Facebook Still Can't Admit That Launching Libra During An International Privacy Scandal Is Idiotic

from the well-duh dept

One of the less charming aspects of Facebook is its executives' total inability to read the room. For example, any sensible company under Facebook's recent level of scrutiny would take the contrite and humble approach -- pausing most operations to insist they'd seen the error of their ways, pummeling home the claim that they were pausing expansion ambitions to ensure they were leaving no stone unturned to fix the problem and company culture (even if the company in question never genuinely intended such a thing).

Instead Facebook, one of the wealthiest companies to ever exist, engaged in repeated PR gaffes and face plants, most of which were their own making. Like thinking it was a good idea to launch a dating app in the middle of a privacy firestorm. Or thinking it was a good idea to push a "privacy protecting" VPN on users that wound up being spyware. Or, you know, thinking it was a good idea for it to push hard into the cryptocurrency space while facing numerous international investigations for being a dumpster fire when it comes to protecting its users' privacy and security.

To that end, a paywalled report at The Information this week hinted that Facebook was finally backing away from its Libra cryptocurrency plan after numerous partners had wisely exited the (likely) doomed venture. Last year Facebook had already been slowly backing away from its original vision of Libra as a fully open, decentralized network, putting it in stark contrast with those excited about the decentralized nature of blockchain-based networks.

But the company and the Libra Association (or what's left of it) subsequently told Ars Technica that nothing has changed:

"The Libra Association has not altered its goal of building a regulatory-compliant global payment network, and the basic design principles that support that goal have not been changed nor has the potential for this network to foster future innovation."

Government regulators around the world balked at the dumb idea from the start. Stripe, Paypal, eBay, Visa, Mastercard, and Mercado Pago all quickly sensed the project was a dumpster fire and quickly backed away. Most of the companies that actually know something about international payment systems want nothing to do with this project. But this being Facebook, it apparently knows better, and will probably keep beating this dead horse for another year or so before it admits the project is a turd, in large part because nobody trusts the company to get it right after Cambridge Analytica.

Filed Under: cryptocurrency, currency, libra, money, regulations, regulators
Companies: facebook

Your Money Or Your Life: Louisville Cops, Prosecutors Dropping Hefty Trafficking Charges In Exchange For Seized Cash

from the participation-trophies-for-all-drug-war-participants dept

Law enforcement agencies like to portray asset forfeiture as an important weapon in the Drug War arsenal -- one capable of toppling cartels and kingpins. Every so often, a large amount of cash and drugs is trotted out in front of reporters as evidence of this claim.

The reality is much, much different. For all intents and purposes, civil asset forfeiture is a government crime of opportunity. Any search that yields cash is a win for the agencies that profit from the seizure, even when there's no evidence the cash taken has any link to criminal activity. Pretextual traffic stops, knock-and-talks, stop-and frisk programs… all of these have the potential to turn everyday police work into something profitable.

WFPL's examination of the Louisville (KY) Metro PD's asset forfeiture paperwork shows the agency isn't really targeting drug traffickers and criminal organizations with its seizures. It's just lifting money from whoever it can, like people who've done nothing more than produced an offensive odor. (You are not misreading that sentence.)

Theron Carson and his friends were smoking weed and playing video games when the police showed up at his door.

It was 1 a.m., and the officers told Carson someone complained about the smell. The quickest resolution of the problem, they told Carson, was to allow them to search his Newburg apartment.

After police found his weed and his digital scale, they emptied his wallet. Then they charged him with drug trafficking.

Carson, now 24, says he is not a drug dealer. The $1,200 police took was earned legally, he said, and a mix of rent money, bill money and cash he and his girlfriend socked away in preparation for their daughter's birth.

Carson wanted the money back. Prosecutors offered him a deal that would allow him to plead to a misdemeanor… but only if he surrendered all of the cash.

This is standard operating procedure for the LMPD and the prosecutors it works with. Any cash seized is treated essentially as a bribe arrestees didn't know they were offering. In 25% of the cases examined, charges were dropped in exchange for the LMPD keeping the money.

Local prosecutors pretend the money is not a motivator. They're apparently putting alleged criminals back on the street (minus their cash) because they're just so great at prosecutorial discretion... I guess.

Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney Thomas B. Wine said in an interview with KyCIR that losing cash is the “cost of doing business” if you’re caught with drugs and money, regardless of how the case is resolved.

“To somehow suggest that money is going to make a difference for any of us, at least here on the prosecution side, is ridiculous,” Wine said. “It’s not worth it for the prosecutors that I work with.”

So. Much. Discretion.

Wine estimates nearly 98 percent of cases his office prosecutes are settled with a plea deal.

But no profiting from cash grabs. No sir.

Kentucky law dictates that the police department keeps 85 percent of what it seizes, and the rest goes to the state’s prosecutors.

The LMPD seizes nearly $1 million in cash per year. It takes a while to add up when cops -- utilizing their training and expertise -- are able to turn almost anyone into a "drug trafficker" for the purposes of relieving them of their cash. According to WFPL's investigation, almost 40% of the seizures involved less than $1,000. And yet, officers taking property from arrestees tend to describe any amount of cash as "large" to better fit the drug trafficking narrative being pushed to create charges significant enough to be used as leverage against defendants and their natural desire to be reunited with their seized funds.

Police stopped a man in January 2017 for failing to use a turn signal while leaving “a high narcotics area,” according to an arrest citation. The officer reported smelling marijuana but didn’t find any; instead, a search netted a needle loaded with suspected meth, two pills and a “large amount of money”: $231.

An LMPD officer arrested a man suspected of selling synthetic marijuana at a west Louisville gas station in March 2017. In the arrest citation, the officer noted the man possessed a “large amount of lower denomination bills” in his wallet. The “large” amount of cash officers seized: $33.

These are the people prosecutors ring up on drug trafficking charges. And these are the ones whose cash they take to secure plea deals for lesser charges. Even then, the deliberately-broken system still doesn't work. The $33 kingpin listed above lost his cash and was convicted of drug trafficking.

One more data point: the LMPD's drug dogs are only "right" half the time.

In an analysis of 139 searches since Jan. 1, 2017, in which a dog indicated that drugs were present, 45% turned up no narcotics.

Cops don't know the drug dog is wrong until after the search is completed. The drug dog is really there to give officers permission to perform a warrantless search. On the dog green lights the search, anything discovered can be seized by officers, including whatever cash happens to be in the car or on the driver. A drug dog is a mobile warrant exception.

Programs where random citizens are relieved of cash just because they happen to be in possession of small amounts of drugs isn't going to stop the flow of drugs. They'll continue to flow as freely as citizens' cash into the accounts of the PD and prosecutors. No one's in any hurry to give up this revenue stream, even if law enforcement resources would be better used elsewhere.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, asset seizure, cash, civil asset forfeiture, dropped cases, legalized theft, louisville, money, prosecutors

Another Day, Another Flimsy Report Claiming TV Cord Cutting Won't Save You Money

from the denying-the-obvious dept

Once a month like clockwork, somebody in the tech press proudly decides to inform their readers that you can't save any money by cutting the traditional TV cord and going with cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives. The logic in these reports almost always goes something like this: "Once I got done signing up for every damn streaming video service under the sun, I found that I wasn't really saving much money over traditional cable."

Writers leaning into this lazy hot take almost always tend to forget a few things.

One, the same broadcasters dictating cable TV rates dictate streaming video rates, so in some ways pricing will be lateral. Two, adding a dozen streaming services to exactly match your bloated, 300 channel cable subscription misses the entire point of cord cutting, which is about customization and flexibility. Three, if writers actually stopped and talked to real consumers (like in the cord cutting subreddit), they'd be told (repeatedly) how customers routinely save money each month by breaking free of the traditional, bloated cable TV bundle.

Last week it was Quartz's turn to prop up the flimsy narrative that "streaming’s live-TV bundles aren’t actually saving cord-cutters money." Their report was at least somewhat more scientific in nature, leaning heavily on data provided by a research firm by the name of M Science, which acknowledged that the average cord cutter saves around $20 per month by going with a streaming alternative. But the firm then tried to claim that this savings disappeared when you factored in cable company "triple play" bundles:

"When paired with the cost customers continued to pay their cable providers for things like internet, phone, or additional TV packages, the savings vanished altogether. The average virtual pay-TV subscriber paid about $15 more in aggregate than the average cable customer in 2017, based on M Science’s data.

That’s in part because customers can often get a better deal bundling two or three services from a cable provider, like TV, internet, and home phone service, than paying for internet alone. It’s marketed by cable operators as the double or triple play. “The cable companies will incentivize aggressively for bundling and penalize for unbundling,” said Corey Barrett, senior analyst for technology, media, and telecom at M Science. “They’ll have attractive rates for a double-play bundle and if you decide to go to broadband only, it’s going to cost more than broadband bundled with other services.”

The problem with this take is that while cable operators claim you're getting "savings" by bundling multiple services you may not even want (cable digital phone service, especially), these savings are often part of a temporary promotion. And when that promotion expires you're usually left paying a dramatically higher rate. While new customers tend to get offered promotions in order to get them to switch, existing customers who've been with the company for a while often have trouble getting a new, comparable promo when the contract expires.

In reality, ISPs like to artificially jack up the price of standalone broadband to make it as unpalatable as possible in the hopes of upselling you to additional services. That doesn't necessarily equate to saving money. The report is also likely relying on these companies' advertised prices, which isn't the actual price. Cable companies are facing all manner of lawsuits for using bogus fees to jack up the advertised rate post sale, a bit of creative marketing regulators from both parties have turned a blind eye to for decades. That's before you get to the broadband usage caps and overage fees used to punish cord cutters for leaving the cable walled garden.

Another tendency I've enjoyed observing in these reports is that they almost always ignore the fact that piracy exists and is aggressively common in the Plex and Kodi era. Countless consumers save money via piracy, but acknowledging this reality is seen by most news outlets and analysts as a tacit approval of it -- resulting in them comically omitting it from the discussion entirely. Because you don't approve of piracy doesn't change the fact that it routinely occurs as a cost-cutting measure among consumers. Piracy is, as Techdirt readers have long understood, something you have to compete with whether you like it or not. If you ignore it in your analysis of TV costs you're painting an incomplete picture.

All told, if you prefer a massive bundle of religious programming, horrible reality television, live sports and infomercials -- you may want to stick to paying an arm and a leg for cable. But if you spend even a small amount of time talking to those that have taken the leap and ditched traditional cable, you'll find absolutely no debate that cutting the traditional TV cord routinely saves you a significant chunk of change each and every month.

Filed Under: cable tv, cord cutting, money, silos, streaming

NCAA Forces UCF Football Player To Choose Between His Athletic Career And His YouTube Channel

from the bad-guys dept

While we've talked about the NCAA in the past, those conversations have mostly revolved around the NCAA's backwards thinking regarding the streaming of sporting events and issues about the likenesses of players appearing in video games. Unsaid from what I can tell, however, is the general opinion of this writer that the NCAA is an outdated institution designed to make gobs of money off of the labor of otherwise free citizens while curtailing their rights to make any income themselves. These attempts to make income by college athletes typically revolve around selling autographs, memorabillia, and game-worn clothing, but the NCAA is perfectly capable of taking its rules to ridiculous lengths.

Serving as an example of this is UCF kicker Donald De La Haye, who has been informed by the NCAA that he must either shutter his YouTube channel or his football career.

De La Haye’s channel has published 41 videos over the past year, piling up 54,000 subscribers and two million views in that time. His videos are nearly all related to his athletic career, though only a few directly address his status as UCF’s kicker; others are simply videos showing off his daily kicking regime and ability to boot a flatscreen TV from a ledge. As De La Haye stated in his latest video, entitled “Quit College Sports Or Quit YouTube,” because he was profiting from ads placed on his videos and channel homepage, the NCAA determined that he was profiting off his own likeness—the nerve!—and put its foot down.

As is the case with everything to do with the NCAA, this is about where this advertising money is going and not the actual conduct of De La Haye. The NCAA's stance is that it is perfectly fine for athletes to generate money based on their activities, it's just that the money generated must end up in the NCAA's coffers instead of in the bank accounts of the athletes that perform on the field of play. If that sounds like slavery to you, the NCAA would like to remind you that some of these athletes get college scholarships. But not all of them do, of course, and the value of those scholarships pales in comparison to the revenue generated by these athletes for the NCAA and its member institutions. It's a terrible deal for college athletes, all the more so when the NCAA is now in the habit of prohibiting speech in the form of these kinds of videos just because some advertising revenue is generated.

Revenue, by the way, that appears to be going to De La Haye's family instead of bling.

De La Haye intimated in his 10-minute video that he had been using some of the money made from his channel to help his family at home—he hails from Costa Rica—saying they have, “tons of bills piling up and there’s no way for me to help. I thought I found a way.”

The NCAA may have once served a purpose, but it needs to die a very quick death in the present. Any organization that wants to keep an enterprising college student athlete from making YouTube videos has demonstrated its need to be exited.

Filed Under: collegiate sports, donald de la haye, free speech, money
Companies: ncaa, youtube

Report: DEA Blowing Money On Liars, Thieves, And Amtrak Employees

from the nothing-like-spending-other-people's-money dept

If the Drug War is US law enforcement's wildly-swinging fist, the DEA is its middle finger. Once the pointless brutality stops, the finger is extended to everyone -- especially taxpayers.

Even the agency's name inadvertently belies its twisted motivations: "Drug Enforcement Administration." Without further information, the name, on its own, seems to suggest a shoring up of the drug trade, rather than an adversarial force.

The DEA has a lot of skin in the drug game. Without the steady flow of drugs, it ceases to exist. It operates with a great deal of autonomy and is often excused its worst excesses because most people agree (without much thought) that drugs are bad.

The DEA controls a vast network of confidential informants. Actually, to state it more accurately, the DEA oversees… Never mind. The DEA pays a great deal of money to confidential informants. Beyond handing out cash, the DEA apparently does little else to keep its informants in line.

A just-released Inspector General's report [PDF] on the DEA's use of confidential informants finds the agency has no problem paying out vast sums of money to lying informants and that it maintains a small army of otherwise-employed citizens who moonlight as cash/drug-sniffing humans for the nation's top drug warriors.

This year's report builds on the lowlights of last year's examination of the DEA's informant program, in which the OIG basically stated the entire program runs without sufficient oversight. Nothing has changed in the interim. This report includes even more details of excess, abuse, and stupidity.

Fun fact: lying to prosecutors, judges, and the DEA itself isn't enough to prevent the agency from giving an informant even more chances to lie -- all the while being paid handsomely for making stuff up.

[W]hile DEA policy prohibits paying deactivated sources who were deactivated because of an arrest warrant or for committing a serious offense, we found two concerning instances of payments to previously-deactivated sources. In one case, the DEA reactivated a confidential source who previously provided false testimony in trials and depositions. During the approximate 5-year period of reactivation, this source was used by 13 DEA field offices and paid $469,158. More than $61,000 of the $469,158 was paid after this source was once again deactivated for making false statements to a prosecutor.

That's just one case. There are many more. The OIG notes that $9.4 million in tax dollars was shelled out to deactivated informants, suggesting that not working for the DEA is a great way to make a living.

Then there's the so-called "limited use" informants. These are Amtrak, airline, and parcel service employees the DEA pays to keep any eye out for cash and drugs. Lots of money is misspent here with even less oversight than goes into the paying-people-for-doing-nothing program.

Another area of concern is the DEA’s oversight of confidential sources it categorized as “Limited Use,” often referred to as “tipsters,” which DEA policy specifies are sources who make information available independently without direction by the DEA. The Limited Use category is regarded by the DEA as low-risk and therefore DEA policy requires the least supervision. Yet we found that Limited Use sources were some of DEA’s highest paid sources, with 477 Limited Use sources during the period of our review having received an estimated $26.8 million.

[...]

Some of these sources received significant payments for their assistance, including an airline employee who received more than $600,000 in less than 4 years, and a parcel employee who received over $1 million in 5 years.

Unsurprisingly, the DEA is very interested in cash, despite its supposed drug focus. Consequently, "limited use" informants need a bit more hands-on treatment to keep them zeroed in on seizable currency. As the OIG points out, the extra attention paid to handling "limited use" informants makes them no longer "limited use" -- and therefore supposedly subject to stricter oversight. Not that this happened either.

We believe that DEA Agents directed the actions of these sources extensively enough that they could not reasonably be understood to have acted “without direction” and therefore do not fit the definition or purpose of “Limited Use.”

[...]

We also found the DEA did not appropriately track all confidential source activity; did not document proper justifications for all source payments; and, at times, did not adequately safeguard traveler information.

The DEA is given billions of dollars to work with every year. Some of this goes to its informants, some of which are very unreliable. Apparently none of the budget goes towards recordkeeping.

Because DEA’s files do not detail the universe of information provided by its sources, it is unable to examine their reliability and whether they frequently or rarely provide useful information, or whether the information DEA agents acted upon resulted in identifying individuals involved in illegal activity or instead caused DEA to regularly approach innocent civilians for questioning. We are deeply concerned about this inability to assess source reliability, which seriously impairs DEA’s ability to oversee and manage the activity of these sources and the Confidential Source Program overall.

As if its lying informants weren't troublesome enough, the DEA also gave informants free reign to act as contractors and "hire" their own informants to work underneath them. Unlike other Ponzi schemes, the sucker here is at the top of the pyramid, rather than the bottom.

Additionally, we were extremely concerned to discover the DEA condoned its confidential sources’ use of “sub-sources,” who are individuals a source recruits and pays to perform activities or provide information related to the source’s work for the DEA. During our review of DEA files, we found evidence of sources who were paid based, in part, on the need to pay “sub-sources,” but the information in the files was insufficient to allow us to determine the full extent of such payments.

As for the lying, the DEA seems completely unconcerned that it may be doing little more than funding a network of bullshit artists.

[T]he DEA does not independently validate the credibility of sources used for intelligence programs or the accuracy of the information they provide…

And the DEA spends money like any entity blessed with piles of unearned cash.

Additionally, when we asked the DEA Intelligence Division to provide us with an itemized list and overall total of payments to intelligence-related confidential sources, it was unable to do so. We reviewed DEA records and estimated that, during the 5-year period of our review, the Intelligence Division paid more than $30 million to sources who provided narcotics-related intelligence and contributed to law enforcement operations, $25 million of which went to just 9 sources. Additionally, we identified one source who was paid over $30 million during a 30-year period, some of it in cash payments of more than $400,000. We concluded the Intelligence Division’s management and oversight of its sources was not commensurate with the large amount of payments it made to them.

The entire report is an indictment of the DEA's willingness to throw good money after bad, and its unwillingness to perform even the most perfunctory of oversight. The joke, of course, is that the report will not result in any indictments, even if the behavior detailed borders on fraudulent.

Filed Under: dea, informants, liars, money, thieves

Did The NY Times Give Up Its Journalism Standards The Second Facebook Threw A Few Million Its Way?

from the seems-like-a-problem dept

Last month, we discussed how Facebook was apparently forking over truckloads of cash to various media companies to get them to use Facebook Live, the company's new livestreaming video platform. This arrangement struck us as odd -- and potentially an FTC violation, in that these media companies are basically promoting and endorsing Facebook's product, after getting paid millions of dollars, without ever disclosing the payments and the relationship. That seems... questionable. Apparently the two largest recipients of the cash were Buzzfeed and the NY Times, who each got over $3 million to stream these videos. Buzzfeed, for its part, has embraced the ridiculousness of this situation with Buzzfeedian gusto, putting on stunts like livestreaming exploding a watermelon with rubberbands. But that's kind of what you'd expect from Buzzfeed.

The NY Times, on the other hand, is a bit of a different beast. The newspaper likes to pride itself on being serious, careful, thoughtful journalism. And while that's often a lot more what the people there tell themselves than reality, it does raise some questions about what the NY Times is doing with that $3+ million and how journalistic it is. Apparently, I'm not the only one to wonder about this, as the NY Times recently appointed public editor, Liz Spayd, is concerned about what the NY Times is doing here as well.

here’s the problem. After watching countless hours of live video in the past few weeks, I have hit upon many that are either plagued by technical malfunctions, feel contrived, drone on too long, ignore audience questions or are simply boring, by I imagine most anyone’s standards.

Too many don’t live up to the journalistic quality one typically associates with The New York Times. Take one produced at the Republican convention, where we’re on the floor chatting up delegates. The idea is right, but the sound cuts in and out for three long minutes and becomes so grating that one Facebook viewer messaged: “WOW. THE AUDIO IS HORRIBLE!” Another added: “Unwatchable,” and one humorously said, “RIP headphone users...” Another video on raging fires in Canada shows the narrator staring off-screen while the sound keeps breaking up. Not a single flame ever appears. One viewer, April Simpson, sent in this comment: “It would be a much more effective interview if you could roll in some of the amazing video of the fire. Seriously, nyt contact me — I could help you with all of this.”

And in a category all its own, there is a video of an editor with two reporters who are pitching their stories in hopes of getting good play on the home page. It’s an odd meeting — of a type I’ve never seen nor heard of in my 30 years in newsrooms. And it turns out it was more of a simulation to show the kinds of conversations that take place in a newsroom. In other words, it was posed.

Now, to be clear, I think there's value in experimentation -- and if you don't fail with your experiments, you're probably not experimenting enough. But when Facebook is throwing millions at publications like the NY Times, some of these don't feel so much like "experimenting with this neat new technology" but more like "oh, fuck, we need to make more videos because we promised Facebook in exchange for all this cash." Indeed, Spayd suggests the quantity over quality approach is a part of the problem here:

On the one hand, it has before it a compelling new form of journalism, a young and eager audience, and the crown prince of social media opening up its checkbook. On the other hand, if you’re producing about 120 videos a month, implementing good quality control can take a back seat.

And, when the paper's editor defends all these videos under the "this is how we experiment" banner, Spayd responds, rightly, that there are ways to experiment that still live up to the kind of quality standards the NY Times likes to think it has:

But this particular experiment veers significantly from The Times’s past approach to new journalism forms. The newsroom has shown that innovation doesn’t have to equate with poor quality. Whether it was with interactive graphics, virtual reality or podcasts, The Times is a model for innovating at a thoughtful, measured pace, but with quality worthy of its name.

This time, that’s not the case. It’s as if we passed over beta and went straight to bulk.

Does anyone believe that this would play out this way if Facebook hadn't added 3 million reasons for the NY Times to go for bulk? I think that's the bigger story here. Spayd mentions the cash in passing, but doesn't spend much time on it. It still seems like the real issue. I get that the NY Times is a business and that it needs to make money, but usually there's a separation. Here, when a private company is paying for a specific type of coverage that is promoting their own technology -- and the NY Times isn't disclosing it, while pumping out lots of low quality content, it should raise a lot of questions about why that's okay.

Filed Under: experiments, facebook live, money
Companies: facebook, ny times

Not Funny: How The OFAC Is Outlawing Even The Lamest Attempts At Humor Over Terrorist Fears

from the humor-me dept

It's only been a couple months since we discussed some of the problems stemming from the US Treasury Department's terrorism scary names of brown people list, namely that non-scary people with names similar or identical to maybe actual scary people suddenly can't seem to use online services. Some term this "Islamophobia", whereas I prefer to mark it as the type of government laziness combined with carpet-bomb approaches to governance that is far too common. Add to that the fact that banking institutions are also suddenly being tasked with checking their payment services against this watchlist, nabbing all kinds of innocents in the process, and you have a process that could be funny if it weren't so frustrating.

But, when it comes to terrorism, we're legislating funny out of the equation altogether, it seems. For example, one man's $42 payment to a friend to reimburse him for drinks has been held in limbo because he tried to get funny in the memo section of the payment.

Telling a friend you’re paying him back for “ISIS beer funds!!!” is not a particularly good joke. I knew this as I was typing it at 2am on a Sunday, but what I did not know is that it’s an even worse joke on Venmo because the federal government will detain your $42.

Almost immediately after I hit send, Venmo—you know, the app that allows people to send money to each other via their phones—blasted an e-mail into my inbox. The company wanted to “better understand a recent payment.”

Obviously this started because of some automatic flag on the word "ISIS." And for that, one can hardly blame Venmo. Is it unlikely that a terrorist is going to send $42 to another terrorist to pay him back for alcohol, of all things, as part of their terrorist-y network? Sure, that's unlikely. But do we want the financial system running some general check against common terror groups and references to make sure money isn't falling into their hands? Of course.

But when Ben Guarino responded to Venmo to try to explain, choosing to call the whole thing a typo error instead of an admittedly lame joke, that meant that someone from Venmo was manually looking at the situation. And the result wasn't any better.

Venmo wasn’t buying it. “Unfortunately,” wrote someone who signed the e-mail as Heather, “due to OFAC regulations, we are not allowed to give the funds back to you or issue a refund.” Because I don’t regularly bump into terrorists or sicarios at Whole Foods, I had no clue what an OFAC was. As it goes, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control is a decades-old institution, quietly working to keep money out of the hands of America’s enemies. In 1962, the Division of Foreign Assets Control—which President Harry Truman had used to block transfers destined for North Korea and China—metamorphosed into OFAC. This association now has to deal with tipsy hipsters grasping at wit through instant payment apps.

And that's where this whole practice breaks down into the land of the dumb. Look, Guarino's joke was both dumb and not particularly funny, by my estimation. But here's the thing: if your terrorist money-traps are nabbing hipster dudes trading 42 whole dollars for drinks, with a full explanation of where the drinks were had as well, then the program is no longer serving its purpose. Instead, we should admit that we've let fear grip our government institutions to such a degree that those institutions are trying to pass off annoying our citizens as a necessary trade for our safety. If that isn't the stated goal of terrorism, I don't know what is.

As of this writing, the OFAC still has Guarino's $42 sitting in limbo, having given him a case number for his request to have it released and nothing else. And America lived to see another day, I suppose.

Filed Under: isis, money, ofac, payments, terrorism
Companies: venmo