MY MESSAGE TO THE U.S. CONGRESS: Transnational Financial Repression Costs Lives—Here's the Evidence

Last month I testified before the US Congress about something that sounds like a conspiracy theory but isn't: authoritarian regimes are weaponizing American and European banks, travel and communication information to silence their critics.

Do you know this is happening?

Here's how it works: Dictatorships and their proxies are systematically abusing Financial Action Task Force (#FATF) anti-money laundering, cybersecurity systems that Western democracies created for security cooperation. They turn our own tools against us.

The scariest part? It's completely legal.

I, my Open Dialogue Foundation team, and our families lived this nightmare. Despite winning in court repeatedly and proving all accusations false, we still lost our bank accounts, crypto accounts, crowdfunding platforms.

Our crime? Documenting human rights violations and sanctions evasion.

But it didn't stop there. A Belgian judge revealed that dozens of Kazakh security officers filed subpoenas seeking the maximum amount of private data on Lyudmyla Kozlovska—including her banking, travel, and communication records.

Why? To isolate and destroy us our capacity to live, work and defend human rights.

We fought back; most activists can’t or don't know how.

When authoritarian regimes and their proxies can manipulate American and European financial, travel, and communication systems to silence dissent, they're attacking the foundation of Westen values and democracy itself.

How did we survive and continue holding rights violators accountable? #Bitcoin peer-to-peer payments and encrypted communications became our lifeline.

We've learned firsthand that compromising privacy doesn't just threaten operations—it costs lives.

Here's the complete testimonial with policy recommendations: