Going down

 

I'm surprised he was allowed to post this on X.

Still a sharp mathematician.  

Ooops

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Charlottesville trial

Four years [after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.], jury selection is set for Monday in a case seen as the most sweeping attempt yet to hold to account those associated with the march. To do so, those behind the suit are taking a page from a decades-old playbook: they're turning to civil litigation in an attempt to put extremists out of business.

[...]

"We have had a number of issues with effective returns in criminal trials for reasons ranging from ingrained problems in our legal system that have to do with long histories of white supremacy, to all kinds of procedural problems that have derailed justice in one way or another," [Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago] said. "Civil trials are a really good tool in hitting the pocketbooks and the membership lists of white power groups."

[...]

In 1987, SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] lawyers won a $7-million judgment on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose 19-year-old son, Michael, had been abducted and brutally murdered by members of United Klans of America in Mobile, Ala. The group had to turn over their building to Ms. Donald and the suit effectively shut down its activities.

Similarly, the SPLC won multimillion-dollar judgments from the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, White Aryan Resistance, Aryan Nations and Imperial Klans of America in later civil lawsuits. They were all forced into turning over their assets to satisfy court judgments.

  NPR

Yes, but it didn't end the movement.

"In the the cases where we were litigating against the Klan in the 80s, they had property, physical land, and they had buildings and bank accounts that could be seized and taken," said Scott McCoy, interim deputy legal director for LGBTQ rights and special litigation at the Southern Poverty Law Center. "It's harder now in the digital age because a lot of these groups don't have those kind of assets. Their assets are in cryptocurrency and it's much harder to find and get at and attach those kind of assets."

McCoy is part of a legal team that represented Tanya Gersh, a Montana woman who sued Andrew Anglin in 2017 for organizing an anti-Semitic harassment campaign against her family.

Anglin runs a neo-Nazi website, and is also among the 24 namIn a pre-trial court hearing, defendant Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who coined the term "Alt-Right," referred to the case as "financially crippling." He also acknowledged in an interview on a far-right YouTube channel that the lawsuit has led him to cut back public appearances for fear of being sued.ed defendants in the Charlottesville trial. Gersh won a $14 million judgment against Anglin, but collecting on that has been a challenge. According to McCoy, Anglin has kept his money in Bitcoin, which has made it difficult to track.

Cryptocurrency: the preferred currency of criminals.

Nonetheless, attorneys in the Virginia case say there's evidence that tying defendants up in a protracted and costly lawsuit has already disrupted their activity and influence.

[...]

"One of the most striking facts to me in this case is that Charlottesville was really Charlottesville 2.0," said Dunn, referring to the fact that some of the participants had taken part in an earlier event in that city, which they had dubbed "Charlottesville 1.0," in May 2017. "There was every intention for there to be a Charlottesville 3.0, which did not happen, in part because of this case.

[...]

"In a pre-trial court hearing, defendant Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who coined the term "Alt-Right," referred to the case as "financially crippling." He also acknowledged in an interview on a far-right YouTube channel that the lawsuit has led him to cut back public appearances for fear of being sued.

If you can't stop them, slow them down, I guess?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Bitcoin subversives

Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable — while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of bitcoin’s fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order.

  The Intercept

Who wouldn't have expected that? I'm not a techo-libertarian, nor am I a rocket scientist, and I can't imagine they wouldn't try.

It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target bitcoin users around the world — and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013.

  The Intercept

You can safely bet that anyone or anything that might threaten the system will be on the NSA's radar.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

JP Morgan: Money laundry

The Swiss subsidiary of US bank JPMorgan Chase has been sanctioned by Switzerland’s financial regulator FINMA for money laundering and “seriously violating supervision laws,” according to the local weekly Handelszeitung.

[...]

The ruling was reportedly issued on June 30, but the regulator did not make it known as JPMorgan has been actively trying to prevent the publication.

[...]

It is two months since JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon slammed bitcoin, the world’s leading cryptocurrency, labeling it a fraud. According to Dimon, bitcoin could be useful “if you were a drug dealer or a murderer.”

[...]

At the time, the CEO predicted the eventual demise of the digital currency and pledged to fire any trader trading bitcoin for being stupid.

  RT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Russian Mobster Caught in Greece, Indicted in the US

A US jury indicted Alexander Vinnik on Wednesday after his arrest in a small beachside village in northern Greece on Tuesday, following an investigation led by the US justice department along with several other federal agencies and task forces.

Vinnik was described by the justice department as the operator of BTC-e, an exchange used to trade the digital currency bitcoin since 2011, which was allegedly used to launder more than $4bn for people involved in crimes ranging from computer hacking to drug trafficking.

  Guardian

Can't wait to see how the Trumps are connected to this guy.

Sorry, couldn't resist. The Trumps don't know anything about computer business.

“Just as new computer technologies continue to change the way we engage each other and experience the world, so too will criminals subvert these new technologies to serve their own nefarious purposes,” said Brian Stretch, US attorney for the Northern District of California.

The Trumps are a little behind the times.

Vinnik’s arrest is the latest in a series of US operations against Russian cybercriminals in Europe, including the taking down of two of the biggest dark web marketplaces for drugs, guns and other illicit items, AlphaBay and Hansa, last week.

The prosecutions also coincide with intensified scrutiny of Russian hackers after US intelligence officials determined that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election using cyber-warfare methods to help Donald Trump, something Moscow denies.

We thank you, Donald Trump. Will the Russian mob?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Lakota CryptoCurrency

I hope this works for them...the Lakota Nation is authoring their own BitCoin style currency - MazaCoin.

[MazaCoin creator Paul] Harris says that MazaCoin is designed to avoid [Bitcoin] Mt. Gox-style booms and busts. Prior to the launch of the currency, Harris mined 25 million MazaCoins for the Lakota Nation's reserve, which can be tapped in a crisis.

[...]

Mining MazaCoin is designed to be a simpler process that requires less processing power than Bitcoin, which Harris says makes it both easier to learn and more environmentally friendly than other cryptocurrencies.

MazaCoin was embraced quickly by the cryptocurrency community, many of whom noted its promising opening performance.

  alJazeera

Environmentally friendly? Obviously I don't know anything about cryptocurrency. How environmentally unfriendly can it be?

That Was Quick

The world's largest bitcoin exchange filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan on Friday, saying it had lost about $420 million worth of its customers' bitcoins because of a "weakness" in its system.

Mark Karpeles, the French CEO of Mt. Gox, bowed in contrition at a press conference at the Tokyo District Court and said he was "sorry."

  alJazeera

He’s sorry. What else do you want?