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Interested in maladministration. Estd. 2005

offsite link RTEs Sarah McInerney ? Fianna Fail?supporter? Anthony

offsite link Joe Duffy is dishonest and untrustworthy Anthony

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offsite link RTE in breach of its own editorial principles Anthony

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offsite link Britain?s Descent Towards Civil War is No Accident Wed Sep 03, 2025 11:23 | Michael Rainsborough
Britain's descent towards civil war is no accident, says Professor Michael Rainsborough. Decades of 'divide and rule' policies from the radical Leftists who have colonised our institutions were revolutionary by intent.
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offsite link Labour Government?s Popularity Crashes to New Record Low as Markets Ramp Up Borrowing Costs Wed Sep 03, 2025 09:00 | Will Jones
The Labour Government's popularity crashed to a new record low of minus-59 yesterday as markets ramped up borrowing costs following Starmer's side-lining of Reeves and drafting in of hard Left economic advisers.
The post Labour Government’s Popularity Crashes to New Record Low as Markets Ramp Up Borrowing Costs appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link The End of Europe?s Welfare State: Net Zero, Debt and Decline Wed Sep 03, 2025 07:00 | Tilak Doshi
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that the welfare state is "no longer sustainable" while France and the UK teeter on the brink. Europe is doubling down on the economic suicide of Net Zero, says Dr Tilak Doshi.
The post The End of Europe’s Welfare State: Net Zero, Debt and Decline appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link News Round-Up Wed Sep 03, 2025 00:46 | Richard Eldred
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offsite link Starmer Pushes Digital ID Cards for All After Macron Demands Action to Tackle Scourge of Illegal Wor... Tue Sep 02, 2025 19:00 | Will Jones
Keir Starmer is pushing for everyone in Britain to be forced to sign up for a digital ID card after?Emmanuel Macron?demanded action to tackle the scourge of illegal working in Britain.
The post Starmer Pushes Digital ID Cards for All After Macron Demands Action to Tackle Scourge of Illegal Working in Britain appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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Voltaire Network
Voltaire, international edition

offsite link Will intergovernmental institutions withstand the end of the "American Empire"?,... Sat Apr 05, 2025 07:15 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?127 Sat Apr 05, 2025 06:38 | en

offsite link Disintegration of Western democracy begins in France Sat Apr 05, 2025 06:00 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?126 Fri Mar 28, 2025 11:39 | en

offsite link The International Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism by Amichai Chikli and Na... Fri Mar 28, 2025 11:31 | en

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Civil liberties, the cashless society sets off alarm bells

category international | politics / elections | opinion/analysis author Thursday March 08, 2018 11:12author by Emma Robinson Report this post to the editors

Despite political institutions keeping the subject on the low, whistleblowers and civil rights activists are raising flags regarding what they regard as a threat to fundamental freedom for States. A trend leading to the disappearance of physical currency, they fear, will inconspicuously and irreversibly invite totalitarianism into our lives.

As the virtual layer of the world continuously expands, more and more things from our daily lives lose their material feel, to enter the computerized and intangible world. Fewer and fewer people know the feel of mail paper on fingertips, or pilots no longer use the expression “flying by the seat of their pants”, as computers have been entasked with more and more of our operations. Amongst the things disappearing from our lives, are coins and paper. Adam Forrest writes (1) for the Guardian: “As more shops and transport networks adapt to contactless card and touch-and-go mobile technology, many major cities around the world are in the process of relegating cash to second-class status. Some London shops and cafes are now, like the capital’s buses, simply refusing to handle notes or coins.” The website LetsTalkPayments.com confirms (2) with hard data: “UK’s popular mobile payment system Paym. has crossed 26 million pounds in transaction volume. Two thirds (66%) of the UK population is aware of mobile payments, with more than half (52%) of those with knowledge of mobile payments aware of Paym.” Would this new era replace hassle with danger?

The right to privacy has been a rising concern for many citizens in the developed world, as they become gradually aware of the extent to which anyone and everyone can keep an eye on them. Large-scale government surveillance (3) was perhaps the primer to the subject, as citizens realized their every move and action was under discreet scrutiny. The rise of uncontrolled data originating from social networking sites (SNS) added a new layer of worrying complexity to the matter, as was revealed by an in-depth study (4) by CyberPsychology :”The booming popularity of SNSs has brought an additional dimension to the complexity of privacy risks. According to Zittrain (2008), early threats to people’s online information privacy came mostly from data stored in government or corporate databases, which he calls Privacy 1.0; yet, with the rise of SNSs, we have transitioned into an era of Privacy 2.0, where the data is generated and shared by individuals, and the “generativity” of SNSs breeds a new generation of privacy problems”. But how does this data jeopardize our liberty?

Traceability is the key word in this cashless society we are slowly drifting towards, where financial information is linked to locations, people and things, through the aggregation of banking and SNS data. When virtual purchases are carried out by a citizen, they leave information within server logs, known as a “paper trail”, even though they are dematerialized. Nathan Heller, from the New Yorker, wrote (5):”With a pocket of cash, you could be anyone: a Russian spy, a birthday celebrant, an avvocato out for a night on the town. With a cashless trail, you were fated always to be what you had always been; you couldn’t flee far from your name, your purchases, even your network of friends. You were always, by your cards or cell phone, outed as yourself”, designating the constant accountability for non-cash-payments. Part of this information is transmitted to the citizen himself, in his bank statement. But banks also keep a record of these transactions. Who can then access these records, is anyone’s guess. Of course, State agencies are on the usual suspects’ list. This is one of the reasons why governments are keen to accelerate the demonetization of societies. In addition to representing a hefty expense for them, in the design, production and management of bills and coins, currency creates a lack of control for the legal and economic policies which they wouldn’t mind seeing gone.

Now, to some extent, many citizens don’t object to having a government keep an eye on such matters, because they perceive immediate benefits and no immediate downsides. In a way, these citizens are right. With transaction data, banks can provide us with instant information, and companies can target their advertising towards things we would actually be liable to purchase, rather than random and annoying guesses. As for the government’s capacity to monitor an increasingly cashless society, it increases their capacity to prevent terrorism, and to fight crime, whilst leaving the honest citizen in relative peace. But civil rights activists are not concerned about today, they are alarmed about tomorrow. Elaine Ou, writing for Bloomberg, describes (6) the cashless perspective as falsely convenient and safe, and also “creepy” : “A cashless economy violates the basic laws under which currency has operated since before the Industrial Revolution. The justification for giving up a fundamental freedom is that it would clear the way for an experimental policy designed to place a tax on currency. Money may be a shared illusion, but cash abolitionists are in a hallucination all their own.” Their fear is based not on what governments do, but on what they can do, our could do with that information in a near future. With a comprehensive list of all a citizen’s purchases and belongings, a government is liable to use public force to pressure its citizens by stripping them of all of their belongings.

It is in the nature of crises that they become visible when it is already too late to respond, or else they would never come to be. Civil rights activists are trying to bring the matter to public attention before populations have locked themselves into a situation where no longer have any escape. If modern societies continue to drift towards the cashless era, they will have failed to keep powers, between States and their peoples, on an even keel.

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/09/rise-cas...ciety
(2) https://letstalkpayments.com/which-countries-are-close-...orld/
(3) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/29/qanda.jan...rrone
(4) https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/6184/5914
(5) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/imagining-...world
(6) https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-14/the-...ntasy

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