A minor clarification: The formal proposal known as "Know Your Customer" was withdrawn (see my back articles on that topic). But other regulations in the same vein require banks to require ID. -Declan On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 11:18:53AM -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:
On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 06:40:08PM -0000, lcs Mixmaster Remailer wrote:
Payee traceability had nothing to do with it. Every customer of MTB, whether an end user or a merchant, had to fully identify himself to the bank, including SSN and for merchants, type of business, etc. This is SOP for other payment systems like credit cards.
It was on this basis that MTB was able to screen their merchants. No payee tracing was necessary. A fully untraceable cash system would have been equally amenable to merchant screening. Any vendor has the right to control whom it does business with, and MTB chose to exercise its discretion in this way.
I don't know if MTB had a lot of discretion - banks are subject to the federal "know your customer" regulations. You can't get depositor anonymity from a bank chartered in the US, at least not without at least one level of corporate indirection (e.g., the bank "knows its customer" who is a domestic or foreign closely-held corp, who does the bidding of its unidentified-to-the-bank-and-FINCEN shareholders).
The Texas couple in the news recently made a different choice and decided to provide payment services for child pornographers, as James Donald recommends. Now MTB is still in business (after merging with MTL and then FSR) and the Texans are in jail. Which made a better choice?
Sounds like the Texans knew too much about their customers - if they operated a content-neutral service which had many, many customers, one of whom happened to be a child-porn service, they'd be doing fine, especially if they shut off the child porn people if/when notified by law enforcement of the activity. Does the FBI shut down AOL and Earthlink when their subscribers traffic in child porn?
-- Greg Broiles gbroiles@netbox.com PO Box 897 Oakland CA 94604