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An Anonymous Coward writes:

In May, the bill S.1241 [congress.gov] (archive [archive.org]) was introduced [soylentnews.org] in the U.S. Senate by Chuck Grassley [wikipedia.org], a Democratic 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 [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 [senate.gov] about the bill on November 28. Witnesses included Charles Davidson of the Kleptocracy Initiative of the Hudson Institute [wikipedia.org] conservative think tank; Douglas Farah of IBI Consultants [ibiconsultants.net], which specializes in "issues of national security, transnational crime, terrorism, terror finance and non-state armed actors"; and Kathryn Haun Rodriguez of Coinbase [wikipedia.org], a cryptocurrency exchange. Ms. Haun, however, made no mention of cryptocurrency in her testimony [senate.gov] (PDF).

Original Submission