Comment by OutOfHere

I agree. We already see instances of debanking (logical evolution of money laundering "control") being used to pressure political opponents and dissenters even in the "free" West. Even worse, governments silently share this power with private entities to pressure stuff they do not like as was recently demonstrated by the MasterCard/Visa debacle.

Ideally, access to the financial system and secrecy of financial transactions should be protected by constitutions in the same way as secrecy of correspondence and right to privacy. Unfortunately, most constitutions were written in the age when it was a given, since most people relied on physical cash and were was no need to explicitly protect this right.

I've worked in a regulatory agency, albeit for a brief time. I worked with analyzing data, usually in cooperation with law enforcement, as part of some case or operation.

I don't know what to tell you - but my experience was that it is the most careless and obvious criminals that get caught. Some even being very rich, rich enough to afford solid defense teams, and rich enough to stay in court for a long time. These were also the very same type of people that would cry to the media about unfair treatment, witch hunts, etc.

But, as for why these agencies go after the money: It is much easier to prove money laundering, rather than the actual crime itself. Many of cases I worked on focused on companies that illegally harvested regulated natural resources, used unreported employees, and did not report their sales / trades. Off the market, under the table.

We co-operated with other regulatory agencies around the world, and I can tell you - in the more corrupt parts of the world, the effects can be devastating on the community: No honest companies can compete against the ones that operate illegally, dire working conditions, less tax funding to the local community. What happens is that these actors eventually become local monopolies, and start operate semi-legally, but that's what the community is stuck with. If you report those companies, you end up losing your own job - should the company go down. And since these players don't care about regulations anyway, whatever natural resources they harvest, can risk being wiped out.

And to re-iterate: It is easier to follow the money. Usually in these cases, where there's smoke, there's fire.

I agree with you as well. I am sick and tired of being put in position where governments are turning the tables and ask people to justify their innocence without any recourse as if everyone is de facto a criminal.

This 100%.

It's strange to see otherwise smart people correctly identify the "think of the children" fallacy in E2E encryption or net neutrality issues, but fail to identify the same exact fallacy when network traffic is measured in dollars and not bits.