s money. That may not have been the intent when the rule was drafted, but why fix it now? 

In case you didn’t know, the Crypto Wars are back. This time with the addition of Section 230 protections, which made the internet as we know it possible, in the firing line. 

As Wired reports:

EARN IT focuses specifically on Section 230, which has historically given tech companies freedom to expand with minimal liability for how people use their platforms. Under EARN IT, those companies wouldn't automatically have a liability exemption for activity and content related to child sexual exploitation. Instead, companies would have to "earn" the protection by showing that they are following recommendations for combating child sexual exploitation laid out by a 16-person commission.

…

Though it seems wholly focused on reducing child exploitation, the EARN IT Act has definite implications for encryption. If it became law, companies might not be able to earn their liability exemption while offering end-to-end encrypted services. This would put them in the position of either having to accept liability, undermine the protection of end-to-end encryption by adding a backdoor for law enforcement access, or avoid end-to-end encryption altogether.

It’s no secret that the world’s authorities are rankled by the rising popularity of encrypted messaging apps, even if they themselves recognize their security value. It’s a line that the technology community has successfully held for decades. Hopefully they can continue, even in this era of tech backlash. 

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Not the best look for Bitcoin, but not really something I am worried about. Why? There was a bit of reporting from Al Jazeera on Bitcoin use in Lebanon that captures what I picture when I think of Bitcoin as an option in times of turmoil: 

But as Lebanon has spiraled into its worst economic crisis in decades, banks have imposed informal capital controls that force people to withdraw their savings in Lebanese pounds at the official exchange rate that effectively values their savings at 40 percent less than what its worth on the parallel market.

"Nothing can prepare you for the shock of this," Maher told Al Jazeera.

But Maher, who asked his surname be withheld to protect his privacy, is not standing by helplessly. He is trying to move what is left of his savings out of Lebanon via a financial instrument many in the country have not embraced - until recently.

Bitcoin.

"Suddenly everything turns upside down and all the options are open," said Maher.

I don’t think anyone thinks Bitcoin would be useful in a Mad Max apocalypse scenario. Mainly because you need the internet to use it, but also because you can’t eat it.

But what’s unfolding in Lebanon is different. In situations where creeping mismanagement of an economy suddenly culminates in the snatching of rugs out from under savers, and there’s rush to get money out of banks and local currencies, Bitcoin seems like a useful tool. 

The New York Times discovered that the NSA spent over $100 million spying on Americans between 2015 and 2019. But that’s not the shocking part. All that expense and violation of privacy ultimately yielded only TWO leads in that time. Sadly the article focuses more on the apparent waste of resources more than the significant mismatch between cost and benefit of this privacy violation. Hopefully more people will start thinking about that too. 

Here’s a shocking story about lengths that the Chinese government is going to in its efforts to track down and silence voices that are critical of its handling of the coronavirus crisis. As Vice reports: 

Left, who asked not to be identified by his full Chinese name, said he first received a warning message from WeChat administrators. Then he began receiving strangely specific messages that appeared to come from four of his friends on WeChat, all asking him for his location, what hotel he was staying at in San Francisco, what his room number was, and what his U.S. phone number was.

Then his cell phone received a warning message that someone in Shanghai was trying to log into his account.

Finally, when he wouldn’t tell them where he was staying, the same accounts all simultaneously began urging him to return to China as soon as possible.

Left told VICE News the he believes his friends only sent the messages after they were coerced by agents from the Ministry of State Security in an attempt to get him to reveal his location, and part of a much wider effort by the Chinese government to crack down on any dissenting voices who are sharing content related to the coronavirus outbreak.

At this point it seems like a caricature of what a surveillance state might look like. 

Did you know that there is an app that lets Saudi men easily restrict the movements of women in their family? Apple and Google have refused to ban the app, which was created by the Saudi government and is framed as an easy tool to help people navigate local laws (some of which happen to be abhorrent). 

Now two women who had to flee the country are trying to raise awareness of this. As Coda reports: 

As they wait for answers from embassies and United Nations agencies on what their future holds, the sisters have a message for the Silicon Valley giants Google and Apple which just weeks ago refused to take down the Saudi-government app Absher that helped their father to restrict their travel rights:

“This is a stupid and aggressive application against women,” said Maha. “Either they remove this application or they change the permissions of its users,” continued her younger sister.

Launched in 2015, Absher was designed to help Saudis navigate local bureaucracy, but it also allows Saudi men in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom to grant or deny travel permissions for women in their family with a click.

Yet another reminder that being compliant with local laws is not always the moral position. 

It turns out the “free” payments service Venmo is sharing your personal data with a bunch of other companies whenever you use it. Who would have thought? 

I discovered this week that when I opened PayPal-owned Venmo to pay my personal trainer and made sure to click "private," yet the app recorded my GPS location (home address) and the trainer's name, and sent it off to Braze, a third-party data collection firm. 

Think about that for a minute. You use the app to pay your bill, and, in return, some company you've never heard of now has your address and associations. How icky is that? 

Feel free to send that to anyone who tells you Venmo works perfectly fine for person to person payments. 

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Among them was this, an excellent analysis of why the internet is so bad these days: The Internet of Beefs.

There’s a lot to it, but the basic idea is that everyone is turning into a beef-only thinker: 

A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.

They are everywhere. I know I’ve sure seen my share as someone cursed with followers, most of which come from my beef-oriented field. 

To continue operating in public spaces without being drawn into the conflict, you have to build an arsenal of passive-aggressive behaviors like subtweeting, ghosting, blocking, and muting — all while ignoring beef-only thinkers calling you out furiously as dishonorable and cowardly, and trying to bait you into active aggression.

We all know everyone beefs, but the real brilliance of this piece is the categorization of beef-only thinkers into two types: knights and mooks. Knights are the big accounts who, through their beefing, direct armies of cloutless mooks that amplify their attacks. I figure a good way to measure a knight is how well they can do the reply-gets-more-likes-than-OP thing (which by the way is NOT a “ratio”). 

What drives a mook? The realization that being granted favor by enough knights through distinguished service in beefing is an established path to becoming a knight yourself. 

There is no higher honor for a mook than to be noticed by the knights they fight for. As a result, the fealty of the mook is the currency of the manorial economy of the IoB. Mookcoins are mined by knights through acts of senpai-notice-me. Call it proof-of-favor. And on mookcoins runs the economy of the IoB.

The dynamic helps knights too:

The more mooks a knight of the IoB can maintain in a stable state of combat-readiness, the bigger a player they are on the IoB.

I could really go on quoting the whole piece. Just read it.

Last week China began temporarily quarantining physical cash as part if its virus containment plan:

“Money from key virus-hit areas will be sanitized with ultraviolet rays or heated and locked up for at least 14 days, before it is distributed again,” Fan said at a press conference on Saturday. Money circulated in less riskier areas is subject to a week of quarantine and commercial lenders have been asked to separate cash from hospitals and food markets, he said.

This week, China began tapping its access to the electronic purchase history of its citizens: 

China’s Hubei province said it will use recent purchases of fever and cough medicines to sweep for unidentified coronavirus patients, a new step that leverages the government’s surveillance powers to try and stop the virus.

The measures may ultimately be necessary in this emergency situation, but it’s not hard to imagine how the combination of these two abilities can be easily abused. In particular by a government that seems so prone to abuse. 

Financial privacy is not just a concern limited to dealing with authoritarian governments. Big business wants to see what you’ve bought, too. 

Luckily for them, they can just buy that information from each other. Enter data brokers like Yodlee, which has been in some hot water lately. It just got hotter, as Motherboard reports: 

Yodlee, the largest financial data broker in the U.S., sells data pulled from the bank and credit card transactions of tens of millions of Americans to investment and research firms, detailing where and when people shopped and how much they spent. The company claims that the data is anonymous, but a confidential Yodlee document obtained by Motherboard indicates individual users could be unmasked.

A trove of data detailing what you’ve bought and when, that can possibly be linked to your identity, being bought and sold by multiple companies that you then have to trust to keep it secure. Seems bad. 

Here’s NY Times’ Charlie Warzel on the risk inherent in the existence of such brokers: 

On Monday, the Justice Department announced that it was charging four members of China’s People’s Liberation Army with the 2017 Equifax breach that resulted in the theft of personal data of about 145 million Americans.

The attack, according to the charges, was part of a coordinated effort by Chinese intelligence to steal trade secrets and personal information to target Americans.

Using the personal data of millions of Americans against their will is certainly alarming. But what’s the difference between the Chinese government stealing all that information and a data broker amassing it legally without user consent and selling it on the open market?

Have you ever bought anything embarrassing? Someone may one day find out. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some thoughts about privacy and cryptocurrencies: 

EFF has been watching the evolution of privacy-enhancing technologies such as privacy coins and decentralized exchanges. While not widely used today, these technologies hold the potential to bring some of the privacy-preserving attributes all of us already enjoy with cash into the digital world. It’s vital that future regulation doesn’t threaten these innovations before they’ve had a chance to find a foothold.

It’s good to have them in the fight.

Insider threats are fascinating to me. All the security and privacy promises in the world aren't going to help you if an employee with access is being bribed or blackmailed. 

The Saudi government did just that, turning a Twitter employee with the right access to their side as they hunted for the identities of dissidents and critics.

As Buzzfeed reports: 

Accessing two Saudi dissidents’ information — one a prominent critic with more than 1 million followers, the other an impersonator of a Saudi Royal family member — Abouammo allegedly passed the information to al-Asaker. Twitter had long been a godsend to dissidents: Unlike Facebook, it had no policy requiring people to use their real names, allowing critics of repressive government to speak more freely. The allegations threw its value as a tool of anonymous dissent into question.

When it built its global media team, Twitter didn’t prepare for possible scenarios in which employees with access to sensitive data and close relationships with foreign governments might use it to spy, according to former employees.

Something for people who depend on anonymity to speak truth to power to consider. 

Here’s a weird tweet

Here’s a good one