Slashdot Mirror
DHS Shuts Down Dwolla Payments To and From Mt. Gox
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from BetaBeat:
"The Department of Homeland Security appears to have shut down the ability to use Dwolla, a mobile payment service, to withdraw and deposit money into Mt. Gox, a Bitcoin trading platform. ... A representative for Dwolla told Betabeat that the company is 'not party' to this matter and encourages those with questions to reach out to Mt. Gox or the DHS. 'The Department of Homeland Security and U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland issued a 'Seizure Warrant' for the funds associated with Mutum Sigillium's Dwolla account (a.k.a. Mt. Gox),' he said. 'In light of the court order, procured by the Department of Homeland Security, Dwolla has ceased all account activities associated with Dwolla services for Mutum Sigillum while Dwolla's holding partner transferred Mutum Sigillium's balance, per the warrant.'"
The government finally decided to care and used the one achilles heel of BitCoin...conversion to and from dollars. If BitCoin had some innate value, it wouldn't be a problem, but since it's primary use is as an exchange currency for dodging taxes and selling goods on the black market, this change is going to seriously impact the value of the currency.The government can't control BitCoin, but it can control US financial institutions and other companies that need to interact with those financial institutions.
We'll now see how well the BitCoin market can operate as a completely stand-alone entity.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
A warrant from the district court of Maryland, does anyone know whether thats likely to be a state tax issue? If it were truly a federal concern, youd think the warrant would come from a federal court....
Can any lawyers comment?
In fact, I think we need a new Department: DERP - Department of Earnings from Role Playing. Then we can finally shut down the other online currencies like WoW Gold that threaten the almighty buck!
they can have half my gold from killing goblins as long as i dont have to share the rest of the loot.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I think maybe some one from DHS wanted to generate some bad publicity for bitcoins. Now they can buy some and make a little money.
I'm not a lawyer, but I used to work in a law library, and that's know enough to know that "U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland" is a federal court, not a state one.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Not really, in the US we have the USD because prior to that there was an ad hoc system of state currencies and there was nobody in charge of managing it or deciding what was and wasn't acceptable as a form of payment.
As much as I loathe and despise the Federal Reserve, the current still better than having random people creating currency which may or may not be usable next month. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USD#History
And if they use the revenue to fund military research, they could call it DERPA.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Contrary to what people have said Bitcoin has all the same government protection any other property does. This could be the DHS looking into the billion dollar attacks on gox as a form of terrorism/cyberthreat. They've just cut off the most likely way for the attackers to cash out.
I can't believe we've gone this many comment and nobody has mentioned that "Mutum Sigillium" sounds like the name of a inter-galactic criminal from Dimension X.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Actually, it is more correct to say that the Obama administration can be as GWB-like as it wants, and its reputation will remain amazingly high with Democrats. It's proof that Democrats didn't hate GWB's policies, they just hated GWB personally.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I've bought some pretty nice stuff with bitcoins that I've mined.
Anyways, people like you are the suckers who will let the government do anything it chooses because the evil thing they do only targets ( kiddieporn | gambling | drugs ) so they should be allowed to do it as they please, because clearly only those people will be affected.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I had no love for Bush, but I think it's quite a smear to compare him to Obama. Bush's administration wiretapped suspected terrorists. They never sank so low as to wiretap reporters. And you'd have to reach back to Nixon to find an administration using IRS to target political opponents. I also don't recall Bush starting any wars without Congressional approval (albeit approval obtained under very, very questionable auspices).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
There's no such thing as innate value. Value is context-dependent. All money is funny money. It's just a question of what brand of humor you prefer.
The US Dollar is like Jay Leno. Dull and unimaginative, but shows up for work on time every night.
Bitcoin is like Richard Pryor. Offensive, unstable, unpredictable, implicated in tax-evasion, and prone to setting itself on fire.
That is completely and totally wrong. The NSA has been wiretapping every single US citizen for the past decade. This is well known. And Bush started it. Obama is only making it bigger. Now the NSA has to build a new, gigantic data center out west to house all the data they're collecting.
Love it -- hope you get a plus 5 insightful. That was a nice reworking of the "calling him an idiot is an insult to the wider idiot community" type quip.
I totally agree that Obama has been worse than GWB but what is even more disturbing is how Democrats don't even want to know about it and have gone totally silent now that it is their guy doing the abuses.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The likelihood that Mt Gox was complying with the "Know Your Customer" anti-money-laundering rules that apply to all financial institutions that handle currency was approx. zero. I'm not surprised in the least. If a bank was doing what Mt. Gox was, (as in, not even pretending to comply with the law), the same thing would happen.
(That's not to say that disobedience of money laundering never occurs, just that experienced banks are substantially better at hiding it.)
You mean "theft through inflation carried out by the Federal Reserve Bank."
(Pro-Tip: The Federal Reserve, despite its name, is not a government entity.)
Kid-proof tablet..
That is completely and totally wrong. The NSA has been wiretapping every single US citizen for the past decade. This is well known. And Bush started it. Obama is only making it bigger. Now the NSA has to build a new, gigantic data center out west to house all the data they're collecting.
You can believe that one if you like.
Do you honestly thing the government (choose whichever one you want) started to listen in just a decade ago? I got some real estate between Manhattan and Brooklyn to sell to you if you believe that one. At best, Bush Jr. only expanded earlier efforts that were well under way and expanded that to include scanning nearly every IP packet transmitted more than a couple hops.
Nixon did plenty of wire tapping himself without warrants, and the technology wasn't even new with his administration. It might be pushing the envelope a bit to go back to the Hoover administration, but the FDR administration definitely kept tabs on communications between nearly all citizens when necessary. J. Edgar definitely collected his share of information about a great many ordinary citizens, and a fair bit by wiretapping too.
For a small customer like yourself, nothing more than ID is required, which you've supplied. Once you start moving decent amounts of cash, the institution receiving the money is required to know something about the activities the cash came from. It doesn't matter that the currency was BitCoins; the same rules still apply. There are reports to file, records to keep, etc. For instance, a bank is expected to report activities like a hot dog cart suddenly depositing stacks of $20's well out of proportion to a plausible amount of sales.
Not complying with these rules (which is "Financial Institution Regulatory Framework 101") is not going to end well.
Mt. Gox was a shoestring operation that got in WAY over its head. (As in, actual banks have entire departments of employees dedicated to pretending to comply with these kinds of rules, warehouses (or tape libraries) full of documents stored away, etc.)
All anyone needs to know:
I've often wondered why TSA seems so unresponsive to the American public, and this book offered me a plausible explanation. Hawley seems to view TSA almost exclusively as a weapon in the US war against Al Qaeda. When TSA implements policies that seem crazy or ineffective to the rest of us, it doesn't use outside opinions to judge the effectiveness of its policies. Instead it uses information gathered from the intelligence community unavailable to outsiders. A policy change is considered effective if Al Qaeda reacts in a desirable way. For example, if a TSA operation deploys VIPR teams at public transportation centers and suspected Al Qaeda operatives leave the US afterwards, the operation is considered successful.
(From here.)
Which, really, is despicable and absurd all on its own.
But it does lend a lot of strength to the theory that all strange law enforcement actions of agencies created by or in the spirit of the PATRIOT Act are actually direct responses to some form of undesired activity.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Up to the GWB administration wire tapping was a case by case basis, after 911 the Bush administration asked for direct links to all the telecom operators. ATT, Verizon and all the others provided direct fiber optic connections to their networks and funneled copies of everything going across their network directly to the government. This is the reason Congress was forced to give them immunity because if they didn't the class action suits would have sunk the phone companies. The need for immunity alone should point to just how serious of an expansion in wire taping occurred under the Bush administration.
In fact as the previous poster said, it was those very links that caused the creation of the Data Center in Utah. I live in Utah and I can tell you that Data Center was already planned and sited in 2008 when Obama took office. The formerly 2-lane highway leading up to Camp Williams (where the data center is) was upgraded in 2008 in anticipation, new power lines were installed at the same time (the data center uses more power than the entire salt lake city valley). Though Obama has done nothing to stop this massive expansion of federal power it most certainly did start under Bush. And though I agree that the government's been spying on people for a long time, the passive acceptance of full monitoring of every single communication didn't start till after 9/11/2001. You are arguing that tapping a few phones here and there is no different than recording every single phone call/text/internet traffic going across the network. And there is a very big difference.
I voted for Jill Stein and for my cat, because I won't cast a vote in favor of evil. Besides, the difference between Romney and Obama was literally, only skin deep.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
"MtGox has read on the Internet that the United States Department of Homeland Security had a court order and/or warrant issued from the United States District Court in Maryland which it served upon the Dwolla mobile payment service with respect to accounts used for trading with MtGox. MtGox takes this information seriously. However, as of this time MtGox has not been provided with a copy of the court order and/or warrant and does not know its scope and/or the reasons for its issuance. MtGox is investigating and will provide further reports when additional information becomes known.
Regards
Mt.Gox Co. Ltd Team."
https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130515.html
The telecommunications access points (usually at central offices) and forced engineering of telecom equipment standards that required ease of monitoring are things I remember happening in the Reagan administration and certainly were encouraged under Bill Clinton and Bush Sr. as well.
I'm just saying dumping all of this on George W. Bush when there was ample evidence of this kind of thing happening well before he became president is uncalled for.... even though the "war on terrorism" did provide plenty of excuses to expand efforts that happened. It was by far more than just a few phone calls that were monitored on a case by case basis. All that really happened is that the U.S. federal government no longer even bothered to pretend that ordinary citizens had privacy on electronic communications.
As for that Data Center in Utah County (well... part of it is in SL County).... I still shake my head even thinking about what it is that they are doing there.
Strangely, one way that you can evade the government prying into your personal communications is through snail mail.... primarily because nobody bothers to use that any more.
Except that no wiretapping occurred.Records of calls to and from AP were obtained.
This rises to the level of wiretapping. This information was enough to figure out who the reporters' sources were. Which is the only type of information which otherwise stays secret as a result of such a phone call. All news-worthy information contained in such phone calls gets published. Only the sources stay secret. So the content of the call actually is less secret than identities of the individuals making the call.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Whether the Patriot Act is a little vague and far-reaching is a different question entirely.
A little? I'd say it needs to be scrapped entirely.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Um, you have no clue what you're talking about. Mt Gox has bent over backwards to comply with all these rules. They not only do ID verification, they freeze accounts suspected of criminal activity, they have co-operated with the police in the past (notably, the German police), they do risk analysis of transactions and all the other things that banks do. This is by no stretch of the imagination "not even pretending to comply with the law". If you're really going to try and paint Mt Gox as some kind of rogue outfit, all you're arguing is that AML rules are so opaque, complex and difficult to comply with that it's impossible for a small company to work with money no matter how good their intentions are.