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:

Peter Todd gets a lot of shit from a couple of handsfuls of bitcoiners here for having explicitly stated and pointed opinions on what to with the Russian and Iranian tyrannical regimes. The same bitcoiners, or whatever they are, are always giving the same spiel about "zomg my tax dollaryy are going to ukraine and israel" and yeah, in some ways thats something you can and ought to protest...

...but when I ask, "so, how is bitcoin going to make Russia stop bombing residential neighbourhoods in UA for years on end? And how is Bitcoin going to prevent Islamic fundies (wherever) from building nuclear armaments and turning every city in the region with a sizeable jewish population into a glass crater?".. There's no answer.

The strong feeling I get is that these people have not been able to think past point A or B; it's just mouthing off, no solutions for anything, and besides lets just worship NGU.

No wonder that libertarians broadly are not taken seriously.

nostr:nprofile1qyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmvqyehwumn8ghj7mnhvvh8qunfd4skctnwv46z7ctewe4xcetfd3khsvrpdsmk5vnsw96rydr3v4jrz73hvyu8xqpqsg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q8dzj6n showed me nostr recently. Reminds me of a writeup I did back in 2021 on decentralized social media:

In the current Bitcoin mining landscape with proxy lools like AntPool & friends, 6 mining pools produce and mine more than 95% of the block templates.

Bitcoin mining is highly centralized today.