So I decided to sign up for PayPal.
As a privacy advocate, this was a pretty big deal to me. Knowing full well the loathsome track record of PayPal as an instrument of the technocratic state, I agonized over this decision.
The skinny: I applied for a remote editing gig. If I wanted it, I'd have to get the P, and I don't mean Pfizer. The employer wanting me on board as an editor apparently only makes payments to its freelancers via PayPal. Balls.
Understand this. I don't ever give out my provincial name (i.e. “legal name”... does that mean another name can be illegal?). Well, sadly, I gave it to PayPal. I thought it'd satisfy their hunger for a “true and correct identity.” Then I could get on with my life and provide for my family. Not so fast! What a foolish move. At least I didn't give them any other personal identifiers of mine.
Within minutes my activity was flagged as 'suspicious' and all features were frozen. I was informed by a bot that until I provided their “team” with gang-issued photo ID, my account privileges would be suspended indefinitely. Here's the kicker. I just said fuck it and decided to close my account. Ah, not so fast there, private eye. Wanna close your account, do ya? Send us that ID. We'll review it first. Then maybe we'll close your account.
Well stuff me in the KYC.
I can't believe I even bothered. All things considered, I did it with my family in mind. Noble though that may be, I compromised integrity and now I feel like I have to do damage control, which suxxx. Those stasi motherfuckers have me flagged. Great. I don't even get any work out of it! A raw deal [I recently learned that the organization accepts any PayPal account as long as I invoice them!]. The parasite class will always try to leverage our families against us. Never forget that. That's how this/a mafia works.
Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) policies are evidently trojan horses for the expansion of the corporate surveillance-state. I'm discovering how troubling this is in real time. I remember the days when a signup took two seconds and an email address. Now its like your applying for a fucking mortgage.
The crazy thing is, the functionaries writing and peddling these KYC + AML standards literally work for the organized crime establishment. Have you read the Paradise Papers? How about the Panama Papers? These conmen want to know how to con you better. They're using big data for that. Just look at Palantir.
Us mutineers better start putting our heads together, or we're gonna find ourselves living in an open-air prison faster than you can say “end-to-end-encrypted.”
That said, there are people are out there, both underground and on-the-ground, doing really tremendous work to preserve privacy and freedom in the digital age.
This report is dedicated to them.