{"id":99892,"date":"2024-02-08T18:30:19","date_gmt":"2024-02-09T00:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=99892"},"modified":"2024-02-08T18:30:19","modified_gmt":"2024-02-09T00:30:19","slug":"99892","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=99892","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Financial Big Brother is Watching You<\/a>
\nA brief note on an overlooked nightmare.<\/em><\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, Ohio congressman and Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan\u2019s office\u00a0released<\/a>\u00a0a\u00a0letter<\/a>\u00a0to Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, an arm of the Treasury Department. Jordan\u2019s team was asking Bishoff for answers about why FinCEN had \u201cdistributed slides, prepared by a financial institution,\u201d detailing how other private companies might use MCC transaction codes to \u201cdetect customers whose transactions may reflect \u2018potential active shooters.\u2019\u201d The slide suggested the \u201cfinancial company\u201d was sorting for terms like \u201cTrump\u201d and \u201cMAGA,\u201d and watching for purchases of small arms and sporting goods, or purchases in places like pawn shops or Cabela\u2019s, to identify financial threats.<\/p>\n

Jordan\u2019s letter to Bishoff went on:<\/p>\n

According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of \u201cextremism\u201d indicators that include \u201ctransportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for\u00a0travel to areas with no apparent purpose<\/strong>,\u201d or \u201cthe purchase of books (including\u00a0religious texts<\/strong>) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

During the Twitter Files, we searched for snapshots of the company\u2019s denylist algorithms, i.e. whatever rules the platform was using to deamplify or remove users. We knew they had them, because they were alluded to often in documents (a\u00a0report on the denylist\u00a0<\/a>is_Russian<\/a><\/em>, which included Jill Stein and Julian Assange, was one example). However, we never found anything like the snapshot Jordan\u2019s team just published:<\/p>\n

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The highlighted portion shows how algorithmic analysis works in financial surveillance. First compile a list of naughty behaviors, in the form of MCC codes for guns, sporting goods, and pawn shops. Then, create rules: $2,500 worth of transactions in the forbidden codes, or a number showing that more than 50% of the customer\u2019s transactions are the wrong kind, might trigger a response. The Committee wasn\u2019t able to specify what the responses were in this instance, but from previous experience covering anti-money-laundering (AML) techniques\u00a0at banks like HSBC<\/a>, a good guess would be generation of something like Suspcious Activity Reports, which can lead to a customer being debanked.<\/p>\n

If Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already shown a tendency toward wide-scale monitoring of speech and the use of subtle levers to apply pressure on attitudes, financial companies can use records of transactions to penetrate individual behaviors far more deeply. Especially if enhanced by AI, a financial history can give almost any institution an immediate, unpleasantly accurate outline of anyone\u2019s life, habits, and secrets. Worse, they can couple that picture with a powerful disciplinary lever, in the form of the threat of closed accounts or reduced access to payment services or credit. Jordan\u2019s slide is a picture of the birth of the political credit score.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more coming on this, and other articles forthcoming (readers who\u2019ve noticed it\u2019s been quiet around here will soon find out why). While the world falls to pieces over Tucker, Putin, and Ukraine, don\u2019t overlook this horror movie. If banks and the Treasury are playing the same domestic spy game that Twitter and Facebook have been playing with the FBI, tales like the\u00a0frozen finances of protesting Canadian truckers<\/a>\u00a0won\u2019t be novelties for long. As is the case with speech, where huge populations have learned to internalize censorship rules almost overnight, we may soon have to learn the hard way that even though some behaviors aren\u2019t illegal, they can still be punished with great effectiveness, in a\u00a0Terminator<\/em>-like world where computers won\u2019t miss anything that moves.<\/p>\n

What a crazy time we live in! See you from the Nevada caucus, and watch this space for other news soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Financial Big Brother is Watching You A brief note on an overlooked nightmare. A few weeks ago, Ohio congressman and Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan\u2019s office\u00a0released\u00a0a\u00a0letter\u00a0to Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, an arm of the Treasury Department. Jordan\u2019s team was asking Bishoff for answers about why FinCEN … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,15,9,50,8,74,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucraps","category-business","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-goobermint","category-rkba","category-scratch-a-lib-find-a-tyrant","category-you-cant-make-this-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99892"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99893,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99892\/revisions\/99893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}