The data on a passport is encrypted with a key derived from the "machine readable zone" that's inside the book. To decrypt the data available via NFC you have to actually optically scan the open page. In addition US passports have a shielded chip so the book has to be open to be readable.
The article calling for giving up the constitution isn't calling for the establishment of a police state, as you seem to be implying. It's pointing out that arguing over interpretation of an ancient document that doesn't evolve with the needs of the time is unnecessary for freedom (as evidenced by other countries and America's presidents own frequent disregard for it), and causes unnecessary problems. Example: people who justify gun ownership not on any kind of reasoned argument about the needs of the time, but just "because the constitution says so". There may well be good arguments for high rates of gun ownership in 2013 but "someone thought it was a good idea hundreds of years ago" probably isn't one of them.
The credit of the USA is itself issued in dollars, so you can't say the dollar is backed by that. Say it's "backed" by taxes or the military or anything else, but credit isn't an option. And BTW I'd say you can't back a currency by levelling taxes in it. That might create demand for it, but in the most extreme scenario of total Bitcoin success combined with total govt/people disconnect, then nothing stops you living entirely in Bitcoins and come tax time buying dollars with them, giving them to the government which then turns around and sells them back for Bitcoins so it can pay its suppliers.
Let's apply Occam's Razor. We have two competing explanations.
One is that the Swedish prosecution is hopelessly corrupt and has decided to level very, very specific yet trumped up charges against him, despite having successfully prosecuted him before for running the Pirate Bay (so there isn't much more to be had by doing it again).
The other is that a guy who made profits out of massive piracy of other peoples work doesn't have any moral qualms about stealing things from other peoples computers. Note that even his friend/partner in crime Sunde isn't willing to actually state in public he thinks the guy is innocent - rather telling.
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say the right answer is probably two. But let's wait and see what comes out at the trial.
If I recall correctly CSIRO are the guys who claimed to employ the scientist who invented wifi and proceeded to tell the whole world how this great Australian invention had been ripped off by nasty companies who just didn't want to give them their fair dues. The reality of course is that nobody in particular invented wifi, it was the result of many standards committees and donated technologies from lots of companies, and CSIRO was in fact just a patent troll.
The idea that the government (and government) would try and screw with the block chain is ridiculous, there's no way that would help them achieve their goals. If there's any kind of analysis the NSA would want to do, it'd be analysing the block chain and possibly crossing it with their own crawl of the web/peoples emails/etc. If Bitcoin were to get large enough to be of interest to the NSA (which I doubt would happen anytime soon), de-anonymising the block chain is what they'd be interested in - not out running it.
One other thing I recall the OFT investigating is/was people who took free government provided online services, repackaged them in app form and then sold them to unwitting people who didn't realize the services were meant to be free. Which seems like something that should indeed be handled, although I'm not sure if it really violates any law or how one might write a law to stop it.
But the long term trend with Bitcoin has been upwards in both value and transaction volume. So what economics predicts simply doesn't line up with reality, no matter which way you slice the data.
As cool as bitcoin is, it has serious problems which will keep it from being used in day to day life.
Bitcoin does indeed have problems that make it hard to use in daily life, but "deflation" is not one of them. BitPay has reported that when the value of a Bitcoin rises their transaction rate goes up not down, as macro-economists would predict. Perhaps because holders of coins feel rich and start to splash out. This should not surprise us. The consumer electronics industry has been in a permanent state of economy-destroying inflation since pretty much forever yet even better and cheaper smartphones/mp3 players/etc continue to fly off the shelves. And in case you'd like observations more rigorous, there is no empirical evidence of a link between deflation and depression.
Anyway, obviously the goal is that nobody loses Bitcoins through carelessness - there are many strategies to help people back up their keys, and over time they will become widely implemented and used.
A 250,000 machine botnet is extremely large, that puts you up in the worlds largest active botnets. Building and maintaining such a thing is not easy at all. To mine off that, you need to run a pool server that those machines can all get work from (as the existing pools will all ban you), which is a rather complex scaling problem all by itself, and then you have the fact that it's all a time limited technique. ASIC hardware has, from what I understand, finally started to ship in significant numbers from the Avalon guy and people will be wiring them in and starting them up over the next few months, which will shortly make just 1 terahash/sec not very much at all.
All things considered, whilst botnet mining can make sense today (especially with gpu miners), the perps know that it won't last.
Hmm. I would note that the dotcom bubble did leave several very successful companies in its wake, and the internet itself whilst subject to a bubble was not, itself, some kind of scam or inevitably doomed project. Bitcoin can be subject to speculation and volatility yet still not be doomed.
Wait, you think the Fed is trying to deflate the bubble? No no no, that's not how it works at all. The Fed has a more or less explicitly stated goal of buying up the bulk of low risk assets in order to force people into higher risk assets like the stock market, and they're doing it with money printing. The stated goal of all this being employment at any cost. If the jobs that are created are all stupid or useless, no problems. That's the great thing about planned economies - you can artificially manipulate statistics but it has a way of not achieving your real goals in the end.
What's more, they're getting nervous about what happens when they try to unwind their positions, as those positions have become so huge - in other words they aren't sure they can safely deflate the bubble they've created without an almighty bang. See the recent FOMC notes or Bernanke's testimony to Congress on the matter.
Anyway, this purchase by Yahoo is a fail move. I have no idea if Summly is good or not, it might be the best thing since sliced bread for all I know, but the question is - could Yahoo really not have built something similar given $30 million and some headcount in their home town? Of course they could. It's just an app. It has less than a million downloads, so that's more than $30 per user which is absurd. It speculates in the article that the real reason for the acquisition is pretty much fashion-driven - the creator is "well spoken and adorkable". Adorkable? Urgh. I think there's an even simpler explanation - Mayer is trying to revive Yahoo by cargo-culting strategies she witnessed at Google. Unfortunately, splashing out megabucks on fluff purchases of questionable startups is pretty common at Google which can get away with it due to its huge bank balance. It can afford to write off huge purchases as worthless time and time again without anyone really noticing (see, the Groupon clone that was sold back to its founders as a recent example). This is not a key part of Google's success story, but Mayer doesn't seem to care.
What's especially got to hurt at Yahoo, which has seen a lot of layoffs, is that the "everyone works from HQ" policy doesn't apply to Summly. The creator will continue to live in England with his parents, and only two of the employees will join Yahoo. And they only handcuffed him for 18 months! What a failure. He'll be out of there the moment his 18 months is up and Yahoo will have flushed $30 million down the toilet.
The money is going into the stock market, just like it did in the late 90's. I thought this was uncontroversial? It's explicitly stated Fed policy. They are buying up all the Treasuries (and effectively financing the US deficit with inflation as a result), with the end goal being to force everyone else into riskier assets. This, Bernanke believes, will invigorate the economy. Because there's nothing like forcing people to gamble on the stock market to build a strong foundation!
so go make your own society, where such controls don't exist. and after you get ripped off, by... get this... criminals... learn your lesson the hard way
Ah, well, couple of problems with that.
The first is that anti-money laundering isn't something that every country arrived at independently through a careful process of democratic consideration and cost/benefit analysis, as you imply. In fact it was invented by Congress in the 70s, institutionalized through a body called the FATF-GATI and then forced on the rest of the world through a combination of diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions. Obviously, AML only works if everyone does it simultaneously. In fact, quite a few countries expressed concerns about this complex and untested set of regulations but that did not matter. Any country failing to implement them was branded a rogue state that was "undermining the integrity of the financial system" and consequently blacklisted. Eventually they all fell into line, one way or another.
So it'd actually be quite hard to create a society where such controls don't exist, because the US at least would insist on crippling trade sanctions.
The second problem with your statement is it's unclear you'd be ripped off by criminals. One of the primary motivations for AML is/was to fight drug dealing - it's a very cash intensive business, hence the emphasis on reporting cash transactions. A large chunk of AML can be summed up as "make bankers investigate where people get their money, under threat of jail time". It sounds good, in theory, except it doesn't seem to work - the street price of drugs has steadily fallen since the passing of the Banking Secrecy Act, not risen as you might expect. Indeed, countries that had very strong commitments to banking secrecy until recently (like Switzerland) are famous for their low levels of crime and generally civilised behaviour.
EFF stopped accepting it in donations years ago, and the stated reason was that if one day they are going to defend it or its users in a court of law it looks better if they don't appear to be biased. That's a very specific and unique position, you can't really extrapolate anything from it.
Indeed. It's easy to forget that the concept of money laundering was only born in the late 70's. The effectiveness of this new set of crime fighting tools should be judged in that light.
I think you have to separate the question of whether X/Y/Z things are bad from the question of money laundering. AML is an extremely complex, expansive and vague set of laws that more or less attempt to fight crime by creating a systematic network of surveillance and control over the financial system. That's why you read about people having to automatically file paperwork for transactions that are "suspicious" (what this means is not well defined). That's why anonymous banking is illegal - the assumption is anyone could be a criminal so everyone has to monitored, all the time. And in fact, it appears that parts of the USG have created a system in which not only are such reports dumped, but all records of all financial transactions ever (this is the TFTP).
One may question whether systematic surveillance is the right way to fight crime... whether the costs are worth the benefits. Most western societies instinctively reject widespread surveillance - we wouldn't accept government controlled security cameras in our homes despite the obvious application to crime fighting. However without anyone really noticing this is what's happened to finance.
The other scary thing about this system is that with the ability to track every transaction comes the ability to veto them too. Consider the case of the US citizen who got on the wrong side of Israel and was put on the sanctions list for 17 years. He was finally removed (and they agreed he was not a terrorist) after the Treasury was sued, 1 day before the law stated they had to respond. This kind of rampant abuse of power comes due to the ability to punish people without going via the courts, a power made possible by extensive AML controls.
That's fascinating and not something I'd heard before. However, according to el 'Pedia, the states were already outlawing cannabis in the years before Anslinger got involved and he simply picked up the pace. It's unclear if the motivations in the states were the same as his or not. Also, he appeared to truly believe that smoking marijuana sent people insane, and when a study that contradicted that idea was released it made him apopletic with rage. So I guess it didn't boil down entirely to racism.
The problem is that the average man on the street thinks the crime of "money laundering" means "hiding the proceeds of crime". That's the definition you'll find in the dictionary, on Wikipedia etc. If you actually read the regulations however, by far the majority of offences labelled as money laundering boil down to not filing the right paperwork or myriad other things. For example, it's quite routine for farmers to be accused of money laundering for depositing their money in chunks of less than $10k, typically to avoid filling out byzatine forms. When this happens, the US government just seizes (aka steals) the money. There is usually no court case.
Over time, the more I learn about AML laws the more I dislike them. There's no rational cost benefit analysis of any of this stuff. The $10k limit was set in the 70's and never adjusted for inflation. The regulations and thresholds are made more and more extreme every year, yet evidence it actually succeeds in stopping drug dealing or terrorism is - as far as I can tell - minimal to non-existent. The costs, meanwhile, are staggeringly huge. The sheer amount of paperwork it generates alone is eye watering.
Evidence for abandonment of the "open web" - cancelling Reader and the CalDAV API. Evidence for support of the open web: Chrome, GWT, open sourced jscompiler, V8, tons of random libraries and developer tools, SPDY, extensions to SSL, HTML5 rich snippets in search, etc.
I will state right now that I'm a Google employee, so you may think that makes me biased, but employees are often the companies harshest critics (internally). Yet this is a ridiculous stretch. Yes, I love(d) Reader too. Cancelling a widely loved but ultimately niche tool for which there are many replacements is not "abandoning the open web", it's recognising that with a finite amount of resources not every product area can be tackled.
Have you actually investigated the practical effects of COPPA? It results in companies like Google and Facebook simply imposing blanket bans on anyone who states they're under 13. It makes them universally persona-non-grata in the online world. I suppose that's one way to "protect" kids, but it's sort of like how locking them in the house can protect them from road accidents - a completely ridiculous solution to problems that are best solved other ways.
I have read the new rules. Their answer for the "what about kids that lie" is quite simply, "this issue is real but in our experience kids mostly tell the truth".
This is a stupid thing to say. Of course they tell the truth now because they were raised by their parents to do. But the COPPA rules are so extreme that almost no websites will actually attempt to meet their requirements. Instead what happens (on Facebook and Google and elsewhere) is that anyone who states they are under 13 is just banned. And once that sort of thing spreads to more websites and becomes normal, kids will more or less immediately learn that if they admit they're under 13 they get kicked out or refused entry to most of the web, but if they say they're 18 they don't. Expect kids lying about their age to become a lot more common now these new rules passed... making the whole endeavour practically worthless.
Besides, this whole thing is quite surprising, because it's been known for some time that the Treasury maintains what they call the "Terrorist Finance Tracking Program" which is a database of not only SARs, but all financial transactions drawn from the card networks, SWIFT and other payment processors. Most likely this is just the unclassified world trying to catch up with the classified world. If you thought the USA wasn't rummaging through your bank records already, think again.
Slashdot Mirror
The data on a passport is encrypted with a key derived from the "machine readable zone" that's inside the book. To decrypt the data available via NFC you have to actually optically scan the open page. In addition US passports have a shielded chip so the book has to be open to be readable.
The article calling for giving up the constitution isn't calling for the establishment of a police state, as you seem to be implying. It's pointing out that arguing over interpretation of an ancient document that doesn't evolve with the needs of the time is unnecessary for freedom (as evidenced by other countries and America's presidents own frequent disregard for it), and causes unnecessary problems. Example: people who justify gun ownership not on any kind of reasoned argument about the needs of the time, but just "because the constitution says so". There may well be good arguments for high rates of gun ownership in 2013 but "someone thought it was a good idea hundreds of years ago" probably isn't one of them.
The credit of the USA is itself issued in dollars, so you can't say the dollar is backed by that. Say it's "backed" by taxes or the military or anything else, but credit isn't an option. And BTW I'd say you can't back a currency by levelling taxes in it. That might create demand for it, but in the most extreme scenario of total Bitcoin success combined with total govt/people disconnect, then nothing stops you living entirely in Bitcoins and come tax time buying dollars with them, giving them to the government which then turns around and sells them back for Bitcoins so it can pay its suppliers.
Let's apply Occam's Razor. We have two competing explanations.
One is that the Swedish prosecution is hopelessly corrupt and has decided to level very, very specific yet trumped up charges against him, despite having successfully prosecuted him before for running the Pirate Bay (so there isn't much more to be had by doing it again).
The other is that a guy who made profits out of massive piracy of other peoples work doesn't have any moral qualms about stealing things from other peoples computers. Note that even his friend/partner in crime Sunde isn't willing to actually state in public he thinks the guy is innocent - rather telling.
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say the right answer is probably two. But let's wait and see what comes out at the trial.
If I recall correctly CSIRO are the guys who claimed to employ the scientist who invented wifi and proceeded to tell the whole world how this great Australian invention had been ripped off by nasty companies who just didn't want to give them their fair dues. The reality of course is that nobody in particular invented wifi, it was the result of many standards committees and donated technologies from lots of companies, and CSIRO was in fact just a patent troll.
The idea that the government (and government) would try and screw with the block chain is ridiculous, there's no way that would help them achieve their goals. If there's any kind of analysis the NSA would want to do, it'd be analysing the block chain and possibly crossing it with their own crawl of the web/peoples emails/etc. If Bitcoin were to get large enough to be of interest to the NSA (which I doubt would happen anytime soon), de-anonymising the block chain is what they'd be interested in - not out running it.
One other thing I recall the OFT investigating is/was people who took free government provided online services, repackaged them in app form and then sold them to unwitting people who didn't realize the services were meant to be free. Which seems like something that should indeed be handled, although I'm not sure if it really violates any law or how one might write a law to stop it.
But the long term trend with Bitcoin has been upwards in both value and transaction volume. So what economics predicts simply doesn't line up with reality, no matter which way you slice the data.
They've been doing it a long time. That's why the ZeroAccess guys run their own pool (or tried to at least).
Bitcoin does indeed have problems that make it hard to use in daily life, but "deflation" is not one of them. BitPay has reported that when the value of a Bitcoin rises their transaction rate goes up not down, as macro-economists would predict. Perhaps because holders of coins feel rich and start to splash out. This should not surprise us. The consumer electronics industry has been in a permanent state of economy-destroying inflation since pretty much forever yet even better and cheaper smartphones/mp3 players/etc continue to fly off the shelves. And in case you'd like observations more rigorous, there is no empirical evidence of a link between deflation and depression.
Anyway, obviously the goal is that nobody loses Bitcoins through carelessness - there are many strategies to help people back up their keys, and over time they will become widely implemented and used.
A 250,000 machine botnet is extremely large, that puts you up in the worlds largest active botnets. Building and maintaining such a thing is not easy at all. To mine off that, you need to run a pool server that those machines can all get work from (as the existing pools will all ban you), which is a rather complex scaling problem all by itself, and then you have the fact that it's all a time limited technique. ASIC hardware has, from what I understand, finally started to ship in significant numbers from the Avalon guy and people will be wiring them in and starting them up over the next few months, which will shortly make just 1 terahash/sec not very much at all.
All things considered, whilst botnet mining can make sense today (especially with gpu miners), the perps know that it won't last.
Hmm. I would note that the dotcom bubble did leave several very successful companies in its wake, and the internet itself whilst subject to a bubble was not, itself, some kind of scam or inevitably doomed project. Bitcoin can be subject to speculation and volatility yet still not be doomed.
Wait, you think the Fed is trying to deflate the bubble? No no no, that's not how it works at all. The Fed has a more or less explicitly stated goal of buying up the bulk of low risk assets in order to force people into higher risk assets like the stock market, and they're doing it with money printing. The stated goal of all this being employment at any cost. If the jobs that are created are all stupid or useless, no problems. That's the great thing about planned economies - you can artificially manipulate statistics but it has a way of not achieving your real goals in the end.
What's more, they're getting nervous about what happens when they try to unwind their positions, as those positions have become so huge - in other words they aren't sure they can safely deflate the bubble they've created without an almighty bang. See the recent FOMC notes or Bernanke's testimony to Congress on the matter.
Anyway, this purchase by Yahoo is a fail move. I have no idea if Summly is good or not, it might be the best thing since sliced bread for all I know, but the question is - could Yahoo really not have built something similar given $30 million and some headcount in their home town? Of course they could. It's just an app. It has less than a million downloads, so that's more than $30 per user which is absurd. It speculates in the article that the real reason for the acquisition is pretty much fashion-driven - the creator is "well spoken and adorkable". Adorkable? Urgh. I think there's an even simpler explanation - Mayer is trying to revive Yahoo by cargo-culting strategies she witnessed at Google. Unfortunately, splashing out megabucks on fluff purchases of questionable startups is pretty common at Google which can get away with it due to its huge bank balance. It can afford to write off huge purchases as worthless time and time again without anyone really noticing (see, the Groupon clone that was sold back to its founders as a recent example). This is not a key part of Google's success story, but Mayer doesn't seem to care.
What's especially got to hurt at Yahoo, which has seen a lot of layoffs, is that the "everyone works from HQ" policy doesn't apply to Summly. The creator will continue to live in England with his parents, and only two of the employees will join Yahoo. And they only handcuffed him for 18 months! What a failure. He'll be out of there the moment his 18 months is up and Yahoo will have flushed $30 million down the toilet.
The money is going into the stock market, just like it did in the late 90's. I thought this was uncontroversial? It's explicitly stated Fed policy. They are buying up all the Treasuries (and effectively financing the US deficit with inflation as a result), with the end goal being to force everyone else into riskier assets. This, Bernanke believes, will invigorate the economy. Because there's nothing like forcing people to gamble on the stock market to build a strong foundation!
Just wanted to say thanks. I've been finding your posts in this thread really interesting.
Ah, well, couple of problems with that.
The first is that anti-money laundering isn't something that every country arrived at independently through a careful process of democratic consideration and cost/benefit analysis, as you imply. In fact it was invented by Congress in the 70s, institutionalized through a body called the FATF-GATI and then forced on the rest of the world through a combination of diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions. Obviously, AML only works if everyone does it simultaneously. In fact, quite a few countries expressed concerns about this complex and untested set of regulations but that did not matter. Any country failing to implement them was branded a rogue state that was "undermining the integrity of the financial system" and consequently blacklisted. Eventually they all fell into line, one way or another.
So it'd actually be quite hard to create a society where such controls don't exist, because the US at least would insist on crippling trade sanctions.
The second problem with your statement is it's unclear you'd be ripped off by criminals. One of the primary motivations for AML is/was to fight drug dealing - it's a very cash intensive business, hence the emphasis on reporting cash transactions. A large chunk of AML can be summed up as "make bankers investigate where people get their money, under threat of jail time". It sounds good, in theory, except it doesn't seem to work - the street price of drugs has steadily fallen since the passing of the Banking Secrecy Act, not risen as you might expect. Indeed, countries that had very strong commitments to banking secrecy until recently (like Switzerland) are famous for their low levels of crime and generally civilised behaviour.
EFF stopped accepting it in donations years ago, and the stated reason was that if one day they are going to defend it or its users in a court of law it looks better if they don't appear to be biased. That's a very specific and unique position, you can't really extrapolate anything from it.
Indeed. It's easy to forget that the concept of money laundering was only born in the late 70's. The effectiveness of this new set of crime fighting tools should be judged in that light.
I think you have to separate the question of whether X/Y/Z things are bad from the question of money laundering. AML is an extremely complex, expansive and vague set of laws that more or less attempt to fight crime by creating a systematic network of surveillance and control over the financial system. That's why you read about people having to automatically file paperwork for transactions that are "suspicious" (what this means is not well defined). That's why anonymous banking is illegal - the assumption is anyone could be a criminal so everyone has to monitored, all the time. And in fact, it appears that parts of the USG have created a system in which not only are such reports dumped, but all records of all financial transactions ever (this is the TFTP).
One may question whether systematic surveillance is the right way to fight crime ... whether the costs are worth the benefits. Most western societies instinctively reject widespread surveillance - we wouldn't accept government controlled security cameras in our homes despite the obvious application to crime fighting. However without anyone really noticing this is what's happened to finance.
The other scary thing about this system is that with the ability to track every transaction comes the ability to veto them too. Consider the case of the US citizen who got on the wrong side of Israel and was put on the sanctions list for 17 years. He was finally removed (and they agreed he was not a terrorist) after the Treasury was sued, 1 day before the law stated they had to respond. This kind of rampant abuse of power comes due to the ability to punish people without going via the courts, a power made possible by extensive AML controls.
That's fascinating and not something I'd heard before. However, according to el 'Pedia, the states were already outlawing cannabis in the years before Anslinger got involved and he simply picked up the pace. It's unclear if the motivations in the states were the same as his or not. Also, he appeared to truly believe that smoking marijuana sent people insane, and when a study that contradicted that idea was released it made him apopletic with rage. So I guess it didn't boil down entirely to racism.
The problem is that the average man on the street thinks the crime of "money laundering" means "hiding the proceeds of crime". That's the definition you'll find in the dictionary, on Wikipedia etc. If you actually read the regulations however, by far the majority of offences labelled as money laundering boil down to not filing the right paperwork or myriad other things. For example, it's quite routine for farmers to be accused of money laundering for depositing their money in chunks of less than $10k, typically to avoid filling out byzatine forms. When this happens, the US government just seizes (aka steals) the money. There is usually no court case.
Over time, the more I learn about AML laws the more I dislike them. There's no rational cost benefit analysis of any of this stuff. The $10k limit was set in the 70's and never adjusted for inflation. The regulations and thresholds are made more and more extreme every year, yet evidence it actually succeeds in stopping drug dealing or terrorism is - as far as I can tell - minimal to non-existent. The costs, meanwhile, are staggeringly huge. The sheer amount of paperwork it generates alone is eye watering.
Extrapolation, much?
Evidence for abandonment of the "open web" - cancelling Reader and the CalDAV API. Evidence for support of the open web: Chrome, GWT, open sourced jscompiler, V8, tons of random libraries and developer tools, SPDY, extensions to SSL, HTML5 rich snippets in search, etc.
I will state right now that I'm a Google employee, so you may think that makes me biased, but employees are often the companies harshest critics (internally). Yet this is a ridiculous stretch. Yes, I love(d) Reader too. Cancelling a widely loved but ultimately niche tool for which there are many replacements is not "abandoning the open web", it's recognising that with a finite amount of resources not every product area can be tackled.
Have you actually investigated the practical effects of COPPA? It results in companies like Google and Facebook simply imposing blanket bans on anyone who states they're under 13. It makes them universally persona-non-grata in the online world. I suppose that's one way to "protect" kids, but it's sort of like how locking them in the house can protect them from road accidents - a completely ridiculous solution to problems that are best solved other ways.
I have read the new rules. Their answer for the "what about kids that lie" is quite simply, "this issue is real but in our experience kids mostly tell the truth".
This is a stupid thing to say. Of course they tell the truth now because they were raised by their parents to do. But the COPPA rules are so extreme that almost no websites will actually attempt to meet their requirements. Instead what happens (on Facebook and Google and elsewhere) is that anyone who states they are under 13 is just banned. And once that sort of thing spreads to more websites and becomes normal, kids will more or less immediately learn that if they admit they're under 13 they get kicked out or refused entry to most of the web, but if they say they're 18 they don't. Expect kids lying about their age to become a lot more common now these new rules passed ... making the whole endeavour practically worthless.
camperdave is not being nasty. He is merely reporting the conclusions of the Supreme Court way back in 1974.
Besides, this whole thing is quite surprising, because it's been known for some time that the Treasury maintains what they call the "Terrorist Finance Tracking Program" which is a database of not only SARs, but all financial transactions drawn from the card networks, SWIFT and other payment processors. Most likely this is just the unclassified world trying to catch up with the classified world. If you thought the USA wasn't rummaging through your bank records already, think again.