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The U.S. Senate has continued to debate a bill which seeks greater regulation of cryptos to weaponize the sector.
Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has led a group contending that cryptos are more prone to sanctions evasion by Russia than legacy financial mechanisms.
But others say that if anything, the public ledgers of cryptocurrencies have aided in tracking financial movements. Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA), ranking member of the Senate Financial Committee, argued:
“There are many other examples of cases being solved much faster because cryptocurrency was involved. Cases where we could immediately identify on a public ledger which Virtual Asset Service Provider to subpoena, using immutable public evidence rather than years of Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process and guesswork about which bank might be involved, due to opaque wire transfers and shell companies.”
Toomey cited recent testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray and National Security Council Cybersecurity Director Carole House that there was no evidence cryptocurrencies are being used to dodge sanctions, according to Nextgov.
Another official, FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) Deputy Michael Mosier, submitted testimony this past week to the committee. Mosier said:
“Yes, cryptocurrency has become the recent payment of choice because of the speed and its perceived anonymity. However, payments made in cryptocurrency offer law enforcement significant visibility and investigative benefits over opaque banking, as we saw with the recovery of $2.3 million in cryptocurrency from the Colonial Pipeline attackers.”
The Weaponization Of Finance Takes Another Step
Supposed democracies in the West have in fact been acting with more naked authoritarian zeal in weaponizing the legacy financial system, not only against external enemies, but internal dissenters.
Intelligence agencies worked with Bank of America and other institutions to illegally audit financial transactions of January 6 protesters.
Just before the breakout of the Russia – Ukraine conflict, the Canadian government triggered extraordinary use of an “Emergency Powers Act” to strangle the finances of an ongoing Truckers Convoy protest against mRNA gene therapies deceptively called vaccines. (See “O CANADA: GOVERNMENTS UNLEASH NEW REIGN OF ‘TERROR,’” 22 Feb 2022.)
The selective and political use of the financial system to crack down on unwanted protests, while allowing politically useful protests, was evidenced in the case of BLM and Antifa in 2020.
During that episode, there was widespread violence and deaths over many weeks, including attacks on government and private property that ran into the billions, and an attempted assault on the White House in June and burning of a church across the street.
But because the chaos was framed as a righteous reaction against a climate of racism supposedly exacerbated by then President Trump, BLM activists not only avoided any financial crackdown. They were actually able to launch and sustain a major corporate and social media funding campaign.
The idea that cryptos contain mechanisms which are resistant to having them warped into such political abuse, has been noted by international human rights and civil liberties groups. (See “HUMAN RIGHTS FOUNDATION HEAD SAYS ‘BITCOIN IS THE REVOLUTION,’” 29 Jun 2021 and “A PERVERSION OF CRYPTOCURRENCY,” 12 Oct 2021.)
Those attributes of crypto, among other things, are clearly drawing scrutiny and proposed action by governments, international banking interests, and shadowy benefitting NGOs.
In the immediate regulatory instance, the crypto sanctions bill co-sponsor Mark Warner sought to position regulatory action as a middle ground, and not a crackdown on cryptos:
“I am not sure the kind of positing of this as an either-or circumstance is the correct posit. This has been a way to move assets to the Ukrainian people in a relatively fast way and I want to commend that. But, I am hugely concerned that because of some of this ease of transferring of assets that has helped the Ukrainian people, that same ease is allowing conversion of fiat currency to crypto to then potentially buying properties in nations around the world that have accepted this.”