{ "episodeId": "SLP424", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "simon_lelieveldt": { "name": "Simon Lelieveldt", "role": "guest", "tag": "SIMON" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.62, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast. A show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Now my guest today is Simon Lelieveldt. He is a business engineer with extensive experience working in banking, central banking, and also acting as a supervisor. So he's not joining purely just as a hater of the system, he actually understands it and is able to give an informed critique about FATF and some of the various AML laws that are impacting the world today. So today in this episode, we talk about the problems of Fat Earth. Who are they? Where did this organization form? What impacts are they having on the world? And what kind of tricks are they using to take advantage of crises, as well as what are the ways to push back? This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the easy way to buy Bitcoin and also learn about Bitcoin. Swan makes all kinds of resources available for free, such as Jan Pritzkir's book, Inventing Bitcoin. You can get this by going to swan dot com slash free book. Swan also has twenty one lessons available for free, and there are also various resources being made available through the Swan Cannon. So this is a great way to show people a curated pathway from various people in the space, people like Matt Odell or Jameson Lopp and various others, and of course Of course, there is Pacific Bitcoin coming up on the 10th and the 11th of November in LA, California. That website is pacificbitcoin dot com, and you can use the code Lelera for a discount on your tickets for Pacific Bitcoin. I'm hoping to see you there. And for our next sponsor, it's Blockstream. 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For those of you in the Bitcoin mining world, brains dot com are offering brains OS Plus. This is auto-tuning mining firmware that allows you to increase the hash rate on your Bitcoin ASIC machine. You can improve efficiency by as much as twenty-five percent. You can mine on any pool or point your hash rate towards brains pool and you get zero percent pool fees. So some of the supported models are the S nineteen The S19 Pro, S19 J, S19 J Pro, T19, some of the S17 models, and they've got in the development pipeline Whatsminer M20S and other Antminer X19 models coming. So make sure you sign up on the mailing list to know when support for those comes in. Now, on the brand's website, you can also find a range of content. They've got their blog, they've got their insights page, which allows you to get a view of the mining ecosystem, and you can see things like the hash rate and mining That's all available over at brains dot com. And now onto the show with Simon. Simon, welcome to the show." }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "03:27", "start": 207.21, "text": "Thank you for the invitation. It's good to be here. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:30", "start": 209.63, "text": "So, Simon, I've been seeing some of your work, I, found it really interesting, and I thought this is a perspective that a lot of the Bitcoin audience would love to hear. Often, not all Bitcoiners, but many Bitcoiners are anti-financial surveillance, and we can see, FATF, AML laws, sanctions laws, and other associated laws are being bucketed under area of what's called, so-called financial crime. Now, I know you have a long storied history and background working in banking, central banking, with a professional view on the world of payments, banking, and, monetary history also. so I guess could you maybe just start with a little, just a brief intro on yourself and some of your history and your background in this space?" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "04:18", "start": 257.85, "text": "okay, so I'm an, industrial business engineer in- In, from the Netherlands, I graduated, I think, more than thirty years ago on the first emergence of point of sale in the Netherlands. So that hooked me into electronic payments. I remained in the payments business sort of ever since, moved from ING Postbank, very big retail bank in the Netherlands, to the central bank where I supervised, electronic money at that point in time. The likes of DigiCash and such, those were the discussions in those days. I witnessed the development of the e-money directive, which is Sort of the stablecoin directive of, twenty years ago, and moved on to work at the Central Bank, Bankers Association, and for ten years right now I'm, independent consultant. So I've been around the, the, the block both in terms of blockchain technology or Bitcoin, Bitcoin technology, as well as seeing developments in financial regulation develop over time and seeing the institutional boundaries change over time." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:17", "start": 316.81, "text": "I see, yeah. And I think it's also fair to say that we've seen We've seen this continual creep of AML, anti-money laundering laws, so-called anti-money laundering, we've seen this continual creep over time, and we've arguably seen insufficient concern for human rights, effectiveness, cost of all of this, and I know this is something you've been quite critical of in terms of FATF, the organization. So FATF stands for Financial Action Task Force for those listeners who aren't familiar. and so could you tell us a little bit about About how this regime started and how it metastasized, it, it grew to this massive regime that exists today, and it seems so powerful. How did it become this way?" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "06:04", "start": 363.9, "text": "Well, I'm gonna venture out on a bit of, history and, and science here. if you look, there's, there's a very good dissertation by Mara Wisseling, I've hidden it somewhere in one of my numerous threads on, on, on Twitter, which outlines the, development and the The political economy behind, the FATF as an organization, but I should say as an organization, because if you go to the beginning of the FATF, it starts out as a project. Around 1989, the G7 sits around and figures, well, we need to do something about anti-money laundering. And there's always a sort of, if you look at, at financial regulation, at, at, bank regulation, it's always like first a crisis and then bank re-regulation, then a crisis, then bank regulation. So that's the intrinsic- Dynamics of regulation. Now, if you position this same dynamics in the area of money laundering or criminality, then you can see, an attack, the nine eleven attack, and then further legislation, then a new attack, a new legislation. So if you're able to ride, if you're able as a regulator to surf on the ride of incidents, on the waves of incidents, you're able to put in place a massive, framework for, anti-money laundering, even, even though the, the, the crime of anti-money laundering is If you rank it in priority, next to a lot of other crimes like genocide, war crimes, you, you name it, stealing money from government doesn't hurt that much as other, crimes that do hurt society far more. So what you can see is a sort of hijacking by ministries of finance of the topic of money laundering, putting it high on the agenda and moving it out of the, criminal law area where it should be, where it should be prioritized and be irrelevant, into- to the financial supervision domain, and there they said it's hugely important that everyone starts acting like a police officer and catch all money laundering criminals, and that's, that's a hijacking trick that has occurred, and if you serve the waves of, attacks and incidents properly, you can go a long way, and that's, that's what happened. The, the project team that the financial action task force is, was set up in nineteen eighty-nine, and until to date, it's still a project. It has never become an international organization. It's not a legal entity If I'm a bank officer and someone asks me, \"Can you onboard the FATF?\" It's impossible to onboard the FATF. Actually, if I were to be onboarding FATF, I'd see a lot of red flags. I'd see them being hosted by the OECD, so that looks really reputational, but it's a reputation trick. Of course, the OECD supports the FATF, but the FATF itself isn't an international organization and thus not bound by international treaties on human rights. So it should have become a formal organization Authorization and the thing that you see governments all, all around the world doing is pretend that the FATF is a international governmental organization. And if you read the real letters, the, the, the clever writers of governments always make believe that FATF is an organization, but it's not, it's still a project. And that's, there's a very good reason for it, you see, in some of the evaluations of the FATF, that they're, yeah, they're happy with being a project because it allows them to shield all their activity, it allows them to be non-g Opening, it's, it's, and that's a classic European or classic international trick, but I'll ex-explain the trick, a bit later then." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:28", "start": 567.63, "text": "Yeah, sure. And so as you sub- as you rightly say, in a way, they are pushing, so, you know, all this cost regulation and surveillance onto the rest of the world, but they're actually not very accountable themselves, as, as you say. and so you had this great thread, so listeners, I will put the links in the show notes, so you can check all of that there," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:51", "start": 591.09, "text": "Mentioned that in a way, it was driven by tax authorities and some intelligence agencies wanting to reap data. So could you just elaborate, how did that happen? Like why, why did it turn out that way?" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "10:05", "start": 604.8, "text": "Okay, so, if you go back to about nineteen ninety-nine, I think, even, somewhere in the US, there was a, like a proposal on, \"We should pop in all kinds of data of customers who, who are sending a payment and receiving a payment within the payment, because that makes life...\" Easy, if we do that, there's a lot of, information to be harvested. It's, it's the, the non-big data world, so we use financial transactions as the data stream of that moment, and we allow police officers to fish in that data stream. That's the basic idea in the nineteen nineties, in the US. So this is being put forward for Congress, and basically there's a storm of people saying, \"No, it's a violation of privacy, et cetera, et cetera.\" So it's impossible to get it through." }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "10:51", "start": 651.09, "text": "There's a huge resistance against, against, against this. So the intelligence agencies still want it because they, the, the problem at that point in time, as they presented internationally, is, well, well, if there's a crime going on in the US and someone in Europe has paid a criminal in the US, we want to be able to track it and to ask a police officer from New York to ask a police officer in Groningen, in the Netherlands, to give the data would be very cumbersome, it's a cumbersome procedure. So if you just put in the data, then the police officer New York automatically can, can ask at his bank who, who sent the, the info, and he can get the data of the Dutch customer without going to the Netherlands and asking formally on the data of the Dutch, person sending it. So it's a, a neat trick to avoid in the, the proper international procedures of collecting data from customers that are on the different side of the world. And at that point in time, the internet was, was already there, you could say, send an email or do your work properly, but that argument basically We stuck within the minds of the regulators, and they felt like, \"Yeah, we want to, we want to make sure that there's no anti-money laundering,\" and that sort of the sending of data from the sender and the receiver originated from a sort of, \"Well, it's more easy for the police officers, so they have all the data in hand, so you can only ask local the data.\" That, that's the, the, the basic conception didn't really fly too much, they tried to push it in the US, and then with the nine eleven attack, this was They added terrorist finance to the mix and said, \"No, all these rules aren't just for money laundering, they are for terrorist finance. And, and are you against-- I, I mean, do you want to promote terrorists? You don't want to put the data in, so you're, you're in favor of nine eleven attacks. And that trick is being repeated ever since. So we, we, we wait for the next attack, you can see the regulation in, in Europe also, regulation on prepaid cards, you can see the Commission want more regulation, then they wait, and the cynical thing" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "12:51", "start": 771.11, "text": "First, a text Charlie Hebdo come in, and next up is the European Commission saying, \"Yeah, we want to add an extra layer of anti-terrorist finance regulation on it.\" It has nothing to do with that attack, it has everything to do with regulators waiting for their shot to put in the next layer of surveillance regulation, and that's a cynical reality of anti-money laundering reg- regulation. And the cynical reality is, is that the efficiency and the effectiveness is completely forgotten. I mean, there's, there's been critical, questions within the FATF Itself on its effectiveness, like show me the money, show me the goods, how many stuff did you prevent? We have twenty years of this stuff already going on and no success stories. There's only after effect stories. There's no prevention success stories, and there would have been if they would have had a case. So there's, there's really a lot of effort being put in, like, yeah, I was at the bankers' association and I had to tell them, \"Yo, we have to put in all this information.\" And then the bankers asked me, \"Okay, so do the regulators Mr. Open Baylarden has an account that he wants to send money from, and that's why we need to check the word Obaylarden in every transaction. Is that, is that the idea? And then you have to say, \"Yeah, well, yeah, that, that's the duty,\" and everyone knows it's silly. Doesn't, doesn't make any sense. Obaylarden doesn't have an account, and he does make sure he won't ever have an account and still be able to move money. So these are all Yeah, political measures and, and, allowing a lot of surveillance by, intelligence agencies and by police officers who can then snoop in local data without anyone else in the world knowing that the data has been harvested." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:29", "start": 869.17, "text": "And now, crucially, historically, let's say pre that regime, if a police officer or the tax office, let's say, wanted to get some of that data, they might have had to go and ask for a warrant, right? They might have had to actually go through some legal process to get access to that data, whereas now- Nowadays, it seems that there's so much data sharing going on, and we're in this environment caused by FATF and caused by this ratchet effect of, continually expanding regulation, such that now the privacy, and security of the everyday consumers and everyday businesses is just being completely given up in favor of this, regulation." }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "15:10", "start": 910.26, "text": "Yeah, well, to, to really position this, we must be aware that, that within a couple of weeks after the 9/11 attack, the, US, law enforcement achieved to, sort of open up the data of SWIFT, the international banking network, by saying, \"This is very important, we need to know what's going on in your network.\" And SWIFT is a European company, but it does have a server in Florida, so they opened up the Florida server to look at everything happening in SWIFT, and that led to a huge political This dissertation by Mara Wesseling on, on, on the, on the moment in time when this stuff became political, it was like the sort of Max Schremm moment on, on Facebook, but then at that point in time for Swift, and that led to the situation where a couple of companies and industries within the financial sector decided, well, we need to have our local data locally in Europe and not harvest-- have it on a US server, because if it's on a US server, it can be impounded and taken away and be read by US- U.S. authorities. So there are some couple of moments in time where there's a political discussion on the topic, but most of the time, the, the topic of, monitoring is sort of pushed away, depoliticized, made technical, like the travel rule for crypto. It's, it's made it into a technical discussion rather than a principal, legal, discussion that it should be. And the political discussion, do we want, government to be able to monitor everything, via this, these kind of measures? And is it proportional? And Those, those are relevant questions." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:42", "start": 1001.66, "text": "And when it comes to the principled argument, I think, and maybe we'll get to this later, but in terms of stopping this, does it require some kind of public awakening or at least more people knowing about this, right? Because I'm sure if you just talk to the average person, if you talk to the average guy on the street, and you asked him, okay, maybe if he ever had to send an international wire, he had all this trouble, or, you know, he might have occasionally had some banker call him and say, \"Hey, what's But he doesn't really know who to point the finger at, right? Because from his point of view, he's probably thinking, \"Oh, these banks are just being assholes, or they're just really nitpickers.\" He doesn't actually see the root cause of this issue, right? Because he's blaming his, the person who he's, he's interfacing with, but not, let's say, politicians in his local country or even at the FedF level." }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "17:32", "start": 1051.95, "text": "Yeah, and, and the, the nice, the, here comes the trick. So the thing is the" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "17:40", "start": 1060.12, "text": "I decide on the tunnel vision for monitoring. Now, we don't have any, governance or say in this, but we're gonna collectively set up a working group. we call ourselves Financial Action Task Force on Fraud, it's a project. Then we're gonna devise standards and we're gonna say, \"Yes, these are our standards.\" So, who are they? Well, twelve, twelve persons thinking the same. But if those are from twelve big countries, and you mesh up and you make a big billboard on how important you are and such, then you'll go home and say, \" Important international group, it's myself, but in a different role. A very important intern-international group, and that has set a standard for anti-money laundering, and, and it's really imperative that we implement it in the Netherlands. It's the, the classic bureaucratic trick of getting a home country to implement rules which have no democratic, basis, because then the minister, minister of finance goes to the parliament and says, \"This important international group has set standards for anti-money laundering, it has the support of the G20, it's, it's excellent.\" It You, you throw in all the key words for politicians, they think like, \"Well, oh yeah, oh, okay, yeah, apparently everyone agrees.\" No, you're being tricked. It's the oldest trick in the political book. You just push in local standards and local rules by make-believe that the international organization that has made them, which is yourself in a different setting, has, has done that. And it's an easy trick, it's been pulled all, all the time. you see it happening with BIS standards, you see it happening with FAT Time and politicians, yeah, are, are, are only human, I would say, and unable to, to, yeah, flat the balloon or, or pop the balloon, on, on this topic. And if you let this flow for a couple of years and, and if you let the incidents on terrorist finance and money laundering be your, oil on the flames of this, of these regulations, if you are able to institutionalize this into a permanent organization or, or project form which has a certain standing, then if you- Succeed in the first ten years, you will be there forever because you have set up an institution which will not be disputed anymore. No one in government will know the origins of the institution. So if you pass on your work to your, to the, to the next policymaker in, in finance or the next policymaker in a central bank or the next supervisor, they will say, \"The FATF is there forever, they set the rules, we implement.\" They won't, they won't go back to history. So no one will go back to history. So if you got the ball rolling, if And you're able to, well, continue, and that's, I think, two years ago, their thirty-year achievement was to have an eternal mandate as the FATF, and they succeeded in sort of solidifying their grip on financial legislation while effectively they are still ministries of finance writing anti-money laundering surveillance law. It should be ministries of justice writing the rules with which to dispute personal data around the world. It's Ministry of Finance, you say? We want tax money. yes, our concern is so big that we're gonna label everything as money laundering. So, so money laundering itself is a specific criminal act, but if you just say the proceeds of any criminal activity are also money laundering, then you've captured the whole world of crime into your, into your, propaganda. And then you see these pictures like, \"Oh, do you want the sale of ivory of elephants? This is money laundering.\" No, it's robbery. It's, it's all kinds of crime criminal acts and then somewhere along the line, money laundering. But, but you see the, the, if, if you're able to pull the trick, get it into an institution, get it flowing, there's no, there's no stopping rather than, than fierce institutional counteraction. That's the only, way that could stop this." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:27", "start": 1286.61, "text": "And I can imagine that there are all kinds of entrenched interests here also, because, because it's such a big world, there's so much money in the compliance department. So there's jobs in this, there is technology vendors who, making money out of selling this kind of sanctioned screening software, AML screening software, transaction monitoring software, customer identification, you know, scanning, all this kind of, document, authorization with various government departments. There's all this technology and money now, and there are vendors now who don't wanna lose that business. So you could almost argue- Yeah," }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "22:02", "start": 1322.44, "text": "yeah, that's, that's very cynical as well. I, I know, very early on in my work at the central bank, there was an international project, CLS, it was- It was called CLS, like a, a big international payments sort of project, and, the central bankers wanted something, but the market wasn't providing, and then they said to the market, \"You have to provide or otherwise we will do it.\" And then the market got scared, and then they started doing it themselves, while the central bankers themselves figured, \"We're, we don't, we don't even know how to do it, could we just scare them off, and then they'll build it themselves? Because there will always be someone who's early on and saying, \"Oh, And you promote that, so you can use the market against itself for implementing a measure which you are unable to achieve yourself. It's, it's a big con game, but everyone's falling for it. You see the travel rule discussion on crypto is following the same path, been there, done that, seen it before. There, and, and it's, you cannot break that magic. It will always work. So it's a classical one in the book of bureaucracy. You just say, \"Yeah, this travel rule, it can be done. It's a technical matter, it can be done People, we have companies coming to us telling us that they can do it, and I mean, it's the easy trick, and then everyone's like, \"Huh? Who are the companies?\" And then, \"Yeah, yeah, yeah,\" and then, then there are those who are completely new to the game, who are impressed by authority, and they feel, \"We gotta work with the regulators.\" Yeah, no, no way. If the regulator is out of line, you gotta push 'em back. Yeah, don't have to work with a regulator that is out of line. So there's a balance to be struck, but there's always within an interest community of market players, a bigger cloud of, of, of, of entities that says, \"Oh, we gotta work with the regulator, keep good relations,\" and that means for that reason, you will always end up with travel rule like solutions in, in those kind of settings because the market as such can be driven to that, and that's, I, I mean, those are the pragmatic dynamics that, the United States A strong force behind the financial action task force is able to really exploit. They are able to maneuver, institutions and, and, and their governance and their flavor into all kinds of areas, and there's, there's a lot of scientific literature about how they are able to, to change the flavor of the IMF towards a more neoliberal goal. They, they, it's, it's a piece of cake, in institutionally speaking, to move the boundaries, but it takes a long game, a long game perspective, to do that, and if you're- Early on, you're able to set the momentum, it's never gonna go away until, until some counter force or counter power is able to, to tweak the wheels and, and put the carriage off the rails. And that's sort of happening slowly right now." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:45", "start": 1484.86, "text": "Yeah, that's interesting. And I, I also wanna get to that topic that you mentioned with FATF influencing local countries. And so, as we were talking about this, as you mentioned, the trick is that they all sort of get together and say, \"Oh, look, see, there's this big standards, and Well, you better implement all of these recommendations, country A, or otherwise you'll be on the grey list. Or if, if not, if-- then you'll be on the blacklist. So could you just explain that dynamic where countries are getting pressured to implement all of this AML regulations, even if they don't necessarily want to off their own bat?" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "25:23", "start": 1523.28, "text": "Well, the, the, the-- basically what happens is there's a dual game, game going on. First of all, there's the formal FATF rules, and, and it's like a club Also, people or, there's a, it's a complex organizational structure with direct members, indirect members, and such. So the, principal idea is we're gonna set ourselves some standards, we're gonna make some best practices, and then we are gonna do some peer review, sort of peer review like in science, peer review of countries, but it's called mutual evaluation. They, they stole the idea from the IMF, the IMF idea or the World Bank idea where they do evaluations of country, country evaluation whether they could get a loan, yes or no. If you take that idea and you put it in the anti-money laundering standards department, you get the mutual evaluation of the FATF. So it's a clever copy-paste of a international mechanism, and as such, it's, it's like every policy maker says, \"Oh yeah, I know the mechanism, we do this also with the IMF and the World Bank.\" So that, that rings a bell, it sounds familiar, and you get a structure where you can say, \"Well, we're gonna evaluate each other.\" See how well are you doing, I'm gonna help you out, blah, blah, blah. The informal part, which is not in the books, is that the, the US as a big buyer in the market phones up your local ministry and says, \"Hey, listen up, if you don't pass this evaluation, we're not gonna do A, B, C or D.\" And then they pull out some, some geopolitical, leverage that they have on the country. So you combine the FATF formal procedure with informal pressure, which is if you don't live up to the standards, then, you're not gonna get some business and that's gonna cost you money, and that creates the incentives for countries to adopt these standards to, to, to make sure that they apply, the, the, there's the, the, the penalty of the gray and the blacklist, of course, but there's the hidden, unseen penalty of, of Big Brother, US saying, well, sort of handing out goodies, compliments, taps on the Shoulder money or, handing out negative incentives if, if you don't comply. So, there were ways and means of, manipulating everyone into compliance behind the scenes. And, and, yeah, that's, that's sort of the-- There's the, the, the FATF sort of is the visible side of the medal, but there's another side of the medal that we don't, don't even see, and we'll never get to see it, by the way. So, but we must be sure, we must be sure to, to be aware that it," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:55", "start": 1675.4, "text": "Unchained Capital can help you with securing your coins in a multi-signature vault. What does this mean? It means you need multiple keys to sign a transaction to spend your large stack of Bitcoin. So this can help you by giving you that peace of mind and removing single points of failure in your security setup. So with Unchained, they offer a concierge onboarding, so you can go, you can pay for a sign up, they can send you the hardware if you need this, and they'll do a call with you and walk you through setting up your multi-signature vault. Vault, and then they will walk you through withdrawing the coins out of your exchange or your custodian into keys which you control, and this gives you so much more peace of mind. So this is a great step to take for those of you who are still leaving your coins on an exchange, or you might even be thinking about this to upgrade out of a single signature wallet setup. So that website is unchained dot com slash concierge, use the code livera for a discount there. When it comes to Bitcoin hardware security, coinkite dot com is the site to go visit. They have a range of The Cold Card, the MK4 is the latest model out, it has two secure elements, it has NFC support, and it's a very reliable performer. I also really like that you can set up this device without plugging it into a computer, you can just plug it into the wall or use the Cold Power device to power this using a battery. Now, CoinCard also offers a range of other products, so for example, there's the Sats Card. Think of this like the new version of the OpenDime, it's much cheaper also, around seven or eight dollars. the TapSign Designed either for the developing world or perhaps for a more convenient use wallet with NFC. So you can find all of this over at CoinKite dot com and get a discount on your cold card with the code Livera. Are you still using a plain old block explorer? Bitcoin has grown beyond a single layer, it's now a multi-layer ecosystem, and MemPool dot space is helping you as a comprehensive Bitcoin explorer covering this ecosystem. You can see the MemPool, you can see the blockchain, you can see second layer networks like Liquid and recently the Lightning Network, so you can search Search lightning network nodes, you can see things like what channel fee rates they are charging. You can also set up mempool dot space on your own server so that you don't have to trust a third party. It's available on some of the full node distros like Umbrel, Raspow, Blitz, and others. And if you are with an enterprise, mempool dot space offers customized mempool instances with your company's branding, increased API limits, and more. Go learn more over at mempool dot space slash enterprise. And now back to the show with Simon. Right, and as I understand, you correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but as I understand, one of the ways they try to leverage this is they'll say things like, \"We'll cut you off from the banking system,\" or, \"We'll cut you off from SWIFT if you don't do X, Y, and Z, A, M, O...\" No, no, no," }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "30:38", "start": 1838.11, "text": "that, no, that, that would be, that would be too harsh and too direct. it could be more nuanced. It could be like, \"We're not giving you firsthand" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "30:55", "start": 1855.1, "text": "You can put that in as leverage and say, \"Well, you know that, but previously we gave you information on, on what happened in the countries surrounding you on economic sites or, for example, economic data, or there's all kinds of data or information that, that, that you can share with other countries on a certain basis.\" And then say, \"Well, we're gonna cut you off from this data because we don't like how you treat, we don't, we don't feel our data is trusted with you because you don't apply our anti-money laundering standards.\" Documented, somewhere in scientific articles that after the application of the travel rule within the banking system, a couple of American companies, succeeded in, penetrating certain markets due to the information advantage that the Americans, would have because of the fact that they knew exactly which data was going where, from who to where to whom. So the economic intelligence part of this whole travel rule discussion must- Also not be overlooked, it's, it's a tool in the box of the intelligence agencies. You could even go as far as, link the fact that they stopped pursuing Phil, Phil Zimmerman, on PGP from the fact that you can link it to the emergence of the FATF standards. Rather than trying to break open PGP as an encrypt-encryption algorithm, they opened up the sea of bank transactions, and there's so a heck of a, heck of a lot of information in there. I mean, let those guys with PGP do their thing. Do their thing. If you're, if you open up the bank accounts of everyone and you're able to tap that stream, that's, that's, eternal sunshine. I mean, that's, that's, that's what you want. So there, there, yeah, there are, there are advantages to be gotten and there are goodies to be handed out or punishments to be given behind the scenes, and that sets you up for a, momentum and a structure, in which you can formally-- I, I mean, I'm having this view due to my thirty years" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "32:55", "start": 1974.96, "text": "And witness this happening very slowly. It's, it's like a, a, a glacier that's losing some snow every year. You don't see it, but over thirty years of time, you see what's happened. And this is what's happening here. And everyone new in the game, the, the, the, the cynical thing is that, that a new players, new policy makers, new bank, new crypto people, everyone new in the game starts off taking the stuff literally, like it's literally about money laundering, et cetera, et cetera. And they" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "33:25", "start": 2004.96, "text": "True to their heart, true to their mission, they don't do anything wrong, but they are doing stuff within a frame that has a history and a context that I would recommend reconsider the frame, reconsider the frame in which you are working. I, I don't want to dispute the honesty and integrity with which those people are doing their jobs, because a lot of people do want to get rid of money laundering and all, all that stuff, and that's a valid goal. But the total structure, the incentive structure, the institutional structure, the lack of governance, the lack of democratic control, those These are the things that we should worry about because it leads to a lack of privacy, a lack, and, and a lack of digital sustainability. We can't allow our government to do this because our next government, in, in the Netherlands, we are very keen, we have a very serious algorithmic, the tax authority has done algorithmic profiling on people, cut off their benefits, taken away their kids, a couple of thousand, and basically violated their human rights by use of IT. So the idea that a government will never infringe on On human rights of its own population is disproven in the Netherlands of today. That is what's happening in the Netherlands. That's, that's why I think the Netherlands is a sensible place on human rights violations. We are, we're sort of selling it to the, the rest of the world like we're the, the, the country where everything's possible, but in fact we are violators ourselves. And that's, that's the, the assumption under the FATF rules is that your own government won't cheat on you. But that assumption is false, it's been broken and it's being broken In what's happening. At least that's what we can see in the Netherlands and other countries, I'll, I'll leave to other people. But that's why, why I think, at, at least it's why I'm so fervent on this, on this topic. I'm, I'm really-- This assumption, the government isn't your best friend, the government is your worst enemy, and we must design systems so that it can't be your worst enemy. That's, that's the, the, and, and right now the FATF is designed to be the mass" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "35:25", "start": 2125.1, "text": "Bank accounts, people are phoned, \"What's this transaction doing? If you, if you say I've had a dinner in a Syrian restaurant, your payment will be annulled, you will be put on a list of your, of your bank, you'll get a phone call. So what's the Syrian stuff? If you try to send money to a school in Uganda, no way it's gonna get there. I mean, we've-- and, and the FATF calls this unintended consequences of their standards. But it's way more than that. It's we, we've designed a system where ministries of finance set up cleverly anti-money laundering standards, anti-terrorist finance standards, they hypnotize the whole world into going with them, pushed a little bit of, on the background, some incentives to, to get the system rolling, and once you get it rolling, it gets its own legitimate flavor, and that's, that's what's happening here. And, yeah, you, you can, there are all kinds of dynamics in, in many of the threads people will read, all kinds of references Describing, part, bits and pieces of the puzzle that I explained, but I hope the, the listener is still with me." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:24", "start": 2183.93, "text": "Yeah, right. No, and I, and I think you're right, and I think one of the important points pertaining to the rights aspect is that in some ways it's overturning these hundreds of years old legal principles, like this idea that you are presumed innocent before guilty, and it's turning a lot of that on its head because if I go to sign up for a bank account or if you go s- try to send an international wire, it's now all You're assumed to be a criminal almost, and you have to prove why you're not a criminal. No, how, how can this be? How can we be in this place where in most of the Western world or most of the banking world, you're treated like you're a criminal by default?" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "37:03", "start": 2223.46, "text": "well, to understand this, you need to understand that in law, at least, I, I always divide law in three areas. One is contract law, you and me have a contract. The other one is criminal law, it says, well, you can't steal a car And that should be about, someone who, who, who holds your money should have a safe bank and a big vault, sort of, like those kind of rules. now the basic trick that the FATF has succeeded in pulling is putting anti-money laundering as a topic onto the agenda of financial supervision. It shouldn't be there. It's a criminal law thing. It's anti-money laundering, okay, it's a crime, so deal with it with the rest of the crimes, hire more police and get, get the crooks. That's what you should do. But by putting it into Administrative law and sort of making everyone's head turn around like, \"Yeah, you, you've got to catch the criminals, you are responsible for fighting crime.\" No, not. We're banks, we're responsible for, for keeping money safe, or we're crypto companies, we're holding crypto or we're exchanging crypto, but we're not crime fighters. That's the police. It's a different department of our society. It's a different role for government. But we've, we've put the monkey on the shoulders of the private sector, which isn't where the monkey should be. The monkey Be back in the cage with the government, that's where, where the monkey of crime fighting and anti-money laundering should be. But, yeah, if you, if you pull the trick lever, and that's been done, then you can create a sense of nor-normalcy around it, yeah, which is where we stand right now. So there's, there's a challenge." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:35", "start": 2314.52, "text": "Yeah, sure. And so then the next question is around reporting and what we are arguably seeing as a lot of over-reporting because it's quote-unquote, cover your ass, right? So just to explain, just to back" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:49", "start": 2328.91, "text": "Based on different things. In some cases, it's based on the threshold, so for example, a transaction above ten thousand dollars, and in other cases, it's based on this idea of being a suspicious transaction, and so they have to file a suspicious transaction report based on, okay, if Stephan Livera is sending money to some business in Iran, as an example, they'll be like, \"Oh, okay, that's for a suspicious reason, we're gonna put a suspicious matter reporting.\" if I-- And, and they've got all kinds of rules, and they basically force the banks to To pick this up. And so as I understand, there's a lot of reporting, basically these banks are just sending thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of reports to their local regulator, right? So in each country, in the US, it might be FinCEN, in the UK, it's, FCA, in Australia, it's like Oztrack, you know, there's different ones, and basically they're just sending all these reports, millions of reports, but" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "39:41", "start": 2380.62, "text": "these are, sort of illegal data distributions, because someone in the private sector is saying that he's Because it feels like suspicious. Well, either you go to the police and say this is a crime, or you don't, or you stop doing business. But why, why do this snitching? It's basically snitching, but it's, the, the advantage of snitching is that if you get into trouble, it gets you a free pass, it gets you an exemption from everything follow-on, following on to your reporting. So that's, that's a goody, for which reason a lot of companies throw in everything they have into, into this data Because if, if stuff goes on and someone gets fined for money laundering, they can't put liability on you as a bank who reported him for the, for the stuff, because you, you got a free pass. It's not your thing. So it's a clever incentive structure dis-devised within, this whole system to make sure that a lot of information flows to the authorities. And then in the Netherlands, we go beyond, we don't, we don't report suspicious transactions, we report unusual transactions, which is even more. And for each of the tran-the transactions, if, if- So we go back to the three pillars of, of law. Within the administrative law pillar, indeed, as you said, the assumption is that you're, you're guilty until you prove innocent, and it's crazy to think that within criminal law, we take so much care to, to worry about due process being innocent until being guilty, while at the same time, your money is held hostage with the bank until you prove your guilt, your, your not guilty. So there's, there's this reversed ransomware system where the- Money is keeping your money, where the bank is keeping your money as a ransom until you show your, your, your tax, payment or stuff like that. I, I, I stole this one from, Schorsprovoes, by the way, a developer here in the Netherlands. He said it's, it's reverse ransomware. It's not like, like they, they block your computer and then if you pay money, you get your computer back. No, it's they, they block your money and then if you show information, you get your To be innocent until proven guilty, and that's innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, not in the court of banks, bank supervisors, and FATF officials, because those aren't the people in court, they are just administrative, tax-paying, tax authorities. They aren't the people who have been educated to, respect your human rights when being suspected of a crime. So, indeed, this, this, this violation of the presumption of innocence is, is a very ongoing- And worrying." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:20", "start": 2539.75, "text": "And so when it comes to all of this surveillance, there's also this notion that, you know, people have said this idea that if cash was in, like, physical cash was invented today, they'd ban it or they'd, they'd put massive controls on it." }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "42:33", "start": 2552.62, "text": "But they do right now," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:34", "start": 2553.84, "text": "right?" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "42:34", "start": 2554.28, "text": "That's happening today, actually, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:36", "start": 2555.72, "text": "Right. And it's almost that, like, because cash has been around for so long and that was the default way for many people, that they kind of have to allow it in certain ways, but at the same time, as" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:49", "start": 2568.85, "text": "mandated to do some kind of money laundering risk assessment. And as part of that risk assessment, they have to look at, oh, okay, how easy would it be for people to money, you know, to launder money? And, you know, if you can send a lot of money through, then you're meant to rate that high risk, and therefore you should be doing more controls on it. And there's kind of all these elements and nuances to it. And all the while, they've got this, you know, like a sword of Damocles hanging over their head, if they" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:14", "start": 2594.37, "text": "don't And lawmakers, legislators, who are sort of holding that threat over any businessman who wants to be a legal businessman in that country." }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "43:30", "start": 2609.64, "text": "Yeah, well, the, the interesting thing is that the, if you speak to bank supervisors and try to address the human rights element, they are completely gone. They think you're from a different planet, and that's, that's very interesting to note because when the sanctions on Russia came in, the, the consequence was that everyone from Russia was being blocked by banks. Oh, better safe than- Sorry, let's block everyone. And this is like this categorical blocking because there's a big risk and you don't wanna be, be safe rather than sorry. But by being safe rather than sorry, you're denying a lot of people access to the banking system. And this is exactly where the FATF is hurting already for ten or fifteen or twenty years, a lot of people in society. This whole system, where you need to go look for a risk and say, \"No, we're not gonna do it, there's a risk of money laundering, et cetera,\" or this categorical denial writes up, no, no, no, we never wrote down that there's a categorical denial, no. And then the central bank in the Netherlands in the last, the last months also said, no, no, no, we're not asking for a categorical denial. Hahaha. I mean, if you get fines for not doing certain stuff, the, the message is pretty clear. Kick everyone out, that's a big risk. Kick them out, cash out, high risk. Are you sure you wanna keep it? You get three times the same question. Are you sure you wanna deal with high-risk customers" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "44:49", "start": 2688.85, "text": "Somebody's gonna to go to his board and say, \"We're gonna kick out high risk because I get the supervisor on my neck all the time. it's killing me.\" So this is the structure. You can, deny as a supervisor and a regulator that you're, that you're pushing out all kinds of risk while the effect is completely the same, because you're throwing in a lot of fines, a lot of hefty fines for violating so-called anti-money laundering rules. We're, we're really keeping each other busy with a lot of, a lot of work and energy that we sustainable and happy place rather than, than seeing a terrorist behind the east tree. It's, it's, it's, it's everyone knows it's a waste of time, a waste of resources, but we're still in the same dance routine, and we keep on dancing the dance routine, and it won't ever stop until we make it stop somehow." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:35", "start": 2735.34, "text": "Right. And I think part of making that stop is the principled approach, as you outlined earlier, and I think many others in, in the world who are anti-surveillance, from a principled point of view, See a principled reason to resist these things or to speak out against FATF, against AML, against these, things like this. Now, I guess one other question and area topic here is that in some cases, it seems like there's a bit of shooting the messenger going on, because as an example, people will often point out, as I'm sure you're familiar, there's this historical example with HSBC where they were, I think, apparently helping launder some money for the Mexican gangs or cartels and stuff, but at the same time Is that like, how much of that is on the, so as an example, here's what might happen, right? So as an example, people will say, \"Well, look, see, HSBC did, were helping launder money for the gangs in Mexico,\" as an example, or, or whatever. Then what happens is the public in that country or in other countries, let's say, you know, and I've seen, I, I, I think arguably you could say you've seen this in Australia, where some AML scandal comes, and then the public get angry at the banks Like, oh, see government, you need to regulate those banks harder because they're letting all this money laundering happen. So I'm curious, how do you sort of dis, disentangle that in terms of, you know, the principle of the matter and FATF and AML versus like those individual banks in those countries, let's say?" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "47:05", "start": 2825.14, "text": "Well, I think the, the error of judgment is the following. If you want money laundering to stop, it's the same as if you want the wings of an aeroplane not to wiggle when it flies. If you want an airplane Where the, where the wings don't wiggle, it's gonna crash. Systems need slack. Systems need slack and areas which are gray, unregulated, doomed, dirty, leaking. That's what a true system is. There's no such thing as a clean system. That will, any system in the world is sort of rotten, has its feedback loops or whatever, but you mustn't try eradicate something because you won't never succeed, and it's not a natural thing, a natural state of things. A terrorist is only a terrorist as long as the government is a good government. If the government is a terrorist, then the terrorist is the legitimate citizen. If you reverse the roles and you create tools in the hand of governments with which you can eradicate- Dedicate stuff that you don't like, at some point in time the government's gonna change, and you've given a very bad actor in the far or distant future or in the near future a tool in hand to basically be the dictator for everyone in the world, and this is what's, what's concerning me in the sanctions area as well right now, because we're sort of using the sanctions tool too much, too hefty. I mean, we need to use it in this terrible situation in Russia that's happening right now in the war. There's, there are reasons to do so, but the me Mechanism that we are using, we are politicizing our money system into this is good, this is bad, and you can have your money and you can't. And I'm, I'm not certain where that's leading us. I, I think we, we crossed the Rubicon there, and I'm very concerned that, that we find this way of thinking normal. Money should flow everywhere. You should use different tools from different toolbooks to get the stuff to catch the crooks, to catch the criminals, but you shouldn't misuse the money system, the money supervision system to, to achieve- Achieve those goals and, and that's those objectives, and that's, that's what, that's what's happening here, and that's the error in design. And then it's an easy part of the natural local dynamics to say, \"Well, because the, the government wants to present good deeds, and they're gonna do the blame game, and it's easy job, you're gonna blame the banks. Yeah, the banks are already ripping you off, but they're also laundering money. Yeah, that, that's possible, but, but, I mean, what, what we need Good lawsuits that challenge the government to be open and proper and precise in their, in their dealing of, of things, and then we can slowly lift the veils of what's happening and create awareness. but that's, that's for, for, insiders, interesting to see, but for outsiders, it's, it's, it's too far gone, it's too far off, it's, well, yeah, you don't care at your bank, oh yeah, they were involved in, in money laundering, well, fine, let them be fined, and I And these, these games are already clouded with standard politics of blame-gaming, bankers for everything that happens in the world, and, and that's not fair to bankers. it's not fair to crypto if you do this to crypto. It's, but it's the reality, of our current, society where a lot of social media creates these spins, and where you can just pull the card, it's, anti-terrorist measure, okay, and then you get a green pass for anything you propose. It's, yeah, it's a online of information and lawsuits, correct, some of those, things. And, and luckily this, this happened in the Netherlands. I assisted a company in, in reverting, the course of history because the Dutch central bank was already implementing an FATF travel rule via the sanctions law. It wasn't in the sanctions law at all, but they, they, they sort of made believe that this was the case. But we were able to get it to court quickly, because they effectively required a mass monitoring Of every transaction, which is a profiling AVG, GDPR discussion, it's, it hits all kinds of buttons in the human rights area and the privacy domain, and that created an urgent call for the justice to say, \"We're gonna quickly resolve this, because the central bank behind the screens had been saying, \"Oh, we'll try and get to court quickly. It's gonna take years. It's corona time, so see you in court in two years.\" And then we pulled out the mass monitoring AVGDPR card and said, \"Okay, see you in three weeks. That's what happened, and then they tried to say we didn't, we never asked the question, or we ne- we never asked this requirement. so the whole, whole industry had to write a letter they did require it, and the last week a freedom of, of information request came out, which outlined neatly how the central bank was doing this all along, anticipated it and on purpose. So, so by freedom of information request, you get the word out, you get the information on table, and you have to combine it with lawsuits and make sure that anyone acting Properly is being sued so that it's corrected in court, and, and damages are being paid and such. That's, that's, if everyone would dare to do this and keep the relation with the supervisor good, because it's, it's, it's just a matter of different interpretation. There's no, there's no harm in suing the regulator. Everyone's, afraid of it. No, it's just, it's a game. They're gonna say, \"Well, this is our territory,\" and then you have to say, \"No, no, it" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "52:38", "start": 3158.01, "text": "A lot of companies don't wanna go to the judge and think, \"Ooh, he's gonna be scared on the regulator.\" No, they're just having a different opinion. Just go sue the regulator. That's, that's the advice." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:47", "start": 3166.71, "text": "Well, that's, that's cool to hear. so, yeah, I think that's an inter-- and this, this is an interesting case because it was one where, let's say, freedom, won back a, a, a victory, whereas over the last, let's say, ten years, it's been" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:06", "start": 3186.07, "text": "a lot" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "53:08", "start": 3188.15, "text": "What's interesting in this case is that, that they asked for information at the European supervisors and the European Banking Authority, which is the group of supervisors, publicly stated in the midst of June, twenty twenty, oh, there are a couple of countries, basically being Switzerland and the Netherlands, that are overshooting in re-in terms of regulation. And even though their, their sort of their boss, the European Banking Authority, said, \"Well, you, you, you should stick to the level playing field and not overdo it locally for the Netherlands,\" they just went on doing it. So this was on Against the advice of the European Banking Authority, it was, it was, yeah, it was fascinating, but, but imagine being one of the seventeen companies being forced to shut down or provide a copy of a screenshot of a wallet as a measure. It was, it was a very interesting, but there's, some, somewhere in the, notes, I think there's a reference to this case." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:58", "start": 3238.0, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, of course. and so I guess the big topic then, of course, is like around in Bitcoin world, also in, in the EU, particularly Conversation also. So, could you just give a basic, for people who aren't aware, what is the travel rule? What does it require companies to do, just in the normal fiat transaction world, and then we'll take it into what happens in Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "54:19", "start": 3259.18, "text": "Okay, so in two thousand eight, in the normal fiat world, the idea was you need to put in the name and address of the sender of a payment and of the receiver, and both entities on both side of the transaction need to do this and check this and have a role in making sure that the information passes on through in two, two thousand eighteen, when the FATF had a US, president, there was more energy on crypto, and they figured we're gonna apply this rule on crypto as well. There was a discussion within the FATF where the FATF actually wanted each, crypto provider to be a licensed institution, but a lot of other players in the FATF said, \"No, we won't do that because it creates too much leg-legitimacy.\" And then the FATF decided, \"Okay, we're gonna apply the financial rules to crypto as if they are banks.\" But there's one caveat, they could have allowed for domestic regimes on the travel rule, which means you just send, send a reference number, and if someone calls you with a reference number, you give the personal data. But they kicked that one out, said, \"No, no, crypto is international in nature, so you need to throw in your data.\" Internationally from A to B, even between Belgium and the Netherlands, there needs to be all the name, from the sender and the receiver in the transaction. Well, then the crypto world said, \"This isn't possible, it's a blockchain. How are we gonna change the blockchain code?\" okay, there's the bureau-bureaucracy trick. We don't know how it works, but you are able to make it work. We have already seen a couple of companies doing it. So then you set in, in motion that mechanism, and it's been set in motion for" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "55:53", "start": 3353.38, "text": "a Or any FATF stage in the world and say, \"Here are the good guys, and check it, look, this is how we can do it.\" So the European discussion is, we're going to do the same as with the Vincent rule, we're gonna sort of allow or, or, or oblige everyone to put in information of the sender and the receiver of a crypto transaction into the transaction, or, well, there's a concession, or you can send it later. So everyone's gonna make some Swift-like international network structures in which this information is going to be, have to be shared. There In the sense that they left so-called unhosted wallet out of the discussion or not out of the discussion, there's, yeah, there's some, some messing around, where people say, \"Well, we got a big deal, they're coming, they're, they're, they're doing concessions.\" No way, there's no concessions, we're gonna be eaten alive. It's, it's, it's, it's a silly idea for banking from start on, and applying it onto the crypto is just as silly as it was for banking, and it's gonna cost even more because We're locked into pursuing our, previous errors. So, so we've already hurt the banking sector to a degree where people don't bank anymore because of those rules, and now we're gonna hurt the crypto industry to a degree where the people won't crypto anymore due to these rules. that, that's the foreseeable future sort of." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:12", "start": 3431.9, "text": "Yeah. So, it's almost, if I had to make a silly analogy, it's almost like if the regulators, back when, automobile cars were coming out, if they mandated that you had a horse to pull your car as a backup as well It's almost like they're trying to say, \"You're not allowed to have these cars unless you've got a backup horse as well.\" And it's just kind of like completely unsolving the problem of automobiles, right, that's solved. And so what we are arguably seeing is some of the, so that to use the, you know, regulator parlance, they call it VASP, virtual asset service providers, and they're saying these VASPs, VASPs have to set up this kind of consortium network amongst each other, and so in Bitcoin and quote-unquote crypto- Well, they have to set up the, I guess this is what they're looking at, right? Like the large exchanges and perhaps the large custodians are looking at this as a way of saying, okay, well, this is how we're gonna try to comply with the Fed F rule, and then all the while we have people talking about, well, what's, what's the response to this? Is there something that can be, is there some way to push back on this, or is it just going to have to all go fully underground? what are some of the" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "58:26", "start": 3505.68, "text": "okay, so I'm, I'm gonna limit myself to formal avenues because I think it's basically an institutional game. There's a big institution messing around with the rules. So we must start out with a lawsuit against the OECD. The OECD has rules on human rights, and they want companies, they want countries to abide with human rights laws, and they should do so themselves. They are sponsoring with their secretariat the FATF as a project group, as a project group, if I would rebrand the participants of the project group into Google. Facebook and Apple and say, \"Well, these are the, the, the, the standards of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple for monitoring and, and risk management in e-commerce.\" It would be completely gone. The OECD wouldn't be allowed to host a mass monitoring project group of big techs. Why would they be allowed to host a mass monitoring group of governments? Because they are governments. No, it doesn't matter whether they are governments, it matters whether they violate human rights. They violate the human rights because they prescribe mass monitoring, and that's a violation Of a UN Charter on Privacy in the Digital Age. So we have our privacy charters, we have our, UN Charter on Human Rights, which are being violated consistently by a secretariat hosted by the OECD. So the OECD should be held to their own standards, and, and, and I would be looking forward to any lawsuit by an NGO in Paris towards the OECD, violating them for, hosting a, criminal crime syndicate that does structural violation of human rights. That's the, institutional approach that you would have to take to sort of, make sure that they organize themselves as an international, organization, because as such, once they turn into an international organization, they have to abide with the human rights standards and all kind of governance rules which aren't applied right now. So we need to get the governance in order. It's, it's a long-standing criticism of the FATF, but they keep ducking the issue. They're a project for thirty years. That's, that's not a project. That, that is serious law evasion on the side want people not to avoid the law. Yeah. I mean, there's a huge, there's an interesting, dissertation or a, a, a, a script, it's, it's slightly less than a dissertation, you must not turn into the monster that you're trying to fight. I think the FATF has turned into the monster that it's trying to fight. The only ones benefiting are the terrorists which scared the whole Western nations into setting up rules where we inflict harm onto ourselves by controlling everything without any, any benefits. So, so the true winners are the Terrorists who achieve the fact that we are basically keeping ourselves busy with rules that, that don't go anywhere. so, so there's, but first hand, OECD as hoster of the secretariat, there's a lawsuit over there, and in each country, and, constellation, the European Union, you'll have to use the institutional structures, file complaints, file lawsuits, be vocal about the violation, of, of human rights, and repeat the message. Over and over and time and over again, and that might set the wheels in motion. Best, best way would be of course if any high profile politician is being somehow subject to the, negative consequences of these rules, which will, which will happen in due time because we have a, register on all assets coming up in Europe. So all assets must be disclosed. We have a UBO, ultimate beneficiary owner register. There are a couple of things going on that I would suspect will- It'll lead to more publicity, incidents, problems, and I would hope the institutional wave would flow the other, the other way around, but, we're never sure." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:04", "start": 3724.59, "text": "Yeah. Well, I think that's-- I think you make some great points there on ways that people can push back in an above board manner. I'm curious, Simon, are there any organizations that exist like this today? Like, can we donate to that? Or, you know, do, do we need to set something up for this? Like, do we need to, like, make a website, make an organization" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "01:02:22", "start": 3742.72, "text": "that I wanna do that and think about setting it up or making sure we find those organizations. This is really a niche area. I've been pondering the thought myself. I, I've set up a website, humanrightsinfinance dot eu, but it's really a, a mock-up website because the idea is in my mind to, to do something about it. But your question is very, very good. I think, I think we should go for this lawsuit in Paris with, find Amnesty International, Bits of Freedom, Privacy International, Electronic Frontier Foundation, whichever. Group, wants to join and tries first of all to kick out, OECD as, as being the secretariat of the FATF. That, that would be step one. Yeah, I, I would be, yeah, we'd, we'd have to think about it. I'm, I'm, I'm, in principle, I'm on a sabbatical right now, but this, this topic is too important to let it go. So, so, yeah, I, I would, I would favor anything that, that would flow that direction." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:16", "start": 3796.9, "text": "Well, I'll tell Probably donate for this kind of thing, because I think many of us see, like, I, I can understand like the general population, like many of them may not really kind of be interested in this kind of thing, but I could imagine those people who are privacy focused might be interested in finding a way to push back. So maybe that's something, a good" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "01:03:41", "start": 3821.11, "text": "French lawyer, good French lawyer, because the OECD is in Paris, so we, we certainly need a good French lawyer and take it from there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:47", "start": 3827.28, "text": "Well, if, if you're out there, get in touch. Yeah, yeah, good Again, at some point, there's so much stuff to cover. Yeah, that's quite a lot. But, for, for now, where's the best place for people who wanna find you online or just get in touch?" }, { "speaker": "simon_lelieveldt", "time": "01:04:03", "start": 3843.55, "text": "I guess my Twitter account, finhistamsterdam on financial history, it is a abbreviation of financial history of Amsterdam, because history matters, I, I think that's, that's the issue here. that's the best way to, to get in touch or see my website," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:22", "start": 3862.58, "text": "you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:25", "start": 3865.87, "text": "I hope you enjoyed the show. I also ended up writing an article after my chat with Simon, so I've got that in the show notes. It's over at Bitcoin Magazine. It's called \"Fat F and AML is a War Against Bitcoin.\" So I hope you enjoy that and let me know what you think. Get the show notes at stephanilivera.com/424. Thanks for listening, and I will see you in the citadels." } ] }