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I’d love to see some action here but I’m skeptical. It seems like attacking payment processors is the main avenue that the thought-crime-police use to attack al
by logicalmonster 6y ago
I’d love to see some action here but I’m skeptical. It seems like attacking payment processors is the main avenue that the thought-crime-police use to attack alt-tech sites that don’t play ball with censoring.
If there was any mass protest movement to push change here, the media would absolutely flood the public with scare stories about (insert evil monsters here) using payment networks to finance (evil activity here) and undermine the protest movement.
It doesn’t help that so many politicians are old lawyers and activists who generally don’t have the technical knowledge to wade through the BS.
- derefr 6y agoI feel like it'd be fine if every single payment processor were individually part of the surveillance-industrial complex, as long as there were enough players in the space that one could get running a service by hopping around between them. For grey-market businesses to succeed, they don't really need air-tight legal protection; they just need their actions to be illegible. This is basically the situation VPN service providers are in. Yes, in theory, any given provider could be beholden to the state. However, when a new VPN provider can spring up so easily (spin up some DigitalOcean instances, stand up a WordPress/Shopify e-commerce frontend), it's unlikely that any given new player in the space has been gotten to yet by the state (unless, of course, it's a new marque of an existing company, set up specifically to serve as a honeypot for switchers.)