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No, there is lots of financial censorship being done against people have have broken zero laws. For example, at one point, banks blocked donations to WikiLeaks

by stale2002 7y ago

No, there is lots of financial censorship being done against people have have broken zero laws. For example, at one point, banks blocked donations to WikiLeaks, even though they were not charged with any crimes. Financial censorship, done arbitrarily, to people who have not even been accused of a crime, is the most common form of financial censorship.

wahern 7y ago
> Financial censorship, done arbitrarily, to people who have not even been accused of a crime, is the most common form of financial censorship. Source? I find that hard to believe considering the prevalence of fraud. In fact, dealing with fraud is one of the primary reasons transactional banking exists in the first place. Notes and other negotiable instruments were in widespread use even when there existed universal gold- or silver-denominated currencies that made direct payments nominally simple and convenient.
- stale2002 7y ago
  Are you not aware about things like how anything related to sexual content will have their accounts closed? I was talking about things like this, and other related situations.
  - wahern 7y ago
    The claim as I read it was that most financial censorship befalls innocent accountholders. But while there are countless examples we can find online about people wrongly censored or accused, actual fraudsters don't go complaining on Twitter. Fraud is a huge problem. The usual reason for why we can't have nice things--a high-trust civil society--is because of bad people. Because no system is perfect, our transactional and legal systems have to balance administrative efficiency and fairness. The more you try to be fair, i.e. improve your accuracy (fewer false positives), the higher your costs (less efficacy at stopping bad guys and/or more resources need to be expended); the more you aim for administrative efficiency (lower costs but better at stopping bad guys) the more fairness will tend to suffer (more false positives). Now, it's entirely possible that there are more accounts wrongly closed than closed for actual fraud. Personally I would doubt it, but would still like to see data. That notwithstanding, it would still be wrong to characterize such a system as arbitrary simply because of that skewed result; it could just be a manifestation of a high efficiency but low fairness enforcement mechanism. Maybe it is arbitrary, but I doubt it. I had never heard the phrase "financial censorship" before. Perhaps a better term here would be financial blacklisting. The EFF's page, https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship, conflates a ton of individual issues in a way that I don't think is constructive. Everybody trying to shoehorn their issues into the free speech debate tends to obfuscate problems and potential solutions; and I suspect it will one day backfire, harming traditional freedom of speech in the process. Before I even read the EFF's issue page--and definitely so, afterwards--the very phrase "financial censorship" brought to mind Citizens United v. FEC. Keep going down that road and there's no limit--I could just as well characterize murder laws as violating my free speech.[1] For the record, I protested in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco when Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested way back when. I do take these issues seriously. [1] In fact, IIRC not long after Citizens United the very same conservative justices upheld the criminal convictions of people who gave to a charity and advocacy organization implicated in funding terrorist organizations. The juxtaposition of the two decisions seemed to me to evidence the inconsistency and hypocrisy of the conservative's free speech crusade; such inconsistency and hypocrisy is inevitable once you start to characterize everything that's incident to speech as speech itself.
    - stale2002 7y ago
      > Now, it's entirely possible that there are more accounts wrongly closed than closed for actual fraud. Personally I would doubt it, Ok, then you can rephrase my argument as "one of the most common examples of financial censorship", or "common enough that it is still bad", instead of "the most common". It still does not take away from my main point here, which is that it is still useful for people who are breaking no laws, to be able to get around arbitrary financial censorship of their perfectly legal transactions. That was my main point. > conflates a ton of individual issues in a way that I don't think is constructive People who are doing the censoring, or support the censorship, usually don't want their actions to be called censorship, yes. I think it is a good term, though. The reason is because I am specifically referring to financial transactions that are perfectly legal, and are being censored for the political content of transaction. The examples I gave were donations to WikiLeaks, which were perfectly legal, but were arbitrarily blocked, due to the political nature of such a donation, as well as the example of sexual content related financial transactions, which are also legal, but often arbitrarily blocked. > it will one day backfire, harming traditional freedom of speech in the process. I am not really sure how it could backfire, to give people more ways of making perfectly legal financial transactions, that are more difficult to arbitrarily block, due to the political content of those transactions. If you think something is bad, and should be blocked, then make a law. Don't rely on intermediaries to block things that aren't illegal.
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        > It still does not take away from my main point here, which is that it is still useful for people who are breaking no laws, to be able to get around arbitrary financial censorship of their perfectly legal transactions. That was my main point. Dramatically more people, indeed the whole world potentially, stand to lose from these countries avoiding sanctions than from the handful of people who can’t currently access their questionable but legal sexual content online.

wahern 7y ago

> Financial censorship, done arbitrarily, to people who have not even been accused of a crime, is the most common form of financial censorship. Source? I find that hard to believe considering the prevalence of fraud. In fact, dealing with fraud is one of the primary reasons transactional banking exists in the first place. Notes and other negotiable instruments were in widespread use even when there existed universal gold- or silver-denominated currencies that made direct payments nominally simple and convenient.

stale2002 7y ago
Are you not aware about things like how anything related to sexual content will have their accounts closed? I was talking about things like this, and other related situations.
- wahern 7y ago
  The claim as I read it was that most financial censorship befalls innocent accountholders. But while there are countless examples we can find online about people wrongly censored or accused, actual fraudsters don't go complaining on Twitter. Fraud is a huge problem. The usual reason for why we can't have nice things--a high-trust civil society--is because of bad people. Because no system is perfect, our transactional and legal systems have to balance administrative efficiency and fairness. The more you try to be fair, i.e. improve your accuracy (fewer false positives), the higher your costs (less efficacy at stopping bad guys and/or more resources need to be expended); the more you aim for administrative efficiency (lower costs but better at stopping bad guys) the more fairness will tend to suffer (more false positives). Now, it's entirely possible that there are more accounts wrongly closed than closed for actual fraud. Personally I would doubt it, but would still like to see data. That notwithstanding, it would still be wrong to characterize such a system as arbitrary simply because of that skewed result; it could just be a manifestation of a high efficiency but low fairness enforcement mechanism. Maybe it is arbitrary, but I doubt it. I had never heard the phrase "financial censorship" before. Perhaps a better term here would be financial blacklisting. The EFF's page, https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship, conflates a ton of individual issues in a way that I don't think is constructive. Everybody trying to shoehorn their issues into the free speech debate tends to obfuscate problems and potential solutions; and I suspect it will one day backfire, harming traditional freedom of speech in the process. Before I even read the EFF's issue page--and definitely so, afterwards--the very phrase "financial censorship" brought to mind Citizens United v. FEC. Keep going down that road and there's no limit--I could just as well characterize murder laws as violating my free speech.[1] For the record, I protested in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco when Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested way back when. I do take these issues seriously. [1] In fact, IIRC not long after Citizens United the very same conservative justices upheld the criminal convictions of people who gave to a charity and advocacy organization implicated in funding terrorist organizations. The juxtaposition of the two decisions seemed to me to evidence the inconsistency and hypocrisy of the conservative's free speech crusade; such inconsistency and hypocrisy is inevitable once you start to characterize everything that's incident to speech as speech itself.
  - stale2002 7y ago
    > Now, it's entirely possible that there are more accounts wrongly closed than closed for actual fraud. Personally I would doubt it, Ok, then you can rephrase my argument as "one of the most common examples of financial censorship", or "common enough that it is still bad", instead of "the most common". It still does not take away from my main point here, which is that it is still useful for people who are breaking no laws, to be able to get around arbitrary financial censorship of their perfectly legal transactions. That was my main point. > conflates a ton of individual issues in a way that I don't think is constructive People who are doing the censoring, or support the censorship, usually don't want their actions to be called censorship, yes. I think it is a good term, though. The reason is because I am specifically referring to financial transactions that are perfectly legal, and are being censored for the political content of transaction. The examples I gave were donations to WikiLeaks, which were perfectly legal, but were arbitrarily blocked, due to the political nature of such a donation, as well as the example of sexual content related financial transactions, which are also legal, but often arbitrarily blocked. > it will one day backfire, harming traditional freedom of speech in the process. I am not really sure how it could backfire, to give people more ways of making perfectly legal financial transactions, that are more difficult to arbitrarily block, due to the political content of those transactions. If you think something is bad, and should be blocked, then make a law. Don't rely on intermediaries to block things that aren't illegal.
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      > It still does not take away from my main point here, which is that it is still useful for people who are breaking no laws, to be able to get around arbitrary financial censorship of their perfectly legal transactions. That was my main point. Dramatically more people, indeed the whole world potentially, stand to lose from these countries avoiding sanctions than from the handful of people who can’t currently access their questionable but legal sexual content online.