> This is about governments abusing the boogyman of supranational oligarchs to justify subjecting their entire populations to surveillance of what books they bu

> This is about governments abusing the boogyman of supranational oligarchs to justify subjecting their entire populations to surveillance of what books they buy, and everything else about their lives which can be deduced from their financial records. Did the government participate in this leak? I didn't see anything that indicated this was a gov operation. > Buying books, contraception, a Grindr subscription, it's not any of their business. Again, straw men. One, this is just a registry of who owns the companies. This isn't financial data. Two, if it was, there is a vast difference between we want to know what books a person is buying and hey that b/millionaire has been using the Bahamas to move millions of dollars in shady ways. Just as banks have to do suspicious activity reports if you deposit more than 10k or deposit large sums in a structured way that indicates suspicion, but them looking at your purchase data is at the same time considered a privacy violation. Don't get me wrong I'm against massive surveillance of the genpop, but that is not even close to what is going on here. > I would venture that supranational oligarchs are an extremely small percentage of who would be revealed, because there really aren't that many supranational oligarchs. And in many cases the ones who do exist aren't obviously the bad guys -- a lot of "oligarchs" with offshore accounts have them because they're on Putin's list, but being on Putin's list is as often an indication of good guy behavior as bad guy behavior. I'm not sure how much you know about the offshore world but that simply doesn't match everything I know about it (which is admittedly little, but some is first hand). Don't get too hung up on the one particular demographic I focused on. There are a lot of shady entities using offshore banking, not just "the oligarchs". Your attempt to whitewash being an oligarch of the particular Russian type because Putin doesn't like them is laughable. > It's because leaking their names was never the thing preventing them from being held to account. You don't think the US government has the intelligence capacity to learn their names on their own? They don't get prosecuted because the information has to come in a way that it would hold up in court, or because they're politically connected, or because they're politically connected in another country which your country needs to maintain a relationship with. It was never because the government can't figure out who they are. So revealing the names does nothing against the real bad guys, but it still gets people murdered who were using those accounts because they're vulnerable and not politically connected. You are partially correct, in that the rule of law doesn't seem to apply to the uber-wealthy, but that doesn't mean the people don't deserve to know who the shady cats are even if the gov does nothing. All of the reasons you state are obvious and exactly why this was done via hacktivism and not via some international banking regulation ala Switzerland when they changed their laws.