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Title: Senate Bill: Travelers Must Register Cash and Digital Amounts Over $10K or Face 10 Years in Prison and Full Asset Seizure
Source:
Activist Post
URL Source: http://www.activistpost.com/2017/06 ... ash-cryptocurrency-assets.html
Published: Jun 17, 2017
Author: Claire Bernish
Post Date: 2017-06-18 11:55:03 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 1569
Comments: 11
A new bill seeks to track your money and assets incessantly, will enjoin any business with government ties to act as a de facto arm of DHS, and would steal all of your assets — including Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — should you fail to report funds when traveling with over $10,000. Under the guise of combating money laundering, Senate Bill 1241, “Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017,” ramps up regulation of digital currency and imposes other autocratic financial controls in an attempt to ensure none of your assets can escape one of the State’s most nefarious, despised powers: civil asset forfeiture. All of this under the farcically broad umbrella of fighting terrorism. Civil forfeiture grants the government robbery writ large: your cash, property, and assets can be stolen completely sans due process, your guilt — frequently pertaining to drug ‘crimes’ — matters not. A court verdict of not guilty doesn’t even guarantee the return of State-thefted property. In fact, the government can seize virtually whatever it wants if it so much as suspects some of your assets might have been acquired through or used in the commission of even lesser crimes. For some time, a war on cash has been brewing behind the closed doors of government, and — although officials prefer to claim counterfeiting, terrorism, and money laundering as the impetus for asset tracking — in actuality, physical currency facilitates black market and untaxed transactions, and, most imperatively to the U.S., cannot be thefted under civil asset forfeiture laws as easily as money exchanged digitally. Characterized as an effort to “to improve the prohibitions on money laundering, and for other purposes,” the bill severely curtails the right to travel freely, without undue hindrance, as travelers with more than $10,000 in assets — including those held digitally, like Bitcoin — must file a report with the U.S. government. Noncompliance with the tyrannical law — including failing to fill out the aforementioned form — would incur penalties befitting a fascist dictatorship: an individual could find the entirety of their assets seized, not just those unreported, and could be locked in a prison cage for up to ten years. To be clear, the State wants to write a permission slip to seize all of your assets — bank accounts, including, specifically, “safety deposit boxes,” prepaid cards, gift cards, prepaid phones, prepaid coupons, cryptocurrencies, all of it — even for being remiss in reporting what you’re traveling with. Considering one’s digital assets veritably follow wherever that travel takes them, a cryptocurrency portfolio would theoretically have to be reported each time that person travels outside the confines of the U.S. Of course, the legislation in actuality just amends laws pertaining to assets and travel already considered dictatorial — right now, failure to fill out the form carries not just the penalty of seizure, but a sentence of up to five years behind bars. “And if that weren’t enough, this bill also gives them with new authority to engage in surveillance and wiretapping (including phone, email, etc.) if they have even a hint of suspicion that you might be transporting excess ‘monetary instruments,’” Simon Black of SovereignMan.com reports. “Usually wiretapping authority is reserved for major crimes like kidnapping, human trafficking, felony fraud, etc. “Now we can add cash to that list.” But it wouldn’t just be the government hawkishly surveilling your every transaction, as, essentially, all retailers would be roped into becoming State spies — any business selling gift or prepaid cards would be required to report those, too. Worse — and in defiance of current structures pertaining to digital currency — the government wishes to somehow require issuers of cryptocurrencies into its abhorrent, ostensible money-laundering police spy ring. According to the legislation, reports Smaulgold.com, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection must, within 18 months of the legislation’s passage, devise a “border protection strategy to interdict and detect prepaid access devices, digital currencies, or other similar instruments, at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States, including an assessment of infrastructure needed [emphasis added] to carry out the strategy […] “The obligation to declare amounts in any form over $10,000 exists, irrespective of whether custom officials have a way of detecting such holdings. Since digital currencies technically travel with the holder [wherever] the holder goes, one would have to declare one’s entire crypto portfolio each time the holder entered the U.S.” Travelers possessing assets, precious metals, and accounts in excess of $10,000 held outside the United States, however, would not be required to declare those to the government — perhaps leaving an albeit sketchy option for those wary of unscrupulous authorities. While the government insists ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear,’ the Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017 proves you might not be able to hide anything from its greedy clutches — and if you try, you could wind up thrown in a cage for a decade, penniless upon release. Welcome to America, where your assets are literally the government’s business, and freedom is anything but free. 
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#1. To: Deckard (#0)
How can they do this when the constitution says they need a search warrant to access your papers affects etc?
This belongs in the "Satan's Mark/Cashless" category. C'mon, we get almost no articles in there and most of the ones in there don't belong there.
The bill amends 31 U.S.C. 5316, "Reports on exporting and importing monetary instruments," which is current law. Those are transactions involving border crossings. The original law is from 1984, last amended 1986. http://law.justia.com/codes/us/2015/title-31/subtitle-iv/chapter-53/subchapter-ii/sec.-5316/
Actually cryptocurrency doesn't travel at all. It's something you have access to. It's more analogous to traveling with a passbook of a savings account in a foreign country. The account doesn't move, but you do. A law targeting cryptocurrency of travelers will work at all. How would the law differentiate between a person with a personal bitcoin access, and, say, a treasurer who possessed access to an organization funds stored as bitcoin? Though if theywant to target travelers for not disclosing any particular bit of information, that could be a separate matter. One 3rd party bitcoin wallet has a feature where you can memorize about a dozen different seemingly random words. Those words, in that order, give access to your bitcoin wallet. So your bitcoin wallet (or rather, the key to your bitcoin wallet) can literally be in your head and not on your smart phone or tablet.
I never heard about Fascists doing something like that.
Who was the President at that time?
Al Gore?
It's the federal government. They can just seize your assets, or put a lein on stuff. You would have to initiate a legal action to tell them that their effort is not working. They may, or may not, believe you. Right or wrong, they have the raw power, and fighting Uncle Sam is a bitch.
Indeed they have the raw power. If they wanted to they could start shooting down all commercial air traffic entering US airspace, and there's not a country on the plant that both could and would do anything to bring the fed gov to justice. So yes, fighting Uncle Sam is a bitch. But when it comes to cryptocurrency, customs first has to know that travelers "have" cryptocurrency. And I use quotes because cryptocurrency is not something someone physically possesses on a smart phone or tablet. And if it's not something they physically possess, then it's also not something that can be brought into the country, at least until it's spent, so any law targeting travelers entering the country with cryptocurrency is obviously written by people who have no idea how cryptocurrency works. They just assume it's like physical cash, but stored on a smart phone. But it isn't. And no, having an IRS bureaucrat or even a court rule it's physical property doesn't change the reality of what it is. I know in your world, the law is everything. But in the real world, laws have practical limits in the extent of the reach they can apply in real life.
In the real world, the U.S. government has arrested and imprisoned U.S. citizens for years without charge or trial, with no legal recourse, and listed them in official records as political prisoners. That is a real application of real power in real life. I wish you well in your great act of defiance against the federal government.
Please spare me your well wishes as they are certainly sarcastic. But I will again point that contrary to your insinuation, nothing on this thread is about me. I'm simply pointing out the difficulty of logistics the government -- any government -- will have in stamping out cryptocurrency in the high tech age.
#2. To: A K A Stone (#1)
#3. To: A K A Stone (#1)
How can they do this when the constitution says they need a search warrant to access your papers affects etc?
#4. To: Deckard (#0)
Since digital currencies technically travel with the holder [wherever] the holder goes,
#5. To: Deckard (#0)
Noncompliance with the tyrannical law — including failing to fill out the aforementioned form — would incur penalties befitting a fascist dictatorship: an individual could find the entirety of their assets seized, not just those unreported, and could be locked in a prison cage for up to ten years.
#6. To: nolu chan (#3)
The original law is from 1984, last amended 1986.
#7. To: A Pole (#6)
Who was the President at that time?
#8. To: Pinguinite (#4)
A law targeting cryptocurrency of travelers will [not] work at all.
#9. To: nolu chan (#8)
It's the federal government. They can just seize your assets, or put a lein on stuff. You would have to initiate a legal action to tell them that their effort is not working. They may, or may not, believe you. Right or wrong, they have the raw power, and fighting Uncle Sam is a bitch.
#10. To: Pinguinite (#9)
But in the real world, laws have practical limits in the extent of the reach they can apply in real life.
#11. To: nolu chan (#10)
I wish you well in your great act of defiance against the federal government.
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