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posted by martyb on Tuesday December 05 2017, @05:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-coin-are-belong-to-us dept.

In May, the bill S.1241 (archive) was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Chuck Grassley, a Republican Senator from Iowa. The bill, if enacted, would call upon the Department of Homeland Security to develop

a strategy to interdict and detect prepaid access devices, digital currencies, or other similar instruments, at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States

According to a story at btcmanager.com (square brackets in original),

the bill would "criminalize [those] intentionally concealing ownership or control of a [digital currency or digital exchange] account.

The Senate held a meeting about the bill on November 28. Witnesses included Charles Davidson of the Kleptocracy Initiative of the Hudson Institute conservative think tank; Douglas Farah of IBI Consultants, which specializes in "issues of national security, transnational crime, terrorism, terror finance and non-state armed actors"; and Kathryn Haun Rodriguez of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange. Ms. Haun, however, made no mention of cryptocurrency in her testimony (PDF).


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:50PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:50PM (#605782)

    Is because they aren't willing to opt out of the country along with the government.

    If you are really man enough to dislike government surveillance then you need to leave the US, officially renounce your citizenship (somewhere between 1500-5000 dollars now, and requires 2 visits 3 months apart at a US embassy on foreign soil.)

    At that point you can have whatever privacy you are willing to make for yourself, so long as your financial transactions don't take place in any country with those reporting requirements. On the other hand, you also lose any constitutional protections against them spying on you. But at this point in America's history, those protections don't mean shit anyway and anyone claiming they do is a fool, plain and simple.

    Do your part to Make America's Emigrants Great Again. Emigrate somewhere new and show by example how those Americans Left Behind can be great again.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday December 05 2017, @08:11PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @08:11PM (#605793)

    I really doubt that renouncing US citizenship is going to be anybody's solution to getting more privacy. It's not like we are only subject to surveillance by our own government anyway. And while the constitutional protections don't seem to be stopping anybody, they do generate media attention. They also might stop a drone strike, or at least make the commander think twice. It's only slightly more protection than nothing, which makes it only slightly safer to stay a citizen than not.

    Unless you are credibly capable of creating your own state apparatus. If you are, then you've probably already started co-opting one that already exists because that is safer than starting a new country.

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?