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this one is new, but gives a pretty compelling overview for the need for electronic cash and could be a nice introduction to the book.
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coincenter.org
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The Case for Electronic Cash:
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Why Private Peer-to-Peer Payments are
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Essential to an Open Society
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Jerry Brito
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February 2019
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Jerry Brito, The Case for Electronic Cash: Why Private Peer-to-Peer Payments are Essential
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to an Open Society, Coin Center Report, Feb. 2019, available at
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https://coincenter.org/entry/the-case-for-electronic-cash
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Abstract
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Cash is more than a method of payment. It is a fundamental tool for individual privacy and
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autonomy, and it is necessary for an open society. This paper shows that a cashless economy is
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a surveillance economy. It also argues that removing the option to freely transact without
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intermediation greatly limits our economic self-determination, placing our economic lives in
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the hands of financial institutions and governments. This paper presents several case studies
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demonstrating the dangers of a completely intermediated payments system and concludes that
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electronic cash is a tool that should not only be tolerated, but fostered and celebrated.
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Author
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Jerry Brito
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Executive Director
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Coin Center
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jerry@coincenter.org
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About Coin Center
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Coin Center is a non-profit research and advocacy center focused on the public policy issues
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facing open blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin. Our mission is to build a better
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understanding of these technologies and to promote a regulatory climate that preserves the
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freedom to innovate using blockchain technologies. We do this by producing and publishing
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policy research from respected academics and experts, educating policymakers and the media
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about blockchain technology, and by engaging in advocacy for sound public policy.
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Acknowledgements
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Thank you to Andrea Castillo who provided invaluable research assistance, and to my Coin
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Center colleagues Neeraj Agrawal, James Foust, Robin Weisman, and Peter Van Valkenburgh
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for indispensable discussions and comments on early drafts of this paper. Sincere thanks to
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those who provided comments on a draft of this paper, including Brandon G. Goodell, Jason
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Somensatto (0x Project), Alexander Zaidelson (Beam), Elena Nadolinski (Beanstalk), Ron
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Bernstein (Coinbase), Rainey Reitman & Jamie Lee Williams (Electronic Frontier Foundation),
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Silke Elrifai (Gnosis), Daniel Lehnberg (Grin), Alex Gladstein (Human Rights Foundation),
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Steven Waterhouse (Orchid Labs), Marvin Ammori (Protocol Labs), Alan Curtis (Radar), Zooko
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Wilcox (Zcash), and Josh Cincinnati (Zcash Foundation). Special thanks to Shane Glynn, Joshua
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Goldbard, and Nathana Sharma (MobileCoin) for helping organize a workshop for this paper.
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1
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Introduction
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Completely anonymous cryptocurrency is an experimental new technology that is being
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perfected by the day. While it is tempting to only focus on the opportunities it presents to
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criminals and its inevitable illicit uses, more important is what it represents for the law abiding
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citizens that make up the vast majority of society. Not only do its benefits outweigh its costs,
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electronic cash is indeed essential to sustaining a liberal open society.
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In a world without cash (a bearer and peer-to-peer form of money) all transactions must be
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necessarily intermediated by financial institutions. Intermediated transactions are by their
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nature subject to surveillance and control. If third-party financial institutions must be part of
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all transactions, then they will be privy to the intimate details of everyone’s financial life. They
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can also choose to disallow certain transactions and potentially even certain persons from
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transacting.
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Intermediation has many benefits, including efficiency and convenience. Used responsibly, the
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information gleaned from the privileged position of financial intermediary can also allow one
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to better extend credit, prevent fraud, and help the authorities fight crime. But as this paper
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will show, it can also be abused spectacularly by corporations and governments. If there is no
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way to avoid intermediation, then individuals will have no way to preserve their privacy or their
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autonomy.
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Cash is an ancient technology that allows us to avoid intermediation and thus to preserve the
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values necessary for the individual liberty and human dignity. While we are a long way from a
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cashless and completely intermediated existence, at least in the United States, this paper will
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also show that there is a concerted effort to eliminate cash that has been quite successful in
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other parts of the world.
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This paper will argue that cash is essential to an open society. It is an escape valve in our
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increasingly intermediated and therefore surveilled world. We do not argue that cash should be
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the only option for transactions, or even the option one should choose most of the time. But it
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should be an option. Without it, there is no choice but to have one’s every purchase be watched
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and recorded and the information used without one’s consent. Without cash there is no
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exit—no chance for the kind of dignity-preserving privacy that undergirds an open society.
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Cash is also necessary to retain agency and autonomy. Autonomy can be understood as the
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power to make decisions for oneself without interference from others. It’s the ability to try
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things one’s way, to succeed and be rewarded, or to make mistakes and learn from them. As
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with personal privacy, without individual autonomy there can be no meaningful open society.
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It is therefore imperative that we preserve our ability to use it. Yet that is not enough. As we
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move to an increasingly online world in which physical cash is not practical for many
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transactions, we must also develop and foster electronic cash that is as privacy-preserving and
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2
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permissionless as physical cash. While this will have costs as well as benefits, we argue that the
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way to address the costs is not to prohibit electronic cash, but instead to regulate its use no
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differently than physical cash for which there is a robust regime.
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What is Cash
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Cash is not simply money. The word cash typically refers to money in the form of coins and
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paper notes. It is distinct from other forms of money, such as demand deposits, which is money
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held in bank accounts and from which one can pay using a check. Paper notes and coins, on the
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other hand, are bearer instruments. That means that whoever has physical possession of the
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tokens—in this case, the notes or coins—is presumed to be the owner of the money, and
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ownership is transferred by simply handing over physical possession of the token.
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Cash transactions are peer-to-peer. Transferring ownership of a house, a car, a stock or bond
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registered in one’s name, or even money in one’s bank account, requires the involvement of a
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third party, such as a bank, a stock transfer agent, or a local register of deeds. A cash
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transaction, on the other hand, happens only between the two parties to the transaction. I hand
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you a $100 note, and that’s all there is to it.
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The bearer and peer-to-peer nature of cash means that transactions require little or no trust.
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You may still want to verify that the cash in hand is not counterfeit, but there is no trust in 1
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third parties necessary for the transaction. In contrast, when you accept a check, you trust that
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the bank is solvent and will honor the order to pay.
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Because it is bearer and peer-to-peer, cash is also permissionless. This means that one does not
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need authorization from, or an account with, any institution in order to transact with others.
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This is important for many persons who cannot easily open such an account, perhaps because
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they don’t have steady income, a good credit history, a government ID, or a permanent address.
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In some countries, like Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to open accounts. Cash is an open 2
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access system in which anyone—banked or unbanked—can participate without having to seek
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the permission of financial gatekeepers.
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Because cash is permissionless, it is censorship resistant. You can use cash to contribute to an
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unpopular cause or to purchase goods or services that are legal but socially or culturally taboo.
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Of course, it can also be used to buy an illicit goods or services. While you may be punished
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after the fact for engaging in an illegal transaction, there is no third-party gatekeeper that can
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1 The U.S. Treasury Department estimates that about only one note in every 10,000 is counterfeit. U.S.
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Treasury Department, “The Use and Counterfeiting of United States Currency Abroad, Part 3,” final
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report to Congress (Sep. 2006)
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https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/rptcongress/counterfeit/counterfeit2006.pdf.
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2 Margaret Coker, “How Guardianship Laws Still Control Saudi Women,” New York Times (Jun. 22, 2018)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/world/middleeast/saudi-women-guardianship.html.
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3
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prevent the transaction because transactions are peer-to-peer. This even includes the very
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governments that may be issuing the cash notes.
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Finally, cash is private. Because cash is peer-to-peer, there need not be more witnesses to a
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transaction than its participants. Sometimes the case that only one party to a transaction is
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witness to it, such as when one drops a bill into a church’s donation box. There also need not be
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any record made of the transaction, since possession of the cash is what matters, and not any
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ledger entry.
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So, cash is a bearer, peer-to-peer, permissionless, and privacy-preserving form of money. It is
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an ancient technology with striking features, yet there is a movement afoot to eliminate it.
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The Cashless Society
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It is easy to take cash for granted. When people think of money, they imagine colorful paper
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notes even though the vast majority of global money stock is composed of electronic entries in
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bank ledgers, not physical cash. The ability to use an ATM to convert some of those ledger 3
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entries into paper that can then be used to pay at a newsstand—privately and
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permissionlessly—is as second nature as breathing. Yet there’s no reason why that has to be the
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case.
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Sweden, for example, is fast becoming a cashless society. According to its central bank, cash
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transactions accounted for only 2% of the value of all payments made in 2015, and that figure is
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expected to drop to 0.5% by 2020. A majority of bank branches in Sweden no longer keep cash 4
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on hand and ATMs are increasingly rare. Other Nordic countries, like Norway, Denmark, 5 6 7
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3 The Federal Reserve releases regular reports on the amount and breakdown of the monetary base in the
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United States. Its most recent release reports a seasonally adjusted M2 of $14.27 trillion in October of
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2018, $1.62 trillion of which was physical cash in public circulation. That means that only around 11
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percent of money is physical cash in the United States. See Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve
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System, “Money Stock and Debt Measures - H.6 Release,” Data Report (Nov. 29, 2018)
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https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/h6.pdf. To get an idea of the international picture,
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we can look at statistics compiled by the Bank for International Settlements. The annual “red book”
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publication from the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures reports $4.7 trillion in
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banknotes and coins in circulation among 24 major economies in 2016. This is roughly 8.95 percent of
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those nations’ $60.7 trillion in combined GDP that same year. See Committee on Payments and Market
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Infrastructures, “Statistics on payment, clearing and settlement systems in the CPMI countries - Figures
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for 2016,” Comparative Tables 1 and 2, Data Report (Dec. 15, 2017): pgs. 420-422,
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https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d172.htm.
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4 John Henley, “Sweden leads the race to become cashless society,” The Guardian (Jun. 4, 2016)
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/04/sweden-cashless-society-cards-phone-apps-leading
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-europe.
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5 Id.; also: Patrick Jenkins, “‘We don’t take cash’: is this the future of money?” Financial Times (May 9,
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2018) https://www.ft.com/content/9fc55dda-5316-11e8-b24e-cad6aa67e23e.
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4
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Iceland, and Finland are similarly situated. South Korea targets 2020 for phasing out paper 8 9
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notes and coins.
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10
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Citizens in these countries rely on card and mobile payments systems owned and operated by
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banks and financial technology (fintech) firms. These companies have an interest in promoting
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an increasingly cashless society. Every cash transaction is a transaction that takes place outside
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of the infrastructure that they own and on which they take a fee. Additionally, cash 11
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management is a not an insignificant cost for financial institutions.
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12
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Firms such as Visa have launched advertising and media campaigns to urge consumers to give
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up cash for card payments. Other campaigns are targeted at merchants. In one, Visa offered 13
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$10,000 to restaurants and food trucks that committed to stop accepting cash. As Visa UK put 14
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it, these campaigns are part of a “long term strategy to make cash ‘peculiar’ by 2020.”15
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Central banks also have an interest in eliminating cash. Doing so would grow the monetary
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policy tools at their disposal. If there are no bearer notes and all money is in the form of
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deposits, then it is easier to impose negative interest rates across the whole economy. The Bank
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6 Will Martin, “Fewer than 10% of people in Norway use cash— and a senior official thinks it could
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disappear completely within a decade,” Business Insider (Apr. 25, 2018)
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https://www.businessinsider.com/norway-first-cashless-society-2018-4.
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7 “Denmark will eventually be cash-free: expert,” The Local DK (Aug. 14, 2018)
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https://www.thelocal.dk/20180814/denmark-will-eventually-be-cash-free-expert.
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8 Anna Kuzmina, “Cashless Iceland,” Medium (Sept. 17, 2018)
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https://medium.com/what-the-money/cashless-iceland-f77147c9b253.
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9 “Bank of Finland predicts country will be cash-free by 2029,” Yle Uutiset Online (Feb. 21, 2016)
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https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/bank_of_finland_predicts_country_will_be_cash-free_by_2029/8689417.
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10 Patrick Jenkins, “‘We don’t take cash’: is this the future of money?” Financial Times (May 9, 2018)
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https://www.ft.com/content/9fc55dda-5316-11e8-b24e-cad6aa67e23e.
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11 Brett Scott, “The War on Cash,” TheLong+Short (Aug. 19, 2016)
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https://thelongandshort.org/society/war-on-cash.
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12 Patrick Jenkins, “‘We don’t take cash’: is this the future of money?” Financial Times (May 9, 2018)
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https://www.ft.com/content/9fc55dda-5316-11e8-b24e-cad6aa67e23e.
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13 Brett Scott, “The War on Cash,” TheLong+Short (Aug. 19, 2016)
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https://thelongandshort.org/society/war-on-cash.
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14 Jackie Wattles, “Visa offers restaurants $10,000...if they stop accepting cash,” CNN Business (Jul. 14,
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2017)
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https://money.cnn.com/2017/07/14/news/companies/visa-no-cash-restaurant-initiative/index.html.
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15 “Visa Europe launches ‘Cashfree and Proud’ campaign,” Visa Europe (Mar. 21, 2016)
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https://www.visa.co.uk/newsroom/visa-europe-launches-cashfree-and-proud-campaign-1386958.
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5
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of England’s chief economist proposed abolishing cash altogether to secure that option. There 16
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are also public finance motivations. Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz would also
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like to do away with cash in order to make tax evasion and other financial corruption more
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difficult and traceable. Still, critics must admit that cash has its uses. Former International 17
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Monetary Fund chief economist Kenneth Rogoff, whose gripes with paper money are plainly
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stated in the title of his book, The Curse of Cash, nevertheless agrees that “we need cash for
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privacy.”18
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This anti-cash trend is taking hold. Signs that read “no cash accepted” are an increasingly
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common sight at shops in Nordic countries. Even in countries like the UK where cash is still 19
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popular, some shops are going cash-free, and as Transport for London’s website will tell you, 20
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“You can’t use cash to pay for your bus fare.” On the Internet, cash has never been an option, 21
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and as commerce moves online, the proportion of intermediated payments grows
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concomitantly. Market research firm eMarketer estimates $2.3 trillion in global ecommerce
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sales in 2017. That is around 10 percent of the $22.6 trillion in all global retail sales, and a 22
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16 Chris Giles, “Scrap cash altogether, says Bank of England’s chief economist,” Financial Times (Sep. 18,
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2015) https://www.ft.com/content/7967908e-5ded-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.
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17 Ross Chainey, “The US should get rid of cash and move to a digital currency, says this Nobel Laureate
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economist,” World Economic Forum (Jan. 17, 2017)
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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/the-us-should-get-rid-of-cash-and-become-a-digital-econo
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my-says-this-nobel-laureate-economist/. Stiglitz has elsewhere criticized the Indian government’s 2016
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demonetization experiment which aimed to achieve similar goals. Indian citizens complained about the
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waste and inefficiency of the process which stemmed little evasion. Cash demand in India has since
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returned to pre-demonetization levels. See: “Why Demonitisation Was Launched Will Remain A Mystery:
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Joseph Sitglitz,” Interview with NDTV (Jan. 26, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acgVZEhsjgo;
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Andy Mukherjee, “By a 99.3% Verdict, India’s Cash Ban Was a Farce,” Bloomberg Opinion (Aug. 30, 2018)
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https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-08-30/india-s-cash-ban-was-a-farce-by-a-99-3-verdi
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ct.
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18 James Pethokoukis, “The problem with cash: A Q&A with economist Kenneth Rogoff,” AEIdeas, (Nov.
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10, 2016) http://www.aei.org/publication/the-problem-with-cash-a-qa-witheconomist-kenneth-rogoff/.
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19 Amanda Billner, “‘No Cash’ Signs Everywhere Has Sweden Worried It’s Gone Too Far,” Bloomberg (Feb.
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18, 2018)
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-18/-no-cash-signs-everywhere-has-sweden-worried
|
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-it-s-gone-too-far.
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20 Patrick Jenkins, “‘We don’t take cash’: is this the future of money?” Financial Times (May 9, 2018)
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https://www.ft.com/content/9fc55dda-5316-11e8-b24e-cad6aa67e23e.
|
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21
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Transport for London website, https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/buses/cash-free-buses, accessed December 3,
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2018.
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22 Corey McNair, “Worldwide Retail and Ecommerce Sales: eMarketer’s Estimates for 2016-2021,”
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eMarketer Report (Jul. 18, 2018)
|
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https://www.emarketer.com/Report/Worldwide-Retail-Ecommerce-Sales-eMarketers-Estimates-2016202
|
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1/2002090.
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6
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24.8 percent increase from 2016’s $1.8 trillion in worldwide online sales. Online commerce will
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only grow.
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The growth of online retail necessarily requires a growth in online payments. Online
|
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transactions are therefore generally facilitated by new fintech services, credit or debit cards
|
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issued by traditional banking intermediaries, or some combination of these. This means that
|
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intermediaries have more information about our buying habits than ever before.
|
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Although some countries like Sweden are on a cashless path, it would be a mistake to conclude
|
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that people’s desire for cash has lessened globally. A report from the Bank for International 23
|
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Settlements (BIS) finds that cash demand, measured by proxy through cash in circulation,
|
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increased among most of the 46 national economies in its sample. The BIS also reports data on
|
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the substitution between cash payments and online payments, as estimated through card
|
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transactions, in 24 nations. Only two of them, Russia and Sweden, exhibit signs of 24
|
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substituting card payments for cash transactions. The other 22 nations exhibit increases in
|
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both online payments and cash demand, which suggest a lingering value placed on cash’s
|
||||
unique features.
|
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25
|
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While the death of cash is not imminent in countries like the United States, it is certainly 26
|
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visible on the horizon. Unfortunately the death of cash means the birth of perfect financial
|
||||
control.
|
||||
The Intermediated Society
|
||||
If cash is eliminated, then all transactions will necessarily be intermediated. This is because
|
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instead of relying on the physical scarcity of bearer instruments, we would have to rely on
|
||||
intermediaries to guarantee all transfers of value. To understand why remember what a
|
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23 John Williams and Claire Wang, “Reports of the Death of Cash are Greatly Exaggerated,” Federal
|
||||
Reserve Bank of San Francisco Blog (Nov. 20, 2017)
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https://www.frbsf.org/our-district/about/sf-fed-blog/reports-death-of-cash-greatly-exaggerated/.
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24 Morten Linnemann Bech, Umar Faruqui, Frederik Ougaard, and Cristina Picillo, “Payments are
|
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a-changin’ but cash still rules,” Bank for International Settlements Quarterly Review (Mar. 11,
|
||||
2018)https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1803g.htm.
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25 The authors suggest a few explanations for lingering cash demand: expanded ATM infrastructure,
|
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which makes accessing cash easier; low interest rates, which lowers the opportunity cost of holding cash;
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and increased use of cash as a store of value, backed by empirical evidence of increased holding of higher
|
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note bills. Id.
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26 As noted earlier, most money in the United States is not physical. But around $1.6 trillion of it is, and
|
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that is not an insignificant amount. See Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Money Stock
|
||||
and Debt Measures - H.6 Release,” Data Report (Nov. 29, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/h6.pdf.
|
||||
7
|
||||
physical cash transaction looks like. I take out a $100 bill and hand it to you, at which point you
|
||||
have it and I don’t, and we can verify this by looking at our hands. Physical scarcity, which was
|
||||
historically not available electronically, makes this possible. On the other hand, by keeping 27
|
||||
ledgers of accounts and recording transactions in those ledgers, intermediaries like banks make
|
||||
it possible for me to virtually “hand” you $100. After the transaction you will have the $100 not
|
||||
because I gave you a token that I no longer have, but because an intermediary made a record in
|
||||
their ledger deducting from my balance and adding to yours. As a result, bank-mediated
|
||||
electronic payments are not peer-to-peer. They replace the scarcity of peer-to-peer cash
|
||||
transactions with trust that the bank correctly records payments in their ledgers. This has
|
||||
several implications.
|
||||
First, it means that bank-mediated electronic payments are not permissionless in the same way
|
||||
as cash. To hold and transfer digital money, you must first secure an account from an
|
||||
intermediary. We do not tend to think in terms of “seeking permission” when we open an
|
||||
account with a bank or mobile payments app, but that is what we do. Those firms are not
|
||||
obligated to open an account for us. It is possible that you will be denied an account. In a
|
||||
cashless world, not having an account with which to receive and send money is essentially
|
||||
expulsion from society. This is very different from a cash system, exclusion from which is
|
||||
impossible.
|
||||
Even if you have an account, intermediaries have full control over whether they will faithfully
|
||||
execute your instructions to transfer money, and may therefore choose to reject (or be
|
||||
compelled by a government or other third party to reject) any particular transaction you
|
||||
request. As a result, digital money is not censorship-resistant like cash. For whatever reason
|
||||
(and there may be good reasons and bad reasons), your bank can decide not to allow you to
|
||||
transact with certain people, to buy certain things, or to give to certain causes.
|
||||
27 If we tried to do this same thing electronically, it would not work. First, I would have to have a digital
|
||||
representation of the money to take the place of the $100 bill. Let’s say it’s a $100 file on my computer.
|
||||
Then I would have to send you this $100 file electronically, perhaps by attaching it to an email the same
|
||||
way I would send you a photo or a text file. The problem is this: When you receive an email from me with
|
||||
a photo, you will have the photo—but what about me? Will I no longer have the photo? No. I will retain a
|
||||
perfect digital copy of any data that I send to you electronically. So, if I send you a $100 file, you’d get it,
|
||||
but I would retain a copy, which I could in turn send to a second and then a third person ad infinitum.
|
||||
Computer scientists refer to this limitation as “the double spending problem,” and it is the result of the
|
||||
inherent lack of scarcity in digital networks. To avoid the double spending problem and make electronic
|
||||
payments possible, we employ third-party intermediaries like banks or payments companies. Here is how
|
||||
it works: If I want to send you $100, I don’t send a message to you directly. Instead, I send a message to a
|
||||
third party (say, a bank) that we both trust and with which we each have accounts. I tell the bank to
|
||||
please deduct $100 from my account and to add it to yours. The bank, in turn, keeps a ledger of all
|
||||
account-holder balances and transactions, and it dutifully adds a ledger entry that records the
|
||||
subtraction and additions to our respective balances. In this way, we can easily send each other digital
|
||||
money.
|
||||
8
|
||||
Even seemingly pro-social or benign financial activities can have unintended consequences.
|
||||
Federal laws aimed at curbing money laundering and terrorist financing deputize banks to be
|
||||
vigilant about money sent to certain “high-risk” countries. Because of this, charities providing
|
||||
aid to war-torn areas or deprived populations have difficulty accessing reliable banking services
|
||||
and thus getting money to those most in need.
|
||||
28
|
||||
High-risk countries tend to be among those most in need of humanitarian aid, so charities
|
||||
understably focus their efforts there. When charities’ fund transfers are slowed and scrutinized,
|
||||
or their bank accounts are shut down, the potential human cost is significant. What is worse,
|
||||
banks’ appeals processes are opaque. One lawyer representing charities whose bank accounts
|
||||
had been closed told the Wall Street Journal, “There’s no no in explanation...no opportunity
|
||||
given to appeal. It’s adding to the problem in Syria and the Middle East.”29
|
||||
Second, mediated electronic payments are never private. An intermediary must always know
|
||||
the parties to, and the details of, a transaction in order to make the appropriate ledger entries.
|
||||
Unlike cash, there is always a third-party witness to every transaction. In a cashless world, your
|
||||
bank will know the exact time, amount, and counterparty to every transaction you engage in,
|
||||
and can build a thorough profile of you. This information, especially if combined with other 30
|
||||
data such as social network activity (see recent reports about Facebook and Google trying to
|
||||
reach a deal with banks), can be a formidable tool. Or, if fallen to wrong hands, it can be a 31
|
||||
powerful weapon.
|
||||
32
|
||||
28 Rob Barry and Rachel Louise Ensign, “Cautious Banks Hinder Charity Financing,” Wall Street Journal
|
||||
(Mar. 30, 2016), https://www.wsj.com/articles/cautious-banks-hinder-charity-financing-1459349551.
|
||||
29 Id.
|
||||
30 Institutions already hold detailed data-based profiles of many people. The New York Times recently
|
||||
investigated one woman’s use of several smartphone apps and found that companies were compiling a
|
||||
comprehensive profile of the woman—based in part by her trips to Planned Parenthood, Weight
|
||||
Watchers, and her ex-boyfriend’s house—to sell to advertisers and financial institutions. See: Jennifer
|
||||
Valentino-DeVries, Natasha Singer, Michael H. Keller, and Aaron Krolik, “Your Apps Know Where You
|
||||
Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret,” New York Times (Dec. 10, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html. 31 Emily Glazer, Deepa Seetharaman, and AnnaMaria Andriotis, “Facebook to Banks: Give Us Your Data,
|
||||
We’ll Give You Our Users,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 6, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-to-banks-give-us-your-data-well-give-you-our-users-153356404
|
||||
9.
|
||||
32 See, for example: Ben Sasse, “Senator Sasse: The OPM Hack May Have Given China a Spy Recruiting
|
||||
Database,” WIRED (Jul. 9, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/senator-sasse-washington-still-isnt-taking-opm-breach-seriously/;
|
||||
John R. Schindler, “China’s Spies Hit the Blackmail Jackpot With Data on 4 Million Federal Workers,” The
|
||||
Daily Beast (Jun. 11, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.thedailybeast.com/chinas-spies-hit-the-blackmail-jackpot-with-data-on-4-million-federal-
|
||||
9
|
||||
The bleeding edge of financial surveillance and profiling can be found in China. As the New
|
||||
York Times has noted, “China is systematically and rapidly doing away with paper money and
|
||||
coins.” Cash transactions are being replaced by mobile payments, which account for over $16 33
|
||||
trillion annually—over 100 times more than in the U.S. The move away from cash in China 34
|
||||
happened in just a few years. While cash accounted for 96 percent of payments in 2012, today 35
|
||||
that number is below 15 percent. As of 2018, more than one-half billion Chinese use mobile 36
|
||||
payments.
|
||||
37
|
||||
Tencent’s WeChat Pay and Alibaba’s AliPay are the dominant payment platforms in China, with
|
||||
a combined market share of 92 percent. These two companies have unprecedented visibility 38
|
||||
into almost all consumer transactions and are using the data they are gathering to develop
|
||||
credit scores for every consumer. The scores look not just at creditworthiness, but at social 39
|
||||
media and consumption behavior as well to determine “whether [the consumer’s] social
|
||||
behavior is healthy.”40
|
||||
workers.
|
||||
33 Paul Mozur, “In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete,” New York Times (Jul. 15, 2017)
|
||||
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/business/china-cash-smartphone-payments.html.
|
||||
34
|
||||
Id.; see also: Don Weinland and Sherry Fei Ju, “China’s Ant Financial shows cashless is king,” Financial
|
||||
Times (Apr. 13, 2018) https://www.ft.com/content/5033b53a-3eff-11e8-b9f9-de94fa33a81e; Jeppe
|
||||
Saarinen, “Mobile Payments in China: Why Foreign Businesses Should Adopt a Strategy,” China Briefing
|
||||
(Aug. 29, 2018)
|
||||
http://www.china-briefing.com/news/mobile-payments-china-foreign-businesses-china-adopt-strategy/
|
||||
.
|
||||
35 Paul Mozur, “In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete,” New York Times (Jul. 15, 2017)
|
||||
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/business/china-cash-smartphone-payments.html.
|
||||
36 Jeppe Saarinen, “Mobile Payments in China: Why Foreign Businesses Should Adopt a Strategy,” China
|
||||
Briefing (Aug. 29, 2018)
|
||||
http://www.china-briefing.com/news/mobile-payments-china-foreign-businesses-china-adopt-strategy/
|
||||
.
|
||||
37 Xiang Bo, “More than half billion Chinese pay by mobile phones: report,” XinhuaNet (Jul. 19, 2018)
|
||||
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-07/19/c_137335685.htm.
|
||||
38 Jeppe Saarinen, “Mobile Payments in China: Why Foreign Businesses Should Adopt a Strategy,” China
|
||||
Briefing (Aug. 29, 2018)
|
||||
http://www.china-briefing.com/news/mobile-payments-china-foreign-businesses-china-adopt-strategy/
|
||||
.
|
||||
39 Mara Hvistendahl, “Inside China’s Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking,” WIRED (Dec. 14, 2017)
|
||||
https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/.
|
||||
40 Josh Horwitz, “China’s Tencent is quietly testing a ‘social credit score’ based on people’s online
|
||||
behavior,” Quartz (Aug. 8, 2017)
|
||||
10
|
||||
What counts as “healthy” behavior will be influenced by the Chinese government, which has
|
||||
encouraged and guided the development of Tencent and Alibaba’s scoring systems. Beijing sees
|
||||
them as the backbone of a Social Credit System to “rate each and every one of the nation's 1.3
|
||||
billion citizens by 2020 using metrics that include whether they pay their bills on time,
|
||||
plagiarize schoolwork, break traffic laws or adhere to birth-control regulations.”41
|
||||
Purchasing habits are noted by the financial intermediaries and can be used as an input to your
|
||||
Social Credit score. As an Alibaba executive told a Chinese magazine in 2015, the company 42
|
||||
judges the purchases consumers make. “Someone who plays video games for 10 hours a day, 43
|
||||
for example, would be considered an idle person, and someone who frequently buys diapers
|
||||
would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of
|
||||
responsibility.”44
|
||||
A high Social Credit score will earn a citizen certain privileges. Today that includes expedited
|
||||
permission to travel abroad and access to express lanes at airports, but in the future it could 45
|
||||
grant your children placement at desired schools. A low Social Credit score, however, will lead 46
|
||||
to punishment, according to official government policy, including, “slower internet speeds;
|
||||
restricted access to restaurants, nightclubs or golf courses; and the removal of the right to
|
||||
https://qz.com/1049669/chinas-tencent-hkg-0700-is-quietly-testing-a-social-credit-score-based-on-peo
|
||||
ples-online-behavior/.
|
||||
41 Julie Makinen, “China prepares to rank its citizens on ‘social credit,’” Los Angeles Times (Nov. 22, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-credit-system-20151122-story.html; Josh Horwitz,
|
||||
“China’s Tencent is quietly testing a ‘“social credit score’” based on people’s online behavior,” Quartz
|
||||
(Aug. 8, 2017)
|
||||
https://qz.com/1049669/chinas-tencent-hkg-0700-is-quietly-testing-a-social-credit-score-based-on-peo
|
||||
ples-online-behavior/; Sean O’Kane, “China will ban people with poor ‘social credit’ from planes and
|
||||
trains,” The Verge (Mar. 16, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/16/17130366/china-social-credit-travel-plane-train-tickets.
|
||||
42 Amy Hawkins, “Chinese Citizens Want the Government to Rank Them,” Foreign Policy (May 24, 2017)
|
||||
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/24/chinese-citizens-want-the-government-to-rank-them/; Julie
|
||||
Makinen, “China prepares to rank its citizens on ‘social credit,’” Los Angeles Times (Nov. 22, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-credit-system-20151122-story.html.
|
||||
43 Celia Hatton, “China 'social credit': Beijing sets up huge system,” BBC (Oct. 25, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186.
|
||||
44 Id.
|
||||
45 Rachel Botsman, “Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens,” WIRED UK (Oct. 20,
|
||||
2017) https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion; Julie
|
||||
Makinen, “China prepares to rank its citizens on ‘social credit,’” Los Angeles Times (Nov. 22, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-credit-system-20151122-story.html.
|
||||
46 Maya Wang, “China’s Chilling ‘Social Credit’ Blacklist,” Wall Street Journal (Dec. 11, 2017)
|
||||
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-chilling-social-credit-blacklist-1513036054.
|
||||
11
|
||||
travel freely abroad[.]” Already, over six million people are banned from taking flights, and 47
|
||||
another 1.65 million are not allowed to take trains.
|
||||
48
|
||||
Your score doesn’t just affect you, but your friends and family as well. If your friend’s score
|
||||
drops because of something she said or purchased, your score will be dragged down with hers as
|
||||
well. This means that not only will people have an incentive to watch what they say and buy, 49
|
||||
but to police their friends and family as well. Not only will there be peer pressure to conform to
|
||||
“healthy behavior,” but official government policy states that the “new system will reward
|
||||
those who report acts of breach of trust.” In tips for individuals looking to improve their 50
|
||||
ranking, Alibaba today warns about the downsides of friending people with low scores.
|
||||
51
|
||||
This kind of social control is made possible by intermediation. This kind of social control
|
||||
emerges naturally as the economy becomes increasingly dependent on dominant centralized
|
||||
intermediaries. These intermediaries, as a matter of course, surveil and record every action,
|
||||
which can then be judged and enforced algorithmically. The privacy and censorship resistance
|
||||
that permissionless cash affords serves as a check on such a systems of social control.
|
||||
Today, Alibaba’s and Tencent’s credit systems are technically voluntary, but in the near future
|
||||
(perhaps as early as 2020) they will be mandatory for everyone in China. Similarly, cash is 52
|
||||
currently still available, but in order for the Social Credit System to work optimally, the
|
||||
government has every incentive to eliminate cash and replace it with intermediated money.
|
||||
As should be clear, intermediation is not without consequence. An end to cash, a technology
|
||||
that we take for granted, will have an effect on liberties that we also take for granted. A cashless
|
||||
society cannot be an open society.
|
||||
47 Rachel Botsman, “Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens,” WIRED UK (Oct. 20,
|
||||
2017) https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion.
|
||||
48 Id.; see also: Sean O’Kane, “China will ban people with poor ‘social credit’ from planes and trains,” The
|
||||
Verge (Mar. 16, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/16/17130366/china-social-credit-travel-plane-train-tickets. 49 Rachel Botsman, “Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens,” WIRED UK (Oct. 20,
|
||||
2017) https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion.
|
||||
50 Celia Hatton, “China 'social credit': Beijing sets up huge system,” BBC (Oct. 25, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186.
|
||||
51 Rachel Botsman, “Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens,” WIRED UK (Oct. 20,
|
||||
2017) https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion.
|
||||
52 Julie Makinen, “China prepares to rank its citizens on ‘social credit,’” Los Angeles Times (Nov. 22, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-credit-system-20151122-story.html
|
||||
12
|
||||
The Open Society
|
||||
The opposite of an authoritarian state like China is an open society, the hallmark of which is a
|
||||
free competition of ideas that drives progress. In an open society, challenges to status quo 53
|
||||
thinking are not only tolerated, they are valued and protected. An open society eschews
|
||||
monism, “the ancient belief that there is a single harmony of truths into which everything, if it
|
||||
is genuine, in the end must fit” in favor of value pluralism, a celebration of variety and diversity
|
||||
within society.
|
||||
54
|
||||
An open society works only if individuals are free to engage in critical thinking to develop,
|
||||
communicate, critique, and accept or reject ideas. That, in turn, requires freedom of thought
|
||||
and expression and association, which is why open societies tend to be liberal democracies that
|
||||
guarantee civil liberties under the rule of law. The equality and dignity of individuals are also 55
|
||||
paramount values in liberal open societies. Persons are equal in worth and rights and should be
|
||||
treated by their government and their fellow citizens with dignity—i.e., not as means to an end,
|
||||
but as ends in themselves.
|
||||
56
|
||||
53 See, generally: Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, New One-Volume Edition. Princeton, NJ:
|
||||
Princeton University Press (2013).
|
||||
54 Isaiah Berlin, “Isaiah Berlin on Privacy,” selection from “The First and the Last,” New York Review of
|
||||
Books, Vol. XLV, No. 8 (1998), available at https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/berlin.html. 55 Benjamin Franklin (writing as “Silence Dogood,” one of his many pseudonyms) articulated this
|
||||
necessity when he wrote: “Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no
|
||||
such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by
|
||||
it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the
|
||||
only Bounds it ought to know.” Silence Dogood, “No. 8,” The New-England Courant (Jul. 9, 1722) available
|
||||
at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-0015. Franklin and the other American
|
||||
Founders were inspired by Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke who articulated the contours of
|
||||
liberal governance based on the “natural state of...equality” inherent to man. Locke wrote: “The freedom
|
||||
then of man, and liberty of acting according to his own will, is grounded on his having reason, which is
|
||||
able to instruct him in that law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the
|
||||
freedom of his own will.” The liberal state is necessary only to the extent that it allows free individuals to
|
||||
fully exercise their will without interfering with others’ freedoms to do the same. See generally: John
|
||||
Locke, Two Treatises of Government. ed. Thomas Hollis. London: A. Millar et al. (1764) available at:
|
||||
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/locke-the-two-treatises-of-civil-government-hollis-ed
|
||||
56 Many people are familiar with the “categorical imperative” that guides the moral philosophy of
|
||||
Immanuel Kant: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it
|
||||
should become a universal law.” Less well known is the philosopher’s alternative formulation of his core
|
||||
moral principle offered later in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: “Act so that you treat
|
||||
humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means
|
||||
only.” See: James Rachels, “Kantian Theory: The Idea of Human Dignity,” from The Elements of Moral
|
||||
Philosophy. New York, NY: Random House Press (1986): pgs. 114-117, 122-123.
|
||||
13
|
||||
The case for an open society based on liberal democracy has been made well elsewhere, so we 57
|
||||
will not rehearse it here and will instead assume that the reader finds its relative merit
|
||||
uncontroversial. The case we will make, however, is that cash is a necessary condition for the
|
||||
existence of an open society. That is, that a cashless society cannot fully be an open society
|
||||
because, as we have seen, eliminating cash means that all transactions are necessarily
|
||||
intermediated, and intermediation undermines privacy and autonomy—two values necessary
|
||||
for the individual liberty and human dignity that undergird an open society.
|
||||
Privacy is essential to freedom of thought, speech, and association not only because it prevents
|
||||
would-be censors from discovering thoughtcrimes, but also because of the chilling effects that
|
||||
come from knowing one is being watched, especially by an authority. In his excellent history of
|
||||
the Third Reich, Thomas Childers explains how the German people were changed by the fear of
|
||||
being watched:
|
||||
The American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who had traveled widely in Germany during the
|
||||
Weimar years, was shocked on a return trip in the mid-1930s by the dramatic changes
|
||||
that Hitler had wrought. He could hardly recognize the country he thought he knew.
|
||||
“Here was an entire nation,” he wrote, “. . . infested with the contagion of an
|
||||
ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all
|
||||
human relations.” Yet, thinking back on day-to-day life in the Third Reich, most
|
||||
Germans did not recall being consciously afraid. Instead they lived with a subliminal
|
||||
fear; developing a sixth sense for survival; learning what to say, when, and to whom was
|
||||
essential in daily life. A quick, almost reflexive glance over the shoulder to see who
|
||||
might be watching or listening nearby was dubbed the “deutscher Blick,” the German
|
||||
glance. Martha Dodd, the daughter of the American ambassador, recalled that
|
||||
“whenever we wanted to talk, we had to look around corners and behind doors, watch
|
||||
for the telephone and speak in whispers.” Many were convinced that their telephone
|
||||
receivers were rigged to act as transmitters so that private conservations at home could
|
||||
be listened to by the authorities. One defense was to place a tea cozy over the telephone
|
||||
to muffle conversations. Berlin merchants couldn’t keep them on the shelves.
|
||||
58
|
||||
Additionally, without privacy—without the ability to control what one reveals to others about
|
||||
oneself—it is more difficult to avoid becoming an instrument in someone else’s design, to
|
||||
preserve one’s dignity. For example, consider this story published in the New York Times
|
||||
Magazine in 2012:
|
||||
57 Perhaps most famously by the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Universal
|
||||
Declaration of Human Rights, G.A. Res. 217A (III), U.N. Doc. A/810 at 71 (1948), available at
|
||||
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf.
|
||||
58 Thomas Childers, The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster (2017):
|
||||
pgs. 321-322.
|
||||
14
|
||||
[A] man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager.
|
||||
He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry,
|
||||
according to an employee who participated in the conversation.
|
||||
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re
|
||||
sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get
|
||||
pregnant?”
|
||||
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the
|
||||
mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained
|
||||
advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants.
|
||||
The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
|
||||
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my
|
||||
daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been
|
||||
completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”59
|
||||
How did Target know that the girl was pregnant before she had told her father?
|
||||
When you shop at Target you are assigned a unique identifier that is used to track everything
|
||||
you buy. Target does not seek your consent to do this. Simply using a credit card is enough to
|
||||
let Target start identifying and profiling you. By statistically comparing the shopping habits of
|
||||
women who had voluntarily signed up for Target’s baby registry program (thus known to be
|
||||
pregnant) with those of the broader public, the retailer can predict not only who is pregnant,
|
||||
but “also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed
|
||||
to very specific stages of her pregnancy.”60
|
||||
It’s tempting to think, “So what?” Although the girl did not willingly reveal her pregnancy,
|
||||
Target gleaned the fact from her purchasing history, which is a history of voluntary
|
||||
interactions, even if the girl could not foresee what they would reveal. And it was indeed a fact,
|
||||
after all, that she was pregnant, and not something she would be able to keep from her father
|
||||
for long. There are deeper issues, however, and that is betrayed by how Target thinks about its
|
||||
surveillance program.
|
||||
Andrew Pole, the Target statistician who developed the pregnancy prediction program, had the
|
||||
task put to him by the marketing department this way: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer
|
||||
is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?”61
|
||||
59 Charles Duhigg, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” New York Times Magazine (Feb. 16, 2012)
|
||||
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html.
|
||||
60 Id.
|
||||
61 Id.
|
||||
15
|
||||
As the New York Times reported, “Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized
|
||||
soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question
|
||||
became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without
|
||||
making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits
|
||||
without letting them know you’re studying their lives?” A Target executive explained the
|
||||
solution:
|
||||
“[W]e started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never
|
||||
buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers.
|
||||
We’d put a coupon for wine glasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all
|
||||
the products were chosen by chance.
|
||||
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on,
|
||||
she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same
|
||||
mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
|
||||
Not only did Target seek to gather information about individuals even if the individuals did not
|
||||
want to give up the information, they also sought to hide what they were doing because they
|
||||
understood it would be seen as an affront to human dignity. They were right. In the particular
|
||||
case of the young woman, Target’s surveillance inadvertently robbed her of her ability to decide
|
||||
when and how to tell her father about her pregnancy.
|
||||
Other examples abound. Companies may not always divulge their targeted advertising
|
||||
campaigns like Target has, but much modern marketing relies on such impersonal data-driven
|
||||
methods.
|
||||
Firms assuage the public of the “creepiness factor” by pointing out that their datasets are
|
||||
de-individualized, which means that the advertising profiles they build for people are not
|
||||
directly connected to their name. Someone is merely “Potential Customer #46274, unmarried, 62
|
||||
high school student, with likely interests in baby items and frozen foods,” or whatever the case
|
||||
may be. However, since that profile is still tied to one’s identity, and used to try to affect their
|
||||
behavior, the fact that a literal name is not associated may be cold comfort.
|
||||
Companies pay for access to this data to try and coax people to behave the way they
|
||||
want—namely, by buying more of their product or services. When advertising merely broadcasts
|
||||
general price or product information to the public, it can be a helpful tip (or a minor
|
||||
62 See, for example: Mark Bergen and Jennifer Surane, “Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to
|
||||
Track Retail Sales,” Bloomberg (Aug. 30, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-and-mastercard-cut-a-secret-ad-deal-totrack-retail-sales.
|
||||
16
|
||||
annoyance). But when marketing is driven by a comprehensive secret profile of imputed
|
||||
lifestyle attributes, it can become invasive and troubling.
|
||||
The case of a major retailer targeting pregnant women with a campaign to ensure future
|
||||
consumer loyalty is alarming. But not all behavioral marketing is necessarily sinister. The point
|
||||
is that a world without cash gives consumers less of an ability to voluntarily exit such schemes,
|
||||
since all of their purchases would be intermediated and therefore up for grabs to marketing
|
||||
profilers who may not respect our privacy and autonomy.
|
||||
Privacy’s fundamental relationship to human dignity must be emphasized. Samuel Warren 63
|
||||
and Louis Brandeis’s foundational article, “The Right to Privacy,” not only noted the physical
|
||||
and pecuniary harms dealt by privacy violations, but also “spiritual” wrongs, injuries to
|
||||
“estimates of [ourselves],” assaults upon our “own feelings,” and blows to our “inviolate
|
||||
personality”—that is, our human “dignity,” to which the authors directly refer in their
|
||||
conclusion. We do not desire privacy merely for its beneficial effects, the dignity it affords is a 64
|
||||
fundamental part of being human.
|
||||
Given that consumers don’t affirmatively consent to retail surveillance, what can one possibly
|
||||
do to avoid losing one’s privacy? The answer is to pay with cash; to transact anonymously.
|
||||
Cash serves as an escape valve in our increasingly intermediated and therefore surveilled world.
|
||||
It’s not that it should be the only option, or even the option one should choose most of the
|
||||
time. But it should be an option. Without it, there is no choice but to have one’s every purchase
|
||||
be watched and recorded and the information used without one’s consent. Without cash there
|
||||
is no exit—no chance for the kind of dignity-preserving privacy that undergirds an open
|
||||
society.
|
||||
Cash is also necessary to retain agency and autonomy. Autonomy can be understood as the
|
||||
power to make decisions for oneself without interference from others. It’s the ability to try
|
||||
things one’s way, to succeed and be rewarded, or to make mistakes and learn from them. As
|
||||
with personal privacy, without individual autonomy there can be no meaningful open society.
|
||||
The law surrounding prior restraint of publication in the United States is a good illustration of
|
||||
how an open society respects autonomy. It holds that while one may be held to account for
|
||||
one’s speech after the fact, censorship before publication is not allowed. This ancient rule of
|
||||
Anglo-American law was explained by English jurist William Blackstone this way:
|
||||
63 Edward J. Bloustein, “Privacy as an aspect of human dignity: an answer to Dean Prosser,” 39 N.Y.U. L.
|
||||
Rev. (1964): pgs. 962-1007, available at: https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/nylr39&i=974. 64 Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” 9 Harv. L. Rev. 5 (1890), available at:
|
||||
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37368/37368-h/37368-h.htm.
|
||||
17
|
||||
The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state; but this consists
|
||||
in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for
|
||||
criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what
|
||||
sentiments he pleases before the public; to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the
|
||||
press; but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous or illegal, he must take the
|
||||
consequence of his own temerity.
|
||||
65
|
||||
Even when the government might know that one is going to publish something potentially
|
||||
harmful or illegal, it is not allowed to prevent one from publishing it, though it may seek to
|
||||
punish one for it after the fact. That is, it must respect one’s autonomy. As the Supreme Court
|
||||
has put it, “If it can be said that a threat of criminal or civil sanctions after publication ‘chills’
|
||||
speech, prior restraint ‘freezes’ it at least for the time.”66
|
||||
The same logic that applies to speech is applicable to association and other freedoms valued by
|
||||
an open society. Respect for autonomy is how such freedoms are given meaning; a legal right is
|
||||
useless if one can be prevented from exercising it. The more intermediated a society is,
|
||||
however, the easier and more tempting it becomes to effect prior restraints on the free exercise
|
||||
of rights.
|
||||
In more liberal societies, censorship is typically not aimed at mainstream views, but rather at
|
||||
speech that is unpopular and controversial—that is, speech the protection of which is the
|
||||
hallmark of an open society. It’s therefore no surprise that a target of attempts to use financial
|
||||
intermediaries for prior restraint has been the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA may
|
||||
be a controversial organization, but it is certainly one rooted in the constitutional bedrock of
|
||||
our open society. After all, for good or ill, the NRA is a free association of individuals that exists
|
||||
to engage in speech to defend a constitutional right. The group is not just a legal and legitimate
|
||||
voice, it speaks for millions of Americans.
|
||||
Someone who values an open society and also disagrees with the NRA would seek to meet
|
||||
speech with speech and ideas with ideas; they would not, however, seek to silence the NRA
|
||||
from speaking at all. Preventing “unhealthy” views from being expressed is what you would
|
||||
expect to see in an authoritarian, closed society like China. Yet this is how a press release from
|
||||
the State of New York issued last year began:
|
||||
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today directed the Department of Financial Services to
|
||||
urge insurance companies, New York State-chartered banks, and other financial services
|
||||
companies licensed in New York to review any relationships they may have with the
|
||||
National Rifle Association and other similar organizations. Upon this review, the
|
||||
65 William Blackstone. Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765-1769,
|
||||
Volume 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1979): page 152.
|
||||
66 Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539 (1976).
|
||||
18
|
||||
companies are encouraged to consider whether such ties harm their corporate
|
||||
reputations and jeopardize public safety.
|
||||
67
|
||||
If the governor’s request was too subtle, Financial Services Superintendent Maria Vullo made it
|
||||
clear later in the same press release, stating, “DFS urges all insurance companies and banks
|
||||
doing business in New York to join the companies that have already discontinued their
|
||||
arrangements with the NRA[.]” This is remarkable. Governor Cuomo is telling financial 68
|
||||
intermediaries over which he has serious power that they must cut off one of his political
|
||||
opponents, not because that opponent broke any law, but because it engages in speech and
|
||||
advocacy at odds with the governor’s views.
|
||||
69
|
||||
While the governor cannot simply ban the NRA’s speech, he clearly feels less constrained to
|
||||
threaten intermediaries that he regulates and whose continued operations depend on
|
||||
permission from the state. Because New York is the world’s financial hub, the state has
|
||||
authority over just about every bank and fintech firm with operations in the country. As a
|
||||
result, losing access to New York-regulated financial intermediaries is practically a death
|
||||
sentence for any advocacy group. As the NRA put it in a suit filed against Cuomo, “If the NRA is
|
||||
unable to collect donations from its members, safeguard the assets endowed to it, apply its
|
||||
funds to cover media buys and other expenses integral to its political speech, and obtain basic
|
||||
corporate insurance coverage, it will be unable to exist as a not-for-profit or pursue its
|
||||
advocacy mission.”70
|
||||
This is not just a viewpoint-based prior restraint on one organization’s ability to speak; it is
|
||||
also a restraint on the autonomy of millions of citizens who wish to make perfectly legal and
|
||||
legitimate contributions, to engage in free association and collective speech. Such prior
|
||||
67 Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, “Governor Cuomo Directs Department of Financial Services to
|
||||
Urge Companies to Weigh Reputational Risk of Business Ties to the NRA and Similar Organizations,”
|
||||
Press Release (Apr. 19, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-directs-department-financial-services-urge-compa
|
||||
nies-weigh-reputational-risk.
|
||||
68 Id.
|
||||
69 The DFS went beyond idle threats. It fined two insurance companies, Lockton Companies and Illinois
|
||||
Union Insurance Company, $7 million and $1.3 million respectively for underwriting an NRA-branded
|
||||
insurance program called “carry guard.” See: New York Department of Financial Services, “DFS fines
|
||||
Lockton Companies $7 million for underwriting NRA-branded ‘carry guard’ insurance program in
|
||||
violation of New York insurance law,” Press Release (May 2, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.dfs.ny.gov/about/press/pr1805021.htm; New York Department of Financial Services, “DFS
|
||||
fines Chubb subsidiary Illinois Union Insurance Company $1.3 million for underwriting NRA-branded
|
||||
‘carry guard’ insurance program in violation of New York insurance law,” Press Release (May 7, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.dfs.ny.gov/about/press/pr1805071.htm.
|
||||
70 National Rifle Association of America v. Cuomo et al, No. 18-CV-00566-TJM-CFH (N.D.N.Y., Jul. 20,2018)
|
||||
available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/15Ld2KEw6SqsvhOYgKUl3SXFTDoz4J3IA/view.
|
||||
19
|
||||
restraint is only possible because of our dependence on financial intermediaries. While physical
|
||||
cash could serve as a last resort, it is not a practical alternative in our increasingly digital world.
|
||||
It is therefore the reliance on intermediaries that is at odds with individual autonomy, an
|
||||
important basis for an open society.
|
||||
The risk to autonomy posed by a dependence on financial intermediaries exists even if there
|
||||
were no egregious government actions like Cuomo’s. In an article published months before the
|
||||
governor’s edict, New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin made the case that the
|
||||
financial industry should, of its own accord, use its “leverage over the gun industry” to
|
||||
“effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America[.]” If Mastercard were to bar 71
|
||||
customers from using their credit cards for certain gun purchases, he wrote, “assault weapons
|
||||
would be eliminated from virtually every firearms store in America because otherwise the
|
||||
sellers would be cut off from the credit card system.”72
|
||||
While one may not like guns or speech advocating for the right to bear arms, it is important to
|
||||
recognize that maintenance of an open society is not compatible with financial intermediaries
|
||||
having this much power. Dependence on intermediaries means not only constant and
|
||||
unavoidable surveillance, but also the power to thwart individual autonomy. Today it may be
|
||||
gun advocates that are targeted, but tomorrow it could be abortion providers that are dropped 73
|
||||
by financial intermediaries. Groups such as Muslim charities, sexual fetishist communities, 74 75
|
||||
71 Andrew Ross Sorkin, “How Banks Could Control Gun Sales if Washington Won’t,” New York Times (Feb.
|
||||
18, 2018) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/business/banks-gun-sales.html.
|
||||
72 Id.
|
||||
73 Meaghan Winter, “The Most Difficult Business You Could Run,” Bloomberg Businessweek (Feb. 24, 2016)
|
||||
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-abortion-business/.
|
||||
74 Lawrence White, “Hundreds of UK charities hit by global crackdown on illegal funds,” The Independent
|
||||
(Jul. 27, 2017)
|
||||
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-charities-illegal-fund-crackdown-money-hundr
|
||||
eds-oxfam-save-the-children-hsbc-a7862261.html.
|
||||
75 Jeremy Malcolm, “Payment Processors are Still Policing Your Sex Life, and the Latest Victim is
|
||||
FetLife,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (Mar. 15, 2017)
|
||||
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/payment-processors-are-still-policing-your-sex-life; Or even
|
||||
those misidentified as sexual fetishists: Violet Blue, “Why PayPal’s crackdown on ASMR creators should
|
||||
worry you,” Engadget (Sep. 14, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/14/paypal-ban-asmr-sound-art-therapy/.
|
||||
20
|
||||
and socialist booksellers have already experienced such extralegal sanctioning. It’s no 76
|
||||
surprise that the American CIvil Liberties Union filed a brief in support of the NRA.
|
||||
77
|
||||
Cash and financial intermediaries both have important roles in an open society. Cash affords
|
||||
people with autonomy and privacy. Financial intermediaries provide convenience. Both
|
||||
structures, however, present challenges. Cash can be used to facilitate crimes or evade taxes.
|
||||
Financial intermediaries surveil our every transaction and can limit what we are allowed to do
|
||||
with our own funds, becoming de facto legislators, judges, and juries. The challenge for open
|
||||
societies is to allow both structures to co-exist while maintaining a legal system that
|
||||
proportionately addresses downsides.
|
||||
Another challenge for open societies is to ensure that, as more commerce is undertaken on the
|
||||
internet and via mobile devices, we maintain an escape valve that allows individuals to
|
||||
safeguard their privacy and autonomy. One way to do this is to foster the ongoing development
|
||||
of electronic cash.
|
||||
The Moral Case for Electronic Cash
|
||||
Cash is a bearer, peer-to-peer, permissionless, and privacy-preserving form of money. In a
|
||||
world without cash, all transactions are intermediated. That means that there is no way to
|
||||
engage in a transaction that is not recorded by a third party, and there is no way to engage in a
|
||||
transaction without the permission of a third party. Such complete intermediation is at odds
|
||||
with the essential values of an open society. Indeed, intermediation undergirds the systems of
|
||||
control employed by authoritarian states like China.
|
||||
Cash is essential to an open society. It is an escape valve that lets us protect our privacy,
|
||||
dignity, and autonomy. It is therefore imperative that we preserve our ability to use it. Yet that
|
||||
is not enough. As we move to an increasingly online world in which physical cash is not
|
||||
practical for many transactions, we must also develop and foster electronic cash.
|
||||
Electronic cash is exactly what it sounds like: a bearer, peer-to-peer, permissionless, and
|
||||
privacy-preserving form of money that is not paper or metal, but digital. Bitcoin, the world’s
|
||||
first cryptocurrency, was created to be that. While it is bearer, peer-to-peer, and
|
||||
permissionless, it is not yet completely privacy-preserving. The Bitcoin system still leaves a
|
||||
sufficient digital trail to make it traceable in a way that physical cash is not. For close to a 78
|
||||
decade, cryptographers and computer scientists have been working to improve on Bitcoin’s
|
||||
76 Cory Doctorow, “Paypal blacklists payments for a World Socialists pamphlet about the Iranian
|
||||
opposition,” BoingBoing (Mar. 29, 2018) https://boingboing.net/2018/03/29/oh-paypal.html.
|
||||
77 Brief for the ACLU as Amicus Curiae, NRA v. Cuomo (2018), available at
|
||||
https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/nra-v-cuomo-aclu-amicus-brief 78 Adam Ludwin, “How Anonymous is Bitcoin?” Coin Center (Jan. 20, 2015)
|
||||
https://coincenter.org/entry/how-anonymous-is-bitcoin.
|
||||
21
|
||||
design in order to build a cryptocurrency that is not only permissionless and
|
||||
censorship-resistant, as Bitcoin is, but also private. Today there are several privacy-preserving
|
||||
cryptocurrencies under development, including Beam, Dash, Grin, MobileCoin, Monero, and
|
||||
Zcash, which hold the promise of being true electronic cash. It is also likely that enhanced
|
||||
privacy will eventually be added to Bitcoin as well.
|
||||
Privacy is a notoriously difficult concept to define, but a useful definition was put forth by
|
||||
mathematician and computer scientist Eric Hughes: “Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is
|
||||
something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one
|
||||
doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”79
|
||||
In this formulation, it is interesting to note that Hughes does not frame privacy as a right to be
|
||||
respected by others, but as a power to be exercised by individuals.
|
||||
Without denying conceptions of privacy as a right, which necessarily imposes duties on others
|
||||
and must be enforced by government, the case we make here is simply for the freedom to guard
|
||||
what one reveals about oneself to the world, and to build and use technology (like cash) to do
|
||||
so. Not only is that a more modest goal, but additionally if privacy is to be a check on
|
||||
government overreach, then its enforcement cannot depend on government. The conception of
|
||||
privacy we advance here is therefore something that can be exercised individually and does not
|
||||
depend on anyone else. Think of the $100 bill dropped anonymously into a church’s poor box.
|
||||
The donor’s privacy depends on no one but himself. The donor’s ability to retain his privacy,
|
||||
however, turns on the technology available to him.
|
||||
Physical cash—from seashells, to gold coins, to paper notes—is a technology that for millennia
|
||||
has allowed individuals to exercise autonomy and retain privacy. As we move to a world that is
|
||||
increasingly dematerialized, with all the attendant benefits and efficiencies, we must preserve
|
||||
the ability to transact autonomously and privately that physical cash has heretofore made
|
||||
possible. Cryptocurrency that is both permissionless and private is a technology that can allow
|
||||
individuals to continue to live in an open society even as life is increasingly digitized. It is a
|
||||
tool that can allow one to shop at physical or online stores alike and reduce the risk of being
|
||||
tracked. It is a tool that allows one to contribute to advocacy groups that have powerful
|
||||
political enemies. And it is a tool that dissidents can use to resist authoritarian states.
|
||||
Caring deeply about the freedom that cash engenders is part and parcel of the Western liberal
|
||||
tradition. While many Nordic and Asian countries seem to be racing towards adopting a
|
||||
cashless society, in Germany the trend is decidedly the opposite. Given their experience with
|
||||
two authoritarian regimes—one fascist and one communist—Germans seem to appreciate how
|
||||
cash helps protect their freedom, privacy, and autonomy. Germans use cash for 80 percent of all
|
||||
transactions, and proposals to move in a more cashless direction have been met with
|
||||
79 Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” (1993)
|
||||
https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
|
||||
22
|
||||
widespread public protest. Germans also carry about twice as much cash as people in the U.S., 80
|
||||
and tens of thousands of restaurants and shops, from big to small, are cash only. In 81 82
|
||||
Germany, the major chains Aldi and Ikea did not begin accepting credit cards until two years
|
||||
ago.
|
||||
83
|
||||
“Cash, to me, is an important public good by which you measure the transparency and legal
|
||||
order of a society, and also the respect for the individual and the private sphere,” Max Otte, a
|
||||
German economist who leads Save Our Cash, a national campaign opposing restrictions on
|
||||
cash, has explained. “‘Why do Germans like cash?’ is the wrong question,” he told Bloomberg.
|
||||
Instead, Otte asks, “Why have others shifted to a cashless society so quickly?” Indeed, “cash is 84
|
||||
printed freedom” is a German expression. Unlike other polities that have taken for granted the 85
|
||||
freedom that cash confers on individuals, Germans understand that cash is an individual check
|
||||
on the kind of all-out state control that we see in China.
|
||||
Peer-to-peer electronic cash is at most 10 years old. Before that, all online transactions were
|
||||
necessarily intermediated. This means that there was a period of decades in which digital
|
||||
transactions were synonymous with intermediated transactions because there simply was no
|
||||
alternative. As a result, it may be that individuals, firms, and governments have come to see
|
||||
electronic transactions as inherently traceable and censorable. But there is nothing natural or
|
||||
fixed about such a state of the world; there is no reason it has to be that way. Indeed it may
|
||||
have been only a matter of time for individuals who value the capabilities that physical cash
|
||||
technology afford would successfully replicate it digitally. Those who build the technology and
|
||||
advocate for its use today share with the German people an understanding of the fragility of
|
||||
liberty and how technologies of individual empowerment are essential to retaining an open
|
||||
society.
|
||||
80 Matthew Campbell, “Germany is Still Obsessed With Cash,” Bloomberg Markets (Feb. 5, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-06/germany-is-still-obsessed-with-cash; Mihret
|
||||
Yohannes, “German rallying cry is ‘cash only,’” USA Today (Jul. 16, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/07/16/germans-love-cash-and-suspicious--credit-deb
|
||||
t/30230061/.
|
||||
81 Matt Philips, “Why Germans pay cash for almost everything,” Quartz (Sep. 17, 2014)
|
||||
https://qz.com/262595/why-germans-pay-cash-for-almost-everything/.
|
||||
82 Matthew Campbell, “Germany is Still Obsessed With Cash,” Bloomberg Markets (Feb. 5, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-06/germany-is-still-obsessed-with-cash.
|
||||
83 Id.
|
||||
84 Id.
|
||||
85 Id. See also: Hardy Graupner, “Should paper money be abolished?” Deutsche Welle (May 18, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.dw.com/en/should-paper-money-be-abolished/a-18456046.
|
||||
23
|
||||
An open society is not costless. Free speech is abused by demagogues and used to spread truly
|
||||
harmful ideas. Freedom of religion protects cultists. Freedom of movement is exploited by
|
||||
terrorists. Yet it would be ridiculous to do away with these freedoms and the benefits they
|
||||
bestow in order to eliminate their costs. The same is true about technologies that enable an
|
||||
open society. Cars are often used to rob banks, email to commit fraud, and web forums to post
|
||||
child pornography. We do not, and should not, restrict individuals’ right to use technologies
|
||||
solely because they can be misused.
|
||||
Without a doubt, electronic cash will be used by some in the course of breaking the law. That is
|
||||
an attendant cost to the benefits described above. If there was no electronic cash (or physical
|
||||
cash for that matter), and all transactions were surveilled and subject to control, then law
|
||||
enforcement might have an easier time prosecuting criminals—just as they would have an
|
||||
easier time spotting crime if all houses were made of glass. But that would not be a better
|
||||
world. It would therefore make no sense to seek to restrict the freedom of all citizens to use
|
||||
cash—to undermine the underpinnings of an open society—in order to make it easier to catch a
|
||||
minority of people who commit crimes. Justice Douglas was right when he wrote, “I am not yet
|
||||
ready to agree that America is so possessed with evil that we must level all constitutional
|
||||
barriers to give our civil authorities the tools to catch criminals.” The fact that criminals will 86
|
||||
exploit freedom and technology to break the law is the cost of living in an open society, but it is
|
||||
outweighed by the benefits. And, making a thing illegal will not necessarily stop criminals from
|
||||
using it.
|
||||
The good news is that over time we have developed an effective way to deal with the criminal
|
||||
use of cash. Financial institutions throughout the world are required to identify their
|
||||
customers, keep records, and report suspicious activities to government authorities. Among 87
|
||||
such suspicious activities are the withdrawal or deposit of large sums of cash or otherwise
|
||||
questionable transactions involving cash. There is no reason why the same reasonable 88
|
||||
regulatory regime that is applied to anonymous and untraceable physical cash could not be
|
||||
applied to electronic cash, and in almost all respects it is already. Doing so would allow law 89
|
||||
abiding individuals to withdraw and use electronic cash as a useful form of payment and
|
||||
86 California Bankers Assn. v. Shultz, 416 U.S. 21 (1974) available at
|
||||
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/416/21.html. 87 For example, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), also known as the Groupe d’action financière
|
||||
(GAFI), is an international intergovernmental organization comprised of 38 members which develops and
|
||||
recommends policies to combat money laundering and other crimes. These policies are directed
|
||||
primarily at financial institutions because of the critical role that banks play in international money
|
||||
transfers. See: Kern Alexander, “The International Anti-Money-Laundering Regime: The Role of the
|
||||
Financial Action Task Force,” Journal of Money Laundering Control, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2001): pgs. 231-248,
|
||||
https://doi.org/10.1108/eb027276. 88 Id. 89 US Department of the Treasury, Financial Crimes and Enforcement Network, “Application of FinCEN’s
|
||||
Regulations to Persons Administering, Exchanging, or Using Virtual Currencies” Guidance
|
||||
FIN-2013-G001 (Mar. 18, 2013) http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013
|
||||
-G001.html.
|
||||
24
|
||||
escape-valve from constant monitoring while ensuring that law enforcement has the ability to
|
||||
target the large scale and systematic criminal use of the technology. What this means in
|
||||
practice is that enforcing the law against some criminals, especially small-scale ones, will not
|
||||
be easy and will instead require the same kind of resource-intensive police work (often
|
||||
undercover) necessary to apprehend those who use physical cash. Those parts of a criminal
|
||||
enterprise that employ electronic cash on a larger scale will eventually interface with the
|
||||
regulated financial system, however, and at that point law enforcement should have the same
|
||||
tools at their disposal as they do with physical cash. Regulators can and should treat electronic
|
||||
cash the same as physical cash.
|
||||
Conclusion
|
||||
The U.S. is far from being a cashless society, and it has constitutional protections that should
|
||||
serve as a bulwark against overreach from an authoritarian state. But eternal vigilance is the
|
||||
price of liberty. While the likelihood that a China-style social credit system will be enacted in
|
||||
the U.S. is low, there are similar threats that citizens should be able to guard against. As we
|
||||
have seen, the more intermediated our financial lives become, the more tempted corporate
|
||||
entities and government officials will be to spy on individuals or take steps to restrict how
|
||||
individuals can transact—often with the best of intentions.
|
||||
In 2014, for example, the Transportation Security Administration sought bids from vendors to
|
||||
build a passenger screening system that would rely on “commercial data” including “wide
|
||||
ranging data such as purchase information.” The TSA did not explain what kinds of purchases 90
|
||||
could be deemed red flags, or as Chinese authorities might put it, “unhealthy.” More recently,
|
||||
online financial intermediaries like PayPal, Stripe, and Patreon have shut down the accounts of
|
||||
users on both of the political spectrum for the fringe views they espoused. And in 2014, J.P. 91
|
||||
Morgan lost to hackers the private financial records of over 100 millions customers.
|
||||
92
|
||||
Cash—and in an increasingly digital world, electronic cash—is a tool that law abiding private
|
||||
individuals can use to protect their privacy, autonomy, and ultimately their dignity. It should
|
||||
90 Tim Cushing, “The TSA Wants To Read Your Facebook Posts And Check Out Your Purchases Before It
|
||||
Will Approve You For PreCheck,” TechDirt (Jan 26, 2015)
|
||||
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150123/09423229792/tsa-wants-to-read-your-facebook-posts-chec
|
||||
k-out-your-purchases-before-it-will-approve-you-precheck.shtml.
|
||||
91 David Gilmour, “How Patreon stepped into a war between Antifa and the alt-right,” The Daily Dot (Aug.
|
||||
8, 2017) https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/patreon-antifa-altright-igd-lauren-southern/; Glenn Harlan
|
||||
Reynolds, “When Digital Platforms Become Censors,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 18, 2018)
|
||||
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-digital-platforms-become-censors-1534514122.
|
||||
92 Tanya Agrawal, David Henry, and Jim Finkle, “JPMorgan hack exposed data of 83 million, among
|
||||
biggest breaches in history,” Reuters (Oct. 2, 2014)
|
||||
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jpmorgan-cybersecurity/jpmorgan-hack-exposed-data-of-83-million
|
||||
-among-biggest-breaches-in-history-idUSKCN0HR23T20141003.
|
||||
25
|
||||
not just be tolerated, but fostered and celebrated. Not only do its benefits outweigh its costs, it
|
||||
is check that individuals may wield over abusive intermediaries. It will help ensure we do not
|
||||
lose our open society.
|
||||
26
|
||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user