cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/post/747117
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24014988
This summer Kimberly Prost, a Canadian judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC), arrived at her home in The Hague and, as was her habit, called out “Alexa”.
There was silence. The voice-activated assistant did not respond. “Alexa was dead. She wouldn’t talk to me,” Prost recalled in an interview with The Irish Times.
Prost had been added to the United States’ sanctions list, because in 2020 she ruled to authorise an investigation into possible atrocities in Afghanistan, including by US troops. Amazon, obliged to implement the sanctions as a US company, had cancelled her account.
It was just the start of what Prost describes as a “pervasive, negative effect” of the sanctions across all aspects of her life, which has shut her out from much of the international banking system.
There’s always ways around those sanctions. As an American that’s never held a credit card, it’s easy to send money or order things online w/o using one.
What this article reflects is the hardship of a person that uses US based, “convenience-oriented” financial systems.
What blew my mind was when I was traveling in the EU some years ago, were the options for cash cards and how they had more privacy controls on them than in the US. The US offers fuck-all for privacy in way too many instances. Europe is decades ahead of America now in that regard.
Homegirl just needs to change tactics.
Also, Alexa (like Siri and Cortana) is a snoop, NEVER use it.
This is actually one of the kinds of situations that Bitcoin was originally invented to solve, the debanking of “undesirable” people by corporate owned systems. Too bad the entire crypto world has been invaded by huckster scammers.
Yeaaaa… Once the story with Sam Bankman-Fried and the whole FTX fiasco broke, I kinda figured crypto was done for.
Turns out I was correct. :(