Externe Ticker

Whitney joined Chris Martenson to discuss AI and how the narrative surrounding it might impact society at large or explore specific strategies for individuals and organizations to navigate this shift. Available on YouTube and Peak Prosperity.

Peak Prosperity.

Whitney joined AM Wake Up to discuss CBDC rollout in the US. Available on Rokfin and Rumble.

AM Wake Up.

Whitney joined Russell Brand to discuss Epstein, the rise of populism and whether figures like Donald Trump and Javier Milei are really “anti-establishment” and how to respond to the global, concerted push towards a centralized, authoritarian state.

Available on Rumble.

Links discussed:

• Larry Page Missing as Google Founder Faces Jeffrey Epstein lawsuit
• Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance
• The Rise of Jamie Dimon
• Crowning the King of Wall Street
• The age of AI : and our human future : Kissinger, Henry, 1923- author : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
• Fink Sees Tokenization of Financial Assets as Next Step – Bloomberg

Russell Brand.

Whitney joined Redacted to discuss how CBDCs are likely to implemented in the United States and how Sam Bankman-Fried had tried to help create the coming digital dollar before the implosion of FTX.

Full show available on YouTube and Rumble. Segment starts at 1:38:15. Whitney’s segment only available here.

Redacted.

Whitney joined TLAV to discuss the Epstein documents, CBDCs and the Digital Dollar and the threat of cyber false flags in 2024. Available on Rumble, Rokfin, and Odysee. TLAV show page here.

TLAV.

Whitney joined The Kim Iversen Show to discuss CTIL. Available on Rumble.

Kim Iversen.

Whitney joined TFTC to discuss the nature of stablecoins, CBDCs, and the potential societal pitfalls of centrally controlled artificial intelligence. Available on YouTube and podcast apps.

TFTC #471.

Whitney joined Natalie to discuss financial freedom, Artificial Intelligence, cyber attacks and simulations, and her latest investigation into the crypto and CDBC world. Available on YouTube or podcast apps.

Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell.

Idris Elba stars in a promotional video for Stellar’s “Real World” campaign, where he touts Stellar’s more “equitable” vision of finance, a future where opportunities are “borderless.”

“If ideas are borderless, opportunities should be too,” A-list actor Idris Elba recently exclaimed in a video for cryptocurrency player Stellar’s “Real World” campaign.

In the elaborate promotional video featuring Elba, traditional currencies are portrayed as unreliable and especially detrimental to marginalized people. An immigrant, working class-coded woman in the video asks, “I can send money to my family, but how much will arrive?” Meanwhile, an older man counting his paper monies in the video says “[t]he more I save, the more I feel unsafe.” 

Presenting itself as the solution to such problems, the Stellar network promises to make opportunities “borderless,” helping the video’s characters to save and send money to others without the traditional financial system’s various obstacles.

Indeed, Stellar’s “Real World” campaign portrays the Stellar protocol as an agent for dignified opportunities, making the financial system work for all. And, generally, many cryptocurrency and bitcoin enthusiasts put stock in such networks because they see them as a medium that ensures financial freedom. But Stellar, like other altruistic-branded financial organizations in the crypto space, is getting involved in other projects that suggest “financial inclusion,” as most would understand it, isn’t their biggest priority. A prime example is Stellar’s intense interest in facilitating the rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which are a programmable, central bank-issued digital version of a country’s fiat currency.

While CBDC proponents tout them as fast, convenient, and ideal for cheaper international transactions, Unlimited Hangout has previously elaborated on CBDCs’ propensity to undermine anonymity, foster surveillance and even, in terms of programmability, be used to enforce policies or otherwise be weaponized to manipulate or control peoples’ financial activities and behavior. If rolled out on a wider scale and introduced in tandem with other tools, like Digital IDs, UH contributor Iain Davis and UH contributing editor Whitney Webb (among others) have posited that CBDCs could “be used to monitor our whereabouts, limit our freedom of movement and control our access to money, goods and services.”

With nation states fearing that falling behind in digital currencies could compromise their competitiveness or sovereignty, the CBDC race feeds itself, thus bypassing critical public discussions around CBDCs’ potential societal harms. As per the Atlantic Council’s CBDC tracker, 130 countries representing 98 percent of the world’s GDP are now exploring a CBDC. Juniper Research recently estimated that the global value of CBDCs will jump from around $100 million today to $213 billion by 2030.

Naturally, as interest in CBDCs proliferates, so have CBDC pilots involving both the public and private sectors. In the process, a myriad of elite-gilded and blockchain-powered digital payment networks and organizations, including Stellar, Ethereum, Ripple and/or the people and forces behind them, are vying for their technologies and payment systems to be incorporated into the developing digital currency infrastructures of tomorrow.

As we shall see, these organizations’ collective facade of inclusivity and altruism obfuscates their true nature as elite-backed or otherwise compromised groups helping centralize, digitize, and even possibly program or otherwise weaponize money in ways unaccountable to traditional policymaking processes and the public, thus bringing them immense power while helping facilitate what could functionally amount to a financial digital control grid.

The CBDC Pilot Race

As the CBDC race heats up, major players in the crypto world are playing key roles in ongoing CBDC pilot projects globally. While many crypto players are interested in facilitating CBDCs, I will focus on Ripple, Stellar, and Ethereum, all of which are blockchain-based platforms being utilized in multiple CBDC pilots, for the purposes of this article.

Blockchain, a distributed digital ledger technology system, is known for its ability to securely store information and transaction records. Key to the functioning of cryptocurrencies, blockchain is often described as a cornerstone for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an ongoing and controversial technological revolution popularized by elite-gilded groups like the World Economic Forum, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young, that seeks to blur the boundaries of the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

Originally founded in 2012 as OpenCoin, Ripple is a blockchain-based digital payment network and transaction protocol that facilitates the cryptocurrency XRP, one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrencies. According to its X/Twitter profile, Ripple’s mission is to “build breakthrough crypto solutions for a world without economic borders.”

Developing a CBDC platform for central banks to use, Ripple is “in talks” with over a dozen governments for the purposes of CBDC development. Namely, Ripple is or has participated in CBDC pilots for Montenegro, Palau, Bhutan, and Colombia. It was also tapped to facilitate the National Bank of Georgia’s CBDC pilot. Ripple website visitors will additionally find extensive efforts to promote the protocol’s CBDC capacities, which emphasize the platform’s “stability, security and resilience,” accessible and sustainable nature, and potential for interoperability. 

Logos for digital assets Stellar (L) and Ripple (R), Source: Guarda

A 2014 Ripple spinoff and rival, Stellar is a public open-source decentralized blockchain network run by the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), which operates Lumens (XLM), Stellar’s cryptocurrency. “Built with CBDCs in mind,” Stellar has created a guidebook for policymakers about CBDCs, as well as a whitepaper that explains how Stellar in particular is up to the task of CBDC facilitation. As I had noted in a previous UH report, “SDF’s mission is to strive towards ‘global financial inclusion,’ a buzzword elite groups like the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund have used to garner support for and participation in the CBDC paradigm.”

As I noted in previous UH reporting, Stellar has participated in CBDC pilots in Ukraine and Australia, and is developing a Brazilian CBDC in collaboration with Mercado Bitcoin. The German bank Bankhaus von der Heydt, meanwhile, selected Stellar to help develop a prospective European stablecoin. 

Created by Vitalik Buterin in 2014, Ethereum is a prominent decentralized blockchain network known for its smart contracts, which are programs or protocols designed to facilitate or execute a desired action when the given preconditions (the “contract”) are met. Also a major contender for CBDC pilots, Ethereum has been used in CBDC pilots for Australia, Norway, Israel, and even MasterCard. Moreover, an Ethereum-based stablecoin pilot issued by the Palau Ministry of Finance and “fully backed by USD cash balances” is currently ongoing in Palau.

Ethereum differs from Stellar and Ripple in that, as per Ethereum’s webpage on Ethereum governance, no one owns or controls the Ethereum protocol, and there are no limits or rules as to how the protocol can be used. Therefore, Ethereum itself isn’t advocating for a role in CBDCs or CBDC pilots. As I will discuss, however, the Ethereum protocol has been compromised in significant ways, and as such many elite players promote it as a protocol fit for purpose in the larger CBDC project, or for other goals they may have in the financial space.

In any case, as the CBDC race heats up, crypto players’ rapid uptake of CBDC and adjacent pilots indicates their foot is on the gas.

Crypto for Good? 

Major crypto players depict their CBDC–related efforts as strides toward an often “borderless” paradigm characterized by financial inclusion, equity, sustainability and modernity in an increasingly digital world. In reality, they are more interested in having a major stake in, or even control over, the money of tomorrow.

In this respect, the Stellar Development Foundation’s establishment as a nonprofit organization is notable because the designation positions the project as beneficial to the public from the get-go. Stellar’s “Real World” campaign that I previously highlighted is another organizational effort to appear as financially “inclusive” and even humanitarian. Last year, Stellar collaborated with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to provide humanitarian payments to those impacted by the war in Ukraine through an “integrated blockchain payment solution,” where the UNHCR distributed funds using Circle Internet Financial’s USD Coin (USDC), a prominent dollar-pegged stablecoin, to recipients’ Vibrant digital wallets, which are built on Stellar’s blockchain, on their smartphones. 

Shashank Rai, Chief Technology Officer at the UN’s UNICC speaks at a panel called “Meeting Humanitarian Need through Digital Tools” along with Denelle Dixon CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation and Carmen Hett, Treasurer at UNHCR, at the 2022 Stellar Meridian Blockchain Conference, Source: UNICC

Stellar’s “financial inclusion” fixation is only par for the course. Likewise, Ethereum’s messaging portrays its work as a “community-run,” grassroots effort, with the Ethereum website describing its work as a decentralized finance (DeFi) system. Positioning itself as an antithesis to the traditional financial system, which it describes as inaccessible and discriminatory, the Ethereum Foundation describes Ethereum as a “protocol for human coordination.” 

“Our vision for Ethereum,” it claims on its website, “is the Infinite Garden,” that people must tend to, nurture, grow, and “continue to play.” Likewise, the Foundation’s philosophy page emphasizes decentralization and a philosophy of subtraction, where “we attempt to subtract our power and resist the natural tendency of organizations to grow and accumulate power.”

According to its 2022 “Fintech for good” report, meanwhile, Ripple’s donated about $170 million towards “philanthropy” since 2018, committing $100 million to “scaling carbon markets,” and $25 million to “NGOs working to make global financial services more inclusive and equitable.” Indeed, Ripple describes its business model as eco-friendly and “on track to achieve carbon net zero by 2030 or sooner through reduced emissions, clean energy use, and large investments in innovative carbon removal projects.”

Moreover, Ripple has previously collaborated with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on financial inclusion initiatives that are part and parcel of the political elite looking to influence or dominate the financial system. While billionaire Bill Gates himself may not own any crypto, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is intensely interested in adjacent technologies, allegedly for the purposes of “financial conclusion.” 

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed Mojaloop, in fact, is an open-source payment platform aimed at driving financial inclusion. Ripple, a Sponsor member of the Mojaloop Foundation, built Mojaloop’s Interledger Protocol. The organization also has a Center of Excellence for CBDCs, which Ripple participates in with players including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Coil, Google, ModusBox, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). The Ripple-supported Mojaloop participates in the Level One Project, a Gates Foundation initiative that “proposes a new low-cost payments system that supports inclusive, interoperable digital payments.”

Ultimately, crypto players’ altruistic exteriors deserve scrutiny. As academic Olivier Jutel writes, crypto’s “blockchain humanitarianism” strives to legitimize what is really an “intensification of the South-to-North extraction of value via solutionism and blockchain platforms,” i.e. a modern iteration of colonialism.

Simultaneously, the crypto industry’s major investments and efforts under the guise of “financial inclusion” must be understood as an attempt to secure influence and/or control over the world’s financial infrastructure. Indeed, the political class has a track record of using talking points like “equity” and “protecting the environment” to push top-down, sweeping policy initiatives slated to deplete traditional policymaking processes in favor of opaque global governance structures, where infrastructure previously facilitated by states is increasingly swallowed up by corporations, corporate-dominated public-private partnerships, and other organizations and institutions unaccountable to the public.

That crypto players like Ripple and Stellar use similar language while simultaneously pushing for increased stakes in the future financial system signals that they are not detractors from the elites’ goals for the financial system: instead, they are advancing their cause.

Crypto as an Elite Endeavor

Crypto players’ elaborate marketing tactics and philanthropic efforts either show a false good will or benevolence that obfuscates their true interest in CBDCs, or otherwise signal their alignment with the political class’ goals.

Indeed, Stellar, Ethereum, and Ripple’s elite connections, including the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and others, are extensive. Ripple Co-Founder Chris Larsen, for starters, is a WEF agenda contributor, and prominent Ripple leaders, including CEO Brad Garlinghouse, have made Davos appearances. 

Meanwhile, Stellar Co-Founder Jed McCaleb has an extensive and tarnished history in the crypto space. In fact, he, with Larsen, had founded now-competitor Ripple, with McCaleb departing after a failed attempt to oust Larsen from the company. Then Ripple board member Jesse Powell subsequently sent McCaleb an email explaining the board’s mistrust of McCaleb’s leadership practices:“[t]he Stripe deal sucks; employees don’t trust you as a leader/manager; you hiring your girlfriend [Joyce Kim] indicates you have poor judgment.” Indeed, McCaleb had brought on his then girlfriend Joyce Kim, much to the annoyance of his colleagues at Ripple.

Jed McCaleb of Ripple and Stellar in an undated photo, Source: BlockBuilders

(The “Stripe deal” Powell refers to a failed attempt by payments company Stripe to buy out Ripple in 2013. While at Ripple, McCaleb had facilitated negotiations with Stripe because, according to Michael Craig’s 2015 reporting in The Observer, he was looking for an exit from Ripple because his girlfriend had no real role at or future with the company.)

After leaving Ripple, McCaleb and Kim launched Stellar, thus establishing a kind of rivalry between the two organizations (Kim subsequently left Stellar in 2016). Ripple and Stellar are known for their curiously similar interfaces; Michael Craig reported in 2015 that some of Stellar’s code was clearly shoplifted from Ripple, noting “at least 177 instances” where Stellar’s code matched Ripple’s. “In its haste to get its currency established,” Craig explains, “Stellar simply copied [R]ipple’s open-source code but evidently its search-and-replace missed many instances where the code still says ‘ripple.’”

Many of McCaleb’s previous (and once wildly successful) projects, including file-sharing site eDonkey2000 and bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, have gone belly-up, with McCaleb previously facing lawsuits over allegedly fraudulently misrepresenting Mt. Gox’s security issues to the public. Despite this, McCaleb’s sights are on the stars, quite literally. In 2021, McCaleb founded and, at the time of writing, is fully funding Vast, a startup whose mission is to “contribute to a future where billions of people are living and thriving in space.” It aims to launch a private space station, Haven-1, into space with “opportunities for lunar artificial gravity.” Vast is collaborating with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the project, where SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is set to launch Haven-1 in August 2025 or after.

Meanwhile, Jed McCaleb has founded the Astera Institute, which focuses on technology and science projects that have the “capacity to create transformative progress for human civilization.” The Astera Institute works on projects including neuroscience-focused Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where McCaleb and team suggest further study of the brain will better inform the building of adaptive Artificial Intelligence and interventions to “disrupt” aging processes. 

McCaleb is also helping out his new romantic partner, Seemay Chou, by providing seed funding to her $500 million bio-firm Arcadia Science, a for-profit science institute founded under the premise that “we could invest in a new way of doing science.” Chou is Arcadia’s CEO and Co-Founder; Jed McCaleb is listed on Arcadia’s website as a Co-Founder and Advisor to the CEO. Breaking away from standard scientific conventions, Arcadia will not collaborate with universities or publish in traditional scientific journals. Rather, it plans to do exploratory research that can then be spun off into startups. McCaleb and Open AI CEO Sam Altman are Arcadia’s two unicorn investors.

Altogether, Jed McCaleb’s grandiose efforts and funds in multiple spheres — money, space, and even anti-aging — suggest strides to direct not just the future of currency but the future of science and technology. Despite multiple major business failures, McCaleb apparently thinks he can, and has the right to, play God.

McCaleb’s messy reputation and megalomaniac aura perhaps explain why Stellar CEO Denelle Dixon is usually the one doing Stellar’s public engagements. However, McCaleb’s far from the only questionable person on staff. Dixon herself is a World Economic Forum Agenda Contributor.

Stellar’s Denelle Dixon testifies before the Senate about stablecoins and financial inclusion, Source: Youtube

In addition, Stellar’s Board of Advisers includes Peter Thiel-backed Founders Fund’s Keith Rabois, Open AI CEO Sam Altman, and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, all prominent players in the tech world’s inner core. 

Furthermore, the Stellar Development Foundation is a supporter of the World Economic Forum’s Humanitarian and Resilience Investing (HRI) Initiative, theoretically created “to unlock social impact investing in frontier markets” to help and increase the resilience of marginalized and crisis-impacted communities. However, impact investing, especially when pushed by an elite organization like the World Economic Forum, cannot be interpreted solely as a humanitarian endeavor. Instead, the phenomenon implies influence over “beneficiary” communities’ and groups’ affairs, stripping them of sovereignty.

Interestingly, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has voiced concerns about CBDCs as of late, saying in a September 2023 interview with CNBC that, while government-issued digital currencies can provide convenience, “[t]hey end up being even less private and basically break down all of the existing barriers against both corporations and the government at the same time.” Buterin also told TIME Magazine in 2022 that “[c]rypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong.”

Simultaneously, Ethereum’s “proof of work” to “proof of stake” blockchain verification system switch, or “merge” in 2022, centralized the protocol’s technology. Whereas decentralized computing “work” validates the cryptocurrency network in “proof of work,” “proof of stake” shifts this validation responsibility over to stakeholders, granting them tangible leverage over the network. 

In theory, the “merge” was executed for environmental reasons: Ethereum’s website highlights that the switch to proof of stake slashed Ethereum’s energy consumption by about 99.95%. In fact, the merge was apparently priming Ethereum for further regulatory capture. As a recent JP Morgan report put it, the “concentrated number” of stakeholders precipitated by Ethereum’s 2022 merge could theoretically “collude to create an oligopoly that would promote their own interests at the expense of the interests of the community.” JP Morgan’s JPM coin, a digital dollar created by the bank, notably runs on a private version of the Ethereum blockchain and the bank also owns a large stake in critical Etherum infrastructure.

Indeed, a small number of stakeholders appear to be swallowing up significant stakes in Ethereum: even before the merge, crypto exchanges Coinbase, Kraken and Binance had together accounted for over 20% of the total staked ETH. At the time of writing, moreover, liquid staking solution Lido Finance holds roughly ⅓ of the total stake. Meanwhile, multinational investment giant Blackrock’s recent filing to launch an Ethereum-backed Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), only shows that the world’s most powerful players are moving to use the protocol for their ends.

Buterin may have concerns about CBDCs and Ethereum’s prospective role in them, but the protocol is ultimately a creature he has diminishing control over. “I feel like my influence in Ethereum keeps decreasing every six months. I have less now than I did six months ago,” Buterin said in an April 2022 interview. “Six months ago, I had less than I had a year ago. And a year ago, I had less than I had 18 months ago.” 

Meanwhile, Buterin’s colleagues don’t seem to share his concerns. Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Aya Miguchi, also a WEF Agenda Contributor, is on the Davos-launched and elite-gilded Global Blockchain Council, which has collaborated with the WEF in the past on issues including crypto-asset regulations. 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Source: EWN

And Ethereum’s co-founder, a lawsuit-plagued Joe Lubin, has founded prominent blockchain company and start-up incubator ConsenSys, which runs on Ethereum and is deeply tied to JP Morgan, proposes in its public materials that Ethereum is the platform most suited to CBDCs’ needs, and has even run its own CBDC trials using Ethereum. (Meanwhile, there’s speculation that Lubin holds 5% to 10% of the total Ether in circulation.)

Zooming out, crypto players’ collective activities and messaging suggest strides towards securing significant leverage over today’s financial system. Stellar, for example, often describes its work as part of a broader effort towards establishing a “global payment standard.” Depicting Stellar’s work as consequential to society as the establishment of the internet, Jed McCaleb previously told CNBC that:

 What we’re trying to build at Stellar is an internet-level protocol. And I think it’s important that that be done by a non-profit entity. Like if you imagine the internet created by a for-profit company, we would just be in a very different world…And [for this purpose] you kind of just need…governance and structure that wasn’t really done in ripple.

McCaleb seems to think slapping the “non-profit” label on Stellar makes its work neutral, or otherwise absolves the organization from scrutiny, despite the weight he assigns to Stellar’s prospective societal impact. Likewise, a now-deleted 2016 article from Ripple, “The Road to Davos: Ushering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” explicitly discusses Ripple’s prospective role in developing a “global standard for payments” as part of the larger Fourth Industrial Revolution:

As the only distributed financial technology company invited to attend Davos this year, Ripple is undertaking one of the first tasks of [the Fourth Industrial revolution]: building the infrastructure. All of the outcomes the WEF predicts rely on not only interoperable global systems for messaging and communication, but for an equally seamless system for the transfer of value. Financial inclusion and economic growth are currently trapped in the same bottleneck; the technology exists but cooperation and regulation hold it back.

It is to this problem that we apply our solutions. If the world had a global standard for payments, it could lead to stronger and more inclusive economies, reducing inequality and inaugurating what Deloitte projects will be a period of exponential growth.

As the language used in the quote suggests, elites are using their professed goal of “financial inclusion” to mask their real one, which is the widespread implementation and interoperability of digital currencies. Furthermore, while the above quote emphasizes that a global payment standard will improve economies and livelihoods, it neglects to mention that developing and having ownership over a “global standard for payments” or adjacent financial infrastructure would put Ripple in an authority position over the financial system’s future, perhaps making it more powerful than traditional state actors.

Stepping back, intelligence ties to and interest in crypto are ripe for questioning. Cryptocurrency adjacent Bitcoin’s Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) 256, which makes it so secure, was actually designed by mathematician Glenn M. Lilly under the NSA’s direction, before Lilly became the NSA’s chief of mathematics research. (However, the SHA was made public in 2001, long before Bitcoin was launched). Many years later, CIA Director William Burns confirmed his agency has initiated “a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency” in December 2021. Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell also wrote alongside Josh Kirshner and Thomas Schoenberger at Beacon Global Strategies that “[b]lockchain technology is a powerful but under-utilized forensic tool for governments to identify illicit activity and bring criminals to justice,” even highlighting a cryptocurrency expert’s claim that blockchain is a “boon for surveillance.” 

While the extent of US government involvement in cryptocurrency development merits further investigation, intense government interest in the technology is clear: the CIA opened a research lab to study blockchain in 2020. On a global scale, the World Economic Forum’s released an extensive whitepaper series to advise policymakers on digital currencies, also creating a Digital Currency Governance Consortium to discuss and construct policy frameworks for governance of digital currencies. In such efforts, the WEF frequently upholds public-private cooperation as critical to success, even though private corporations and groups are unelected and therefore unaccountable to the public. 

Ultimately, within the context of significant crypto involvement in CBDC pilots, the circumstances force speculation as to whether elite interest in crypto is actually about using the private sector to develop and perfect digital financial infrastructure that governance structures can then subsequently utilize for CBDCs.

Financial Inclusion or Control?

Ultimately, crypto players’ elite composition, affiliations and publicly-expressed intentions to set digital financial industry standards showcase their intense interest in obtaining power over the financial system. As such, their participation in CBDC development only suggests an effort to ensure their infrastructure is cemented in the tech facilitating the worlds’ financial transactions. This must be understood as a power grab in its own right.

What’s more, CBDC pilots, where private players’ technologies are being utilized for critical CBDC infrastructure, demonstrates that CBDCs are fundamentally public-private concoctions, where sketchy, elite-gilded groups facilitate the tech underpinning the digital currency partially or fully imposed on the wider population in the event of global CBDC rollouts: a full fledged, perhaps permanent union of the state and the corporate world. Crypto players in the CBDC race are only driving the point home, with payments giant Stripe encouraging the US Federal Reserve “to fully leverage the expertise of the private sector” in the process of CBDC development.

Critically, major crypto players’ intense interest in CBDCs, even though a widespread CBDC rollout could theoretically jeopardize their future, forces speculation as to whether cryptocurrencies were developed as a kind of precursor to, or testing ground for, CBDCs, where the technologies needed for a central bank-issued digital currency could first be tested out and perfected in the private sector before coming under the complete dominion of central banks. 

Even in the event that CBDCs don’t go ahead, adjacent technologies, like stable coins, are also being advanced by crypto players for similar purposes. Indeed, country-led stablecoin pilots like Palau’s and adjacent efforts, including fintech company Circle’s United States Dollar-pegged USD Coin (USDC), signal that, rather than facilitating CBDCs themselves, governing bodies could collaborate with private companies that instead issue and facilitate stablecoins on their behalf. Such stablecoins could ultimately enable the same programmability and surveillance concerns CBDCs pose to the public, but would instead be operated by the world’s wealthiest bankers and financiers rather than the central banks. 

Unmasking Farmington: FTX, Fluent Finance and the Coming Digital Dollar A former partner of Farmington State Bank, the tiny rural bank embroiled in the FTX scandal, is now building the rails for CBDCs in the Middle East and beyond. Their recent activities may finally reveal the true motives behind Sam Bankman-Fried’s and his allies’ use of Farmington, with major implications for the coming Digital Dollar.

Meanwhile, touted by JPMorgan as no less than “a new financial services paradigm,” deposit tokens are like a digital version of the deposited money in a person’s bank account, but programmable and facilitated through a blockchain based-ledger. If universalized, digital tokens could mean money held in commercial bank accounts could also likely become programmable — at the whim of the banks.

Moreover, the consistent obsession with “borderlessness” plays conveniently into the hands of a power elite looking to undermine traditional policymaking processes and whatever sovereignty traditional nation states still have in the modern era under the guise of equitability, inclusion and humanitarianism. In this respect, it appears the current financial system, where nations operate their respective fiat currencies, could be undermined by global governance efforts via CBDCs’ interoperability amongst states. Amidst “inclusivity”-driven pushes for interoperability, it’s not hard to imagine CBDCs becoming interoperable to a point where only a few or even one global digital currency, of course operated by the power elite, could become the norm. 

Ultimately, by simultaneously driving CBDCs and adjacent projects forward, crypto players like Ripple, Stellar, and Ethereum demonstrate they (or those who have influence over them) care little about financial inclusion, privacy, or freedom. Rather, their goal is to have a stake in, or even control over, the future global financial system.

As CBDCs Roll Out, Elite-Backed Digital Payment Systems Vie to Build the “Global Payment Standard”.

Whitney joined What Bitcoin Did to discuss the importance of independent journalism, the challenges of media manipulation and the rise of tyranny. They also talked about the risks of AI, the influence of powerful figures like Elon Musk and the need for public scrutiny, and the potential co-opting of Bitcoin by powerful institutions.

What Bitcoin Did.

Whitney joined The Jimmy Dore Show to discuss recent news about CTIL, Jeffrey Epstein, and her latest article “Unmasking Farmington: FTX, Fluent Finance and the Coming Digital Dollar.” Available on YouTube – Clip 1, Clip 2, and Odysee.

Links Discussed:

• 2023-11-28 Shellenberger tweet/substack
• 2020-08-27 – Meet the IDF-Linked Cybersecurity Group “Protecting” US Hospitals ‘Pro Bono’

Newsguard:

• 2020-01-28 How Government and Media Are Prepping America for a Failed 2020 Election
• 2019-01-09 How a NeoCon-Backed “Fact Checker” Plans to Wage War on Independent Media

Epstein:

• 2023-05-03 Unraveling the Epstein-Chomsky Relationship

Southern Trust:

• 2023-05-11 Redacted – Epstein and Southern Trust

Bitcoin/CBDCs:

• 2023-05-19 Bitcoin and the Plot to Destroy Financial Privacy

Terrorism:

• 2019-09-06 How the CIA, Mossad and “the Epstein Network” are Exploiting Mass Shootings to Create an Orwellian Nightmare
• 2021-05-05 This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”
• 2021-06-12 Who Is A “Terrorist” In Biden’s America?

The Jimmy Dore Show.

One of the oddest and most mysterious relationships that emerged out of the collapse of FTX last year was Alameda Research’s unusual relationship with Farmington State Bank, one of the smallest, rural banks in the United States that came under the control of Jean Chalopin in 2020. Chalopin is best known as the chairman of Deltec, one of the main banks for Alameda Research – FTX’s trading arm that played a central role in its collapse — and still one of the main banks for the largest fiat-backed stablecoin, Tether (USDT). Chalopin had acquired control over Farmington via FBH Corp., where Chalopin was listed as executive officer. Interestingly, Noah Perlman, a former DOJ and DEA official who is now Chief Compliance Officer at Binance and the son of Jeffrey Epstein associate and musician Itzhak Perlman, was also listed as a director of FBH Corp and has never publicly explained his connection with this Chalopin-controlled entity.

As Unlimited Hangout reported last December, soon after its acquisition by Chalopin’s FBH Corp., Farmington “pivoted to deal with cryptocurrency and international payments” after decades upon decades of serving as a single branch community bank in rural Washington. Soon after its pivot into the crypto space, Farmington struggled to move money and sought approval to become part of the Federal Reserve system. It also changed its name from Farmington State Bank to Moonstone Bank. The approval of Farmington by the Federal Reserve has been deemed highly unusual and as having “glossed over Moonstone’s for-profit foreign interests.” Late last December, Eric Kollig, spokesman for the Federal Reserve, told reporters that he could not comment “about the process that federal regulators undertook to approve Chalopin’s purchase of the charter of Farmington State Bank in 2020.”

Just days after Farmington formally changed its name to Moonstone in early March 2022, FTX-affiliated Alameda Research poured $11.5 million into the bank, which was – at the time – more than twice its entire net worth. Moonstone’s Chief Digital Officer, Jean Chalopin’s son Janvier, later stated that the funding from Alameda Research had been “seed funding … to execute our new plan of being a tech-focused bank.”

Farmington State Bank as it appears on Google Maps, Source: Protos

Upon Alameda’s taking a stake in the bank, Jean Chalopin stated that this move “signifies the recognition, by one of the world’s most innovative financial leaders, of the value of what we are aiming to achieve. This marks a new step into building the future of banking.” Outlets like Protos have noted how unusual it is that a Bahamas-based company like FTX was “able to purchase a stake in a federally approved bank” without attracting the attention of regulators.Washington State regulators have stated that they were “aware” of Alameda’s investment in Farmington/Moonstone and defended their decision not to intervene or take further regulatory action.

Notably, the influx of new money into the remodeled Farmington was not exclusive to FTX/Alameda. A New York Times article on the matter noted that Farmington/Moonstone’s deposits – which had hovered around $10 million for many decades – quickly surged to $84 million, with $71 million coming from only four new accounts during this same relatively short period in 2022.

As Unlimited Hangout previously noted, the same day the Alameda investment was announced, Moonstone installed Ronald Oliveira as CEO. Oliviera had previously worked for the fintech company Revolut, a “leading digital alternative bank” financed by Jeffrey Epstein associate Nicole Junkermann. Roughly two months later, the bank hired Joseph Vincent as its legal counsel. Immediately prior to joining Farmington/Moonstone, Vincent had served as the general counsel for Washington State’s Department of Financial Institutions and its director of legal and regulatory affairs for 18 years.

Shortly before FTX’s collapse, which put Farmington/Moonstone under heavy scrutiny, Farmington/Moonstone partnered with a relatively unknown company called Fluent Finance. Fluent Finance, both then and now, has evaded scrutiny from the media aside from Unlimited Hangout’s investigation into Farmington, published last December. However, since FTX’s unraveling and the shuttering of Farmington/Moonstone in the months that followed, Fluent Finance has been quite busy, developing significant government partnerships in the Middle East and looking to become a central part of the coming Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) paradigm for both West and East.

FTX and the Curious History of Farmington State Bank Since FTX’s collapse, a tiny bank in rural Washington has come under heavy scrutiny for the role it may have played in the crypto exchange’s fraudulent activities. Ed Berger and Whitney Webb investigate the history of the bank and unearth some troubling connections.

A likely reason behind the lack of media interest in Fluent Finance and their apparent success after the FTX scandal is the fact that Fluent, from its earliest days, has been operating as an apparent front for some of the most powerful commercial banks in the world and building out “trusted” digital infrastructure for the economy to come. This investigation, an examination of Fluent’s past and its current trajectory, may help elucidate the true motives behind the efforts of Chalopin, Bankman-Fried and others to turn the tiny Farmington State Bank into “Moonstone.”

Fluent Finance’s Deep and Early Connections to Wall Street Banks

Fluent Finance was created in 2020 and was co-founded by Bradley Allgood, Oliver Gale and Jaime Plata. Allgood began his career with the US Army and later went on to serve in NATO’s Governmental Operations division with an apparent focus on NATO activity in Afghanistan. After leaving NATO, Allgood “immediately jumped” into economic development, specifically the creation and expansion of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), specifically one partnered with the Catawba Indian Reservation in South Carolina. That SEZ, officially named the Catawba Digital Economic Zone, was co-founded by Allgood in 2019 and he still serves as its head of Commercial Banking.

Logo of the Catawba Digital Economic Zone, Source: South Carolina Business Journal

Sitting on just two acres of land, the zone aims to “become the worldwide registration hub for crypto companies” as well as to “take a huge chunk out of Delaware’s market for company registration or even to replace it as the gold standard.” The zone is backed by a venture capital firm tied to Bradley Tusk, the former Deputy Governor of Illinois under disgraced former Governor Rod Blagojevich and the former campaign manager for billionaire Mike Bloomberg. In addition, Tusk’s companies count Google, the Rockefeller Foundation and Ripple (XRP) among their clients. Tusk’s different VC firms have invested in Coinbase and Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, and Uber as well as the economic zone co-founded by Allgood.

Shortly after leaving the military, Allgood also worked on the early development of digital transformation of governments, digital identities, people and property registries and the tokenization of carbon credits and commodities. Later motivated by “the sheer number of unbanked and underbanked in the world”, Allgood hosted roundtables around the world with central bank “regulators, tier one institutions, innovators, [and] technology providers” and decided he could act as “a good connector” for the different actors in his growing network.

Allgood claims to have spoken to a few “really senior” banking executives at HSBC, Citi and Barclays and to have educated “them on new innovative technologies for custody [and] better digital identity.” After “building a team” of these “senior bankers from tier one financial institutions,” Allgood and his team “went out into the market and started servicing the [cryptocurrency] space and helping innovative companies find homes and large core banking systems and tier one financial institutions.” While working with these various titans of finance and guiding their views on the future of banking, Allgood met his co-founders of Fluent Finance: Oliver Gale and Jaime Plata.

The founders of Fluent Finance, Source: Fluent Finance

Oliver Gale is one of the co-founders of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), having pioneered the first CBDC project in the Eastern Caribbean and, per Allgood, Gale “went on to do them in Nigeria” and helped create the highly controversial e-Naira. Gale notably describes himself as the inventor of CBDCs and has previously collaborated with the UN, MIT and the IMF. Jaime Plata, Fluent’s other co-founder, “did the core banking systems of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank during the first CBDC [launch].” Aside from Gale and Plata, Allgood has revealed that other top Fluent Finance executives, who are not listed on the company’s website, hail from the Wall Street titan Citi – with the company’s CFO being “the CFO of Citi of all of Latin America” and its COO being “one of the senior, most senior, managing directors from Citi.” He has also stated that other important employees of Fluent include the former chief innovation officer of General Electric as well as “an early board member at [the now collapsed crypto exchange] Celsius [that] helped them get to market.”

Fluent Finance was initially founded with two main and interrelated products: the Fluent Protocol and the US+ stablecoin. Fluent has described the Fluent Protocol as “a financial network that seamlessly bridges traditional finance and digital assets,” while US+ is a “bank-led”, US dollar-pegged stablecoin “built on principles” and designed to be “forward-compatible with CBDC initiatives.” Fluent asserts that US+ resolves “the inherent flaws of web3-native stablecoins” by having US+ be operated by a network of banks partnered with Fluent Finance. Fluent has not made the identities of these banks available to the public.

“When we examined stablecoins, we knew that the lack of institutional uptake of the technology was due to risk,” explained Allgood. “With that in mind, when we approached the design of US+, we did so in terms of de-risking. We knew we needed to provide real-time and transparent reserves monitoring.” Fluent’s answer to providing the reserve metrics needed to tap into the heavily regulated traditional finance market emerged through its partnership with Chainlink, first announced in September 2022.

Chainlink is a blockchain oracle network, meaning it connects blockchains to external systems. It was launched in 2017 on the Ethereum blockchain and later registered in the Cayman Islands as SmartContract Chainlink Limited SEZC in March 2019. In December 2021, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has unprecedented control over the Biden administration’s technology policies, joined Chainlink Labs as a strategic advisor. At the time, Schmidt commented that “it has become clear that one of blockchain’s greatest advantages — a lack of connection to the world outside itself — is also its biggest challenge.”

Fluent’s partnership with Chainlink dealt with regulatory necessities by providing a reliable way for the Fluent Protocol to access real-time, off-chain data from external sources. Fluent’s goal was/is to provide proof of the size, performance, and risk of its asset reserves in order to meet its stablecoin protocol liquidity requirements. Reliable confirmation and publishing of the state of these reserves was seen as crucial by Allgood and others at Fluent in order to manufacture trust from both retail users and membership banks.

Fluent is far from the only partner of Chainlink working on providing trusted stablecoin reserve architecture. Among them is Paxos, the former issuer of Binance’s BUSD and their own PAX, and who recently began providing infrastructure for PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin. Paxos relied on Chainlink to provide on-chain Proof of Reserve Data Feeds for Paxos’ assets, ensuring verification that PAX tokens are 1:1 backed by US Dollars. This was taken a step further with their gold-backed PAXG tokens, in which Chainlink claimed to be able to provide verification of off-chain, physical gold bars held in Paxos’ custody.

Another Chainlink partner is the XinFin Network, also known as the XDC network, which uses Chainlink’s Price Reference Data framework to introduce price feeds for major national currencies such as the Hong Kong Dollar, the Singaporean Dollar, and the United Arab Emirates Dirham. In October 2022, Fluent Finance announced a partnership with Impel to bring its US+ stablecoin to the XDC network. Impel itself is a startup birthed out of XinFin Fintech led by CEO and founder Troy S. Wood. The company boasts a team of advisors including XDC Network co-founders Ritesh Kakkad and Atul Khekade, in addition to long time SWIFT employee André Casterman.

Source: Fluent Finance

In March 2021, XinFin leveraged the DASL Crypto Bridge designed by LAB577 to bring their XDC token to R3’s Corda blockchain. R3 began as a consortium of banks and is not only closely connected to Fluent Finance, but, as will be discussed shortly, is also a major driver of CBDC and stablecoin development globally. Before this XDC-Corda bridge was created, there was no liquidity or token of value on the R3 Corda Network. This bridge opened up the opportunity for traditional financial institutions, such as those that fund R3, to interact with cryptocurrency indirectly without having to operate on under-regulated public networks that could land them in hot water with regulators. It also gives access to those already utilizing Ethereum-based tokens (i.e. ERC20 or ERC721) to the business networks and financial institutions on the Corda network.

XDC co-founder and Impel advisor Atul Khekade remarked that the both government regulators and commercial banks had settled on XDC and Corda as the means through which many major banks would access blockchain technologies:

“Regulatory agencies and financial institutions have selected both Corda and the XDC Network as suitable platforms to engage with blockchain technology […] They did not just randomly throw a dart at a board.”

Fluent Meets Moonstone

In late October 2022, Fluent Finance, now deeply ensconced in the Web3 ambitions of major commercial banks, announced its partnership with Farmington/Moonstone. In a press release on the partnership, Fluent wrote that “Moonstone will be a custody partner in Fluent’s growing network of banks, with plans to expand into a full-node member soon,” which would “allow Fluent and Moonstone to connect the traditional financial system to the emerging Web3 economy.”

At the time the partnership was announced, Fluent’s CEO Bradley Allgood stated the following:

“Moonstone Bank is now a key player in Fluent’s financial ecosystem and will serve as an initial custodian partner. Fluent plans to eventually bring Moonstone Bank on as a full-node partner, which will allow the bank to mint and burn US+. Collaborating with Moonstone is incredibly exciting and will help Fluent bring a safe and secure stablecoin to market while allowing for instant payments along with lower fees. It will also clearly demonstrate the benefits that stablecoins can bring to the banking sector, businesses, and everyday end users alike.”

Notably, this was – and remains – the only Fluent Finance press release to name a member of Fluent’s consortium that supports its “bank-led” stablecoin, US+. In addition, given Allgood’s statements on the partnership, he clearly felt that partnering with Moonstone was a critical part of bringing US+ to market.

However, with the collapse of FTX that November, Farmington/Moonstone came under heavy scrutiny, even attracting the attention of U.S. Senators who cited Farmington/Moonstone’s relationship with FTX as reason to launch federal investigations into the relationships between banks and cryptocurrency firms. The many unanswered questions about Alameda’s relationship with Farmington/Moonstone, Chalopin’s involvement and potential connections to Deltec and Tether as well as the apparent negligence of regulators caused major reputational and trust issues for Farmington/Moonstone.

Promotional image for the partnership between Fluent Finance and Moonstone Bank, Source: Yahoo Finance

A few months after the FTX collapse, in January 2023, Farmington announced it would drop the Moonstone name and return to its “original mission as a community bank” and would discontinue “its pursuit of an innovation-driven business model to develop banking services for industries such as crypto assets or hemp/cannabis.” Just a few days after that announcement, federal prosecutors seized $50 million from Farmington/Moonstone, which they alleged had been deposited as “part of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s wide-ranging scheme to defraud investors through his massive cryptocurrency exchange business.” That sum, significantly more than what Alameda Research had initially invested, was more than half of the bank’s total assets based on the most recent FDIC filings at the time of the seizure. The $50 million seized was all under one account under the name of “FTX Digital Markets,” per court records cited by local Washington newspapers.

Then, in May, the bank announced it would be selling its deposits and assets to the Bank of Eastern Oregon. The Federal Reserve subsequently took enforcement action against Farmington as well as its parent FBH Corp. a few months later in August. According to local newspapers, the Fed “issued a cease-and-desist order against the firms and directed them to take a number of actions as Farmington closes its business – including preserving records and not acquiring any additional brokered deposits.” The Fed asserted that Farmington had violated commitments it had made as part of the approval process which granted it access to the Federal Reserve system. However, it is unknown which commitments were allegedly violated, as the Fed has refused to come clean about its highly unusual and irregular approval of Farmington/Moonstone, even after its enforcement actions against the bank. Fluent Finance issued a statement after the Fed’s announcement and referred to Farmington for the first time as a “prior tentative” collaborator and sought to distance itself from the bank. Most recently, in November, FBH Corp., Jean Chalopin’s vehicle for acquiring and then controlling Farmington, failed to file an annual report in Washington State for 2023, meaning that it will be terminated sometime within December.

While 2023 could not have been worse for Moonstone/Farmington, Fluent Finance managed to successfully reinvent itself by partnering with the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and R3, a blockchain company that focuses on accelerating digital currencies (particularly CBDCs) and is backed by some of the biggest banks in the world.

Building the Rails for CBDC settlement in the UAE

In late July, a few weeks before the Fed announced its enforcement action against Farmington/Moonstone, Fluent Finance announced that they would be opening an office in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, an expansion explicitly backed by the UAE Ministry of Economy. According to a press release, “As part of their move into the region, Fluent Finance is getting support from the office of the Ministry of Economy, further cementing their relationship with regulators and leaders in the region to unveil innovative solutions for cross-border payments.” The UAE government was explicitly backing Fluent Finance so that the company could “advance the UAE’s trade finance and cross-border payments landscape.”

Fluent’s new UAE entity, called Fluent Economic Bridge, focuses on deposit tokens, i.e. commercial bank-issued tokens backed by deposits, with the explicit intention of connecting deposit token and CBDC systems within the UAE and, eventually, beyond. As previously mentioned, Fluent is partnered with the company R3, which is currently under contract with the UAE’s Central Bank to build out the nation’s CBDC system. Fluent Economic Bridge uses R3’s Corda DLT (distributed ledger technology) in order to “bring CBDC-compatible deposit token infrastructure for borderless payments.”

A few months later, in October, Fluent Finance – described in reports from this period as a “US-based developer of a cryptocurrency-based payment platform” – joined an UAE government program called NextGenFDI, which aims to offer a litany of incentives to foreign web3-focused companies to relocate to the country. Reports praising Fluent’s participation in the program noted that Fluent’s focus had moved to “mak[ing] cross-border trade easier” and that the company’s UAE-based Fluent Economic Bridge would be “used by importers and exporters to settle transactions through bank-issued cryptocurrencies, known as stablecoins or deposit tokens.” “I am optimistic about the possibilities of the Fluent Economic Bridge, and the potential for digital currencies to improve the efficiency and accessibility of global supply chains,” UAE Minister of State for Foreign Trade Dr. Thani Al Zeyoudi was quoted as saying.

Thani Al Zeyoudi, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Trade, poses with Bradley Allgood and other Fluent Finance executives, Source: UAE Ministry of Economy

Fluent’s collaboration with the UAE government was notably designed to align “with the [UAE’s] Ministry of Economy’s TradeTech initiative, which, with the participation of the World Economic Forum, aims to promote the use of advanced technology tools in global supply chains, as well as the country’s comprehensive economic partnership agreement programme, which aims to achieve frictionless trade between the UAE and other economies.”

Articles on the development also stated that “by working with banks and regulators in Abu Dhabi, Fluent aims to boost the transparency of cryptocurrency with the security and regulatory structure of the traditional banking system.” Claims were made that Fluent has been piloting this program in Kenya, but Fluent’s website makes no mention of any such program and no information about any such pilot is available online at the time this article was published. This suggests that Fluent’s pilot in Kenya is operating under a different name with no overt ties to the company being publicized.

A few days later, Emirati news reported that Fluent Finance would be partnering with the UAE’s Ministry of Economy to develop “deposit token-based tech” and “stablecoin technologies.” The company stated that by “collaborating with banks and regulators[,] its platform provides the immediacy and transparency of cryptocurrency with the security and regulatory structure of the traditional banking system.” Allgood framed much of the collaboration as a key part of the UAE’s effort to “modernize” multilateral trade. He stated that “The UAE has positioned itself as a global leader for digital assets through their special economic zone initiatives, regulation foresight, and global trade expansion with strategic MoUs [memorandums of understanding],” specifically MoUs with India and China, key members of the BRICS bloc. Since these reports, even more MoUs have been signed between the UAE and BRICS countries. For instance, earlier this month, China’s central bank signed a $400 million “cooperation memorandum” with the UAE’s central bank that is specifically focused on the interchange of the countries’ respective CBDCs. As previously noted, the UAE’s coming CBDC, the digital dirham, is being developed by R3, which is closely tied to Fluent Finance.

A report in Gulf Business on Fluent’s collaborations with the UAE noted that, with respect to the MoUS, “the agreements account for more than $100bn in bilateral trade, with a focus on strengthening the use of new technologies and settlement with digital currency. Deposit tokens issued by commercial banks are poised to offer a borderless missing link to accelerate trade settlement to central bank digital currency.” In other words, it seems that Fluent is positioning itself as an accelerator for CBDCs via deposit tokens, related infrastructure and its “low counterparty risk stablecoin” US+.

R3 – Accelerating Financial Surveillance

Further evidence of Fluent’s intentions to accelerate a CBDC-deposit token paradigm can be found in Fluent Finance’s cozy relationship with R3, a self-described “leader in the digitization of financial services” that is responsible for the Corda DLT platform. As previously mentioned, R3’s backers include some of the biggest names in finance, among them several of the massive commercial banks who had an early role in the creation of Fluent Finance.

Fluent’s connection with R3 was present early on, including before its ill-fated attempt to partner with Farmington/Moonstone. For instance, Fluent’s early partnership with XDC in October 2022 was influenced by the fact that XDC was also “heavily related to R3” as well as XDC’s focus on “trade finance” according to Allgood. Notably, XDC is also very active in the UAE and was described by Emirati media as a “driving force” behind the country’s ambition to become “the successor to Silicon Valley” in articles published roughly a month before Fluent announced its partnership with the UAE’s Ministry of Economy.

In addition, Fluent’s head of engineering Will Hester, who joined the company in April 2022, previously worked as R3’s tech lead and previously as a R3 software engineer. Other Fluent employees, such as software engineer John Buckle, had also previously worked for R3. In addition, Fluent Finance’s US+ utilizes a private Corda network (Corda being a R3 product) to tokenize US+’s fiat currency (i.e. US $) reserves. Reports on Fluent’s expansion into the UAE note that the company chose to use Corda in order to “introduce CBDC-compatible deposit token infrastructure for borderless payments.”

While Fluent has been relatively quiet about its commercial banking partners, what Allgood has revealed is an apparent association between the early days of the company with HSBC, Citi and Barclays, suggesting that these banks could be among the members of its banking consortium backing its US+ stablecoin. R3, which notably began as a consortium of commercial banks, is backed by major banks including HSBC, Citi and Barclays as well as other top names in finance including BNY Mellon (which now holds the bulk of the reserves for the USDC dollar-pegged stablecoin after the banking crisis earlier this year), Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo. R3’s relationship with Wells Fargo is particularly notable as the company’s Corda platform is playing a critical role in Wells Fargo’s pilot of a dollar-pegged stablecoin that will be used “initially for internal settlement across the company’s business.” The Wells Fargo dollar-pegged stablecoin on Corda is being pitched for essentially the same use cases as Fluent’s US+.

Though R3 has considerable ties to a coming digital dollar, through Wells Fargo, Fluent Finance and others, they are also a key player in a number of CBDC projects globally. As previously mentioned, in April of this year, the UAE announced that it had selected R3 to begin implementing its CBDC strategy. The company, which describes itself as having been “at the forefront of CBDC innovation since 2016,” is also involved with CBDC development in France, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Malaysia, Switzerland, Singapore, and Sweden and is partnered directly with the central banks of those countries. R3 was also involved in Italy’s Project Leonidas, a wholesale CBDC trial between Italy’s central bank and the Italian Banking Association. R3 was even named 2023’s CBDC partner of the year by the publication Central Banking.

R3 promotes being awarded “CBDC Partner of the Year” by Central Banking, Source: R3 on Twitter

However, R3 is focused on much more than CBDCs, as evidenced by their Digital Currency Accelerator (DCA), which offers “an end-to-end solution that enables central banks, commercial banks, and monetary authorities to issues, manage, transact, and redeem CBDCs and privately-issued digital currencies.” In other words, R3’s DCA facilitates the creation of CBDCs for central banks and deposit tokens and stablecoins for commercial banks, all of which would likely be inter-operable with other currencies on R3’s Corda network. The central bank component of the DCA, the CBDC accelerator, was designed specifically to meet CBDC specifications laid out by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). R3’s CBDC accelerator, as well as what it offers for deposit tokens, allows the issuer to “define and configure a delegated programmability framework,” which is important given that programmability is one of the most controversial components of CBDCs.

One key partnership highlighting R3’s role in accelerating commercial banks’ forays into the digital currency era was forged in August 2022, when R3, along with The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) –– a prominent post-trade market service provider in the global financial services industry — announced the successful launch of its Project Ion platform. This private and permissioned Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform was developed in collaboration with key industry players (most of whom directly back R3) and technology providers such as BNY Mellon, Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, Citi, Credit Suisse, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Robinhood Securities, and the State Street Corporation, among others. In 2011 alone, DTCC facilitated the settlement of the majority of securities transactions within the United States and processed nearly $1.7 quadrillion in transactions, solidifying its position as the world’s foremost financial value processor.

In order to best take advantage of the coming issuance of trillions of dollars in highly regulated stablecoins, R3 purchased stablecoin issuer Ivno in October 2021. This acquisition came only 6 months after the completion of a collateral tokenization trial Ivno had held with 18 partnered banks including Egypt’s CIB, Singapore’s DBS, Brazil’s Itaú Unibanco, National Bank of Canada, Natixis, Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International and US Bank as well as three unnamed securities exchanges.

Invo was far from the only prospective stablecoin issuer that have partnered with R3. For instance, in September 2019, Fnality and Finteum both joined forces to leverage their Utility Settlement Coin (USC) on the Corda blockchain. Fnality, headed by CEO Rhomaios Ram, the former Global Head of Product Management for Transaction Banking at Deutsche Bank, identifies as a wholesale payments firm, and boasts institutional shareholders such as Goldman Sachs, Barclays, BNY Mellon, CIBC, Commerzbank, DTCC, Euroclear, and ING, among others. In December 2023, Fnality, along with Lloyds Banking Group, Santander and UBS, executed the first ever transaction settlement of digital central bank funds with balances of sterling using an “omnibus account” at the Bank of England. The weight of the moment was not lost on Hyder Jaffrey, Managing Director at UBS: “The creation of a new systemically important global payment system is a once in a generation event.”

With the DTCC’s experience in settling the lion’s share of dollar-denominated securities, and with Fnality and Ivno’s collaborations with some of the largest players in the international banking system, R3 have quietly positioned themselves as suppliers of potentially essential infrastructure within the imminent global system of interoperable CBDCs and their commercial bank equivalents.

R3 partner Fluent Finance, and more specifically its UAE-based Fluent Economic Bridge, is seeking to serve as the connective tissue between the deposit tokens and stablecoins to be issued by commercial banks both in the UAE, as well as abroad, and CBDCs by ensuring their compatibility. Indeed, Fluent’s website – in both the past and present – has promoted its products’ “CBDC bank compatibility.” Given Fluent’s long-standing collaboration and affiliation with R3 and the banks behind it, Fluent Economic Bridge and its stablecoin protocol have likely been built with CBDCs running on R3’s Corda in mind.

In addition, just as R3 is developing CBDCs and other digital currencies far beyond the UAE, Fluent is also looking to expand its “economic bridge” and US+ far beyond the Emirates. In an interview Allgood gave to R3 on January 2023, he stated that Fluent has been in talks with the UAE government to issue a US+ equivalent but for their local currency, the dirham (i.e. a bank-issued dirham stablecoin that would be interoperable with its R3-developed CBDC). He also claimed to be far along in developing a US+ equivalent for the Mexican peso.

In addition, in the same interview, Allgood revealed that Fluent is “looking to do a US dollar stablecoin but with local banking in Africa” and is in talks with multiple banks across 36 different African countries in pursuit of that particular project. Allgood, while busy championing and building an interoperable network of CBDCs across the globe, has begun to turn Fluent’s attention beyond just US+ and towards the dollar system itself.

Building the Digital Dollar: The Synthetic Deposit Token

The US, despite the launch of CBDC pilots in China, Japan, Russia, India, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and elsewhere, has yet to formally launch any sort of government-issued digital dollar. In a June 2023 white paper titled “Central Bank Digital Currency Global Interoperability Principles”, the World Economic Forum reflected on the serious push by governments around the world to explore CBDC issuance. The paper makes mention of “over 100 countries actively engaged in CBDC research and development”, while quoting the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, making the distinction that “there is no universal case for CBDCs because each economy is different”. It seems that the US has plans to be “different” from most countries. For instance, in November 2022, two days before FTX filed for bankruptcy, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was a guest on the Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire’s podcast, and stated that “every major government pretty much is going to want to have a CBDC”, while delineating the path for the US would likely be different from the rest of the world. “I think in the US’s case, it is going to end up using USDC [the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Circle] as sort of like a de facto CBDC.”

In the WEF’s white paper, two US efforts related to CBDCs are mentioned: Project Hamilton, the Boston Fed’s 2020 collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Digital Currency Initiative; and the 2022 report by The New York Fed titled Project Cedar. The former, Project Hamilton, focused mostly on payment throughput of a retail-facing digital currency, while the latter, Cedar, was an experiment on a deposit token to be exchanged by banks during wholesale settlement. The delineation between Project Hamilton and Project Cedar is nearly identical to the fork in the road currently facing the founding fathers of the coming digital Federal Reserve.

In a February 2022 analysis, Gerard DiPippo – an 11 year veteran of the US intelligence community (specifically the CIA) who has long been focused on economic issues in the Global South – stated that:

“Dollar stablecoins have at least one major advantage over a potential U.S. CBDC: they already exist. Even if Congress were to decide the Fed should create a CBDC, the process of development, experimentation, and deployment would probably take at least a few years.”

In that same analysis, published by the National Security State-adjacent Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), DiPippo added that: “The United States should not delay in establishing a regulatory framework to enable safe but speedy development of dollar stablecoins to gain a first-mover advantage in related payments and technologies.”

Indeed, just as DiPippo noted, the digital dollar is already here. In fact, it has been here for a long time. A Fall 2021 piece from Harvard Business Review made the claim that “over 97% of the money in circulation today is from checking deposits – dollars deposited online and converted into a string of digital code by a commercial bank.” But while the vast majority of dollar circulation may have been reduced to 1’s and 0’s on some private bank’s spreadsheet over the last few decades, the assets that actually uphold the US dollar system — US Treasuries — have evolved to the digital age a bit slower. While programs like TreasuryDirect do exist, in which users can set up an account online and purchase securities directly issued by the US Department of Treasury, the actual interbank securities clearing network had remained relatively antiquated until the launching of FedNow this past summer.

FedNow, on first glance, seems innocuous enough – a new communications tool for Federal Reserve-partnered banks to exchange securities. But, on second glance, its necessity in the 21st century implementation of dollar hegemony becomes clear. The settlement and exchange of Treasuries, the asset that actually backs the digital dollars created from checking deposits by private capital creators, has now become further regulated, centralized, and controlled.

Diagram of the FedNow Ecosystem, Source: The Federal Reserve

A reverse repo, or a reverse repurchase agreement, is the preferred method for banks to seek yield by temporarily loaning securities, specifically Treasuries, for cash due to the fact that each party physically exchanges the assets, with an agreement to repurchase the securities the next day with an added service fee. Banks much prefer to do this as opposed to a more traditional loan structure due to the mitigated liability risk that comes downstream of physically holding on to the collateral in the agreement. Say a cash-strapped bank has recently secured a loan to meet current liquidity needs, but before they can repay the loan, the culmination of financial woes causes the bank to declare bankruptcy and ultimately be seized by authorities. The lending bank now not only loses out on its service payments, but also the entire liability of the loan principal. If they had agreed to a reverse repo exchange, while the lender would still lose out on collecting their fees, they would at least retain the rights to the exchanged Treasuries currently within their custody.

The US banking system makes a lot of money by buying US Treasuries and using them to create dollars. The US Department of Treasury also benefits as it is able to service the budget of the US government by selling its debt to the US banking system. Neither of these entities want to muck up their racket: The US government doesn’t want to be directly responsible for managing retail account balances for citizens (as would be the case with a direct-issued dollar CBDC), and the biggest banks certainly don’t want to lose their effective monopoly of private capital creation by letting some outsider fintech company secure the contract for directly issuing digital dollars for the government. FedNow is strictly a wholesale product. In fact, it isn’t really a product at all ––there is no token and it only aims to allow regulators to more closely surveil the exchange of Treasuries.

The purchasing of Treasuries, however, is rapidly shifting towards an entirely new customer class: stablecoin issuers. Much like how a private-sector bank would purchase government-issued securities to back the issuance of dollars in a retail checking account, stablecoin issuers such as Tether (USDT) or Circle (USDC) have become net-buyers of short-term Treasuries referred to as T-bills. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino tweeted in September 2023 that “Tether reached $72.5 billion exposure in US T-bills, being [a] top 22 buyer globally, above the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Australia and Spain.” Just three months later, in December 2023, Tether’s Treasury holdings were over $90 billion. For reference, the largest single holder of US Treasuries is Japan with just over $1 trillion held –– Tether alone already commands nearly a tenth of their balance sheet. In our current high interest rate environment, the yield from these short duration securities can be substantial, leading to large revenue streams for not only these stablecoin issuers, but the companies and banks that custody their assets.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, Source: YouTube

Tether’s substantial Treasury holdings are distributed among three main custodians: Charles Schwab, Fidelity and Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor Fitzgerald is perhaps most famous for having its flagship office destroyed during the events of 9/11, but it continues today as one of the 24 primary dealers authorized to trade US government securities with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Earlier this month, Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, made an appearance on CNBC Money Movers Podcast in which he stated “I’m a big fan of this stablecoin called Tether…I hold their treasuries. So I keep their treasuries, and they have a lot of treasuries.” He further stated his affinity for the company by making reference to Tether’s recent trend of blacklisting of retail addresses flagged by the US Department of Justice. “With Tether, you can call Tether, and they’ll freeze it.”

Just this October, Tether froze 32 wallets for alleged links to terrorism in Ukraine and Israel. In November, $225 million was frozen after a DOJ investigation alleged that the wallets containing these funds were linked to a human trafficking syndicate. This month alone, over 40 wallets found on the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List have been frozen. Ardoino explained these actions by stating that “by executing voluntary wallet address freezing of new additions to the SDN List and freezing previously added addresses, we will be able to further strengthen the positive usage of stablecoin technology and promote a safer stablecoin ecosystem for all users.” Just a few days ago, Ardoino claimed that Tether has frozen around $435 million in USDT for the US DOJ, FBI and Secret Service. He also explained why Tether has been so eager to help the US authorities freeze funds – Tether is seeking to become a “world class partner” to the US to “expand dollar hegemony globally.”

The stablecoin ecosystem, where US dollar-pegged stablecoins dominate, has become increasingly intertwined with the greater US dollar system and – by extension – the US government. The DOJ has the retail-facing Tether on a leash after pursuing the companies behind it for years and now Tether blacklists accounts whenever US authorities demand. The Treasury benefits from the mass purchasing of Treasuries by stablecoin issuers, with each purchase further servicing the federal government’s debt. The private sector brokers and custodians that hold these Treasuries for the stablecoin issuers benefit from the essentially risk-free yield. And the dollar itself furthers its effort to globalize at high velocity in the form of USDT, helping to ensure it remains the global currency hegemon.

In effect, Treasuries are being bought hand over fist, and dollars are being spent en masse. Much like the discrepancy between Bitcoin’s UTXO or coins model and Ethereum’s account balance model, Treasuries and dollars behave exceptionally differently in economic terms. A government could never directly issue what is known as M0 –– base money –– to retail accounts, and thus a CBDC could never serve as anything but M1 — a programmable checking account that relies on trust in a financial service provider to be exchanged. Perhaps a directly-issued US dollar-denominated CBDC is a red-herring. Just ask the Fed.

For instance, Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr stated this past November that “There’s obviously a lot of innovation happening in the private sector,” while later implying that the Federal Reserve has a “very strong interest” in regulating, approving and supervising US dollar-pegged stablecoin issuers. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo recently lobbied Congress on behalf of the US Treasury to extend the regulatory powers over dollar-denominated stablecoins beyond US companies and even US citizens. “Legislation could explicitly authorize OFAC to exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction over transactions in stablecoins pegged to the USD (or other dollar-denominated transactions) as they generally would over USD transactions,” the proposal suggested, even for transactions that “involve no U.S. touchpoints.”

Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr, Source: AEI

Last month, the Atlantic Council also wrote of “the current [Federal Reserve] policy trajectory favoring private stablecoin issuance rather than official CBDC issuance,” making note of an August 8 regulation letter stating that “the Federal Reserve formally shifted its stance to promote stablecoin issuance by banks.”

Over a year before Barr’s statements or the Atlantic Council’s post, Bruno Sultanum, an economist in the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond wrote in a July 2022 brief that “privately issued stablecoins could be equivalent to CBDCs” and that “there may be a pathway to create an effective ‘synthetic’ CBDC in the form of stablecoins. More generally, the discussions around the introduction of CBDCs should always include an evaluation of the possibility of considering well-regulated stablecoins as a viable (and possibly preferable) alternative.”

In addition, the aforementioned CSIS brief authored by CIA veteran DiPippo mentions multiple architectures the US government could adopt for their digital dollar, while realizing the advantages of a bank-issued deposit token. “A synthetic CBDC, is not really a CBDC at all, because the central bank would not be issuing the digital currency. A synthetic CBDC is a stablecoin with a twist: the issuing financial institution would back its stablecoin with reserves at the Fed.” He then noted that “A synthetic CBDC, or a system permitting the issuance of multiple fully backed dollar stablecoins, would be as safe as a CBDC while offering more private-sector competition and innovation.” In November 2021, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released a joint report on stablecoins, which highlighted that stablecoins could improve the US payment system but could also create financial risks if left unregulated. In general, realizing any benefits from stablecoins would require government regulation.

In prepared remarks this October, Barr stated “research is currently focused on end-to-end system architecture, such as how ledgers that record ownership of and transactions in digital assets are maintained, secured, and verified, as well as tokenization and custody models.” Barr also made the claim that any USD-denominated token “borrows the trust of the central bank,” and thus “the Federal Reserve has a strong interest in ensuring that any stablecoin offerings operate within an appropriate federal prudential oversight framework, so they do not threaten financial stability or payments system integrity.” Due to the popularity of and volume present in both the Treasury and stablecoins markets, there are currently many private banks attempting to digitize the securities market by creating a synthetic deposit token that acts like Treasuries.

In addition, the recent push in the US toward regulated stablecoins/deposit tokens and away from a direct-issued CBDC has other motives. While this push is at least partially motivated by the “bad reputation” that the term stablecoin has developed in the aftermath of the TerraLuna fraud in early 2022 and subsequent scandals in the crypto industry, commercial banks – including those that back Fluent Finance, R3 and their equivalents – want to issue the stablecoins/deposit tokens themselves in order to continue fractional reserve banking.

Fractional reserve banking, long controversial due to its role in facilitating bank runs and bank insolvency and characterized as some as little more than embezzlement, has long been a cornerstone of the US banking system. However, the current stablecoin paradigm, including that formerly embraced by Fluent Finance, have fallen out of favor with commercial banks as the 1:1 peg means that banks would have to hold onto equivalent reserves for every coin/token issued. In fractional reserve banking, banks engage in “credit creation” by loaning out the bulk of the money deposited by its customers and are unable to immediately (or even quickly) redeem customers’ money upon request – the entire purpose of the 1:1 ratio that characterizes most of today’s stablecoins. For banks to continue “business as usual”, the issuance of stablecoins and deposit tokens must come under their purview, as opposed to existing stablecoin issuers or even the Fed. Fluent Finance, as a company heavily influenced and guided by powerful commercial banks, is clearly positioning itself to be a key part of this bank-led digital dollar system.

Fractional Reserve Banking, Source: Activist Post

In January 2023, Fluent’s Bradley Allgood told CoinDesk how the United States has been establishing its preference for a private-public model. He specifically pointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and highlighted its initiatives in testing deposit tokens backing digital dollars for wholesale transactions in collaboration with major banks:

“When you look at the Fed of New York and what they have been doing in their innovation offices, this has been setting the standard, with all of it leaning towards wholesale, tokenized deposits or tokenized liability network settlement between bank to bank.”

During much of 2022, and particularly the timeframe in which Fluent Finance was forging its early partnerships including with Farmington/Moonstone, the behind-the-scenes push to create a synthetic CBDC for the US dollar in the form of regulated dollar-pegged stablecoins and/or deposit tokens was well underway. Fluent, from its earliest days, has sought to develop this synthetic CBDC and make it interoperable with any future direct-issued CBDC from the Federal Reserve while also exporting this synthetic dollar CBDC to the Global South. In light of the company’s (and US+’s) trajectory, it now makes sense to revisit the most likely motivation behind Moonstone’s partnership with Fluent prior to FTX’s collapse as well as the likely real goal behind Farmington’s transition into Moonstone.

The Bankman-Fried Stablecoin That Almost Was

Prior to the collapse of the Sam Bankman-Fried-led exchange FTX, there was already considerable speculation about the unusual relationship between FTX and its subsidiaries, Deltec and the dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether (USDT). For instance, nearly a year before FTX went under, Protos reported that “over two-thirds of all Tether minted across multiple years went to just two crypto companies”, one of which was the FTX-linked Alameda Research, the same Alameda Research that would later pour millions into Farmington State Bank during its suspect transition into Moonstone. Earlier that year, Alameda executive Sam Trabucco essentially admitted on Twitter that Alameda would use its massive holdings of USDT to maintain USDT’s peg to the US dollar (something also admitted by former FTX executive Ryan Salame). By October of 2021, Alameda had been issued almost $37 billion worth of USDT and had immediately forwarded $30 billion of that to FTX. Around that same time, FTX issued a $50 million loan to Deltec, which was a key bank for FTX and still is for Tether and whose chairman, Jean Chalopin, had recently acquired Farmington State Bank.

Over the next several months, Alameda Research and Sam Bankman-Fried himself would pour many millions into the Chalopin-controlled entity, making Farmington/Moonstone the newest entity of the Deltec-FTX-Tether nexus. This brings us to the big question: If Deltec and FTX were so close to Tether, why was the bank they controlled – Farmington/Moonstone – seeking to partner so intimately with another US dollar-pegged stablecoin – Fluent Finance’s US+?

For several years, and now more than ever, Tether has been under heavy scrutiny from US authorities, particularly the DOJ, and – given the US government’s push for regulated stablecoins/deposit tokens in lieu of a direct issue CBDC – it’s possible that Tether may not make the cut once those regulations finally come into force (though Tether’s recent overtures to US authorities and Congress obviously seek to prevent that). Tether, along with Deltec and quite obviously FTX, have long been suspected of engaging (or in FTX’s case, proven to have engaged) in bank fraud and a series of illicit financial activities. It seems as though powerful forces deeply tied to Tether, namely Chalopin and Bankman-Fried, were seeking to use Moonstone and its partnership with Fluent’s US+ the way the FTX web of companies/banks had used Tether. This would have presumably allowed them to continue their same shady financial machinations under the coming regulatory paradigm.

Sam Bankman-Fried arrives at a court in New York in February 2023, Source: ArsTechnica

Notably, in late October 2022, three days after the Chalopin/Bankman-Fried-affiliated Moonstone partnered with Fluent Finance, Sam Bankman-Fried stated that FTX was due to announce the now bankrupt exchange’s collaboration with an unspecified stablecoin “in the not-too-distant future.” One wonders if the millions in political donations made by Bankman-Fried (and potentially those made by FTX executive Ryan Salame) in 2022 were aimed at wooing politicians to favor the planned FTX-affiliated stablecoin as a frontrunner for the coming “digital dollar” paradigm.

In other words, the goal was apparently to have the same group of actors transition from the “untrusted” Tether stablecoin to the “trusted” US+ stablecoin. The fact that Fluent Finance, whose co-founders include the alleged inventor of CBDCs and which was heavily influenced from the start by powerful commercial banks, claims to be a “trustworthy” alternative to Tether is deeply undermined and frankly unbelievable given that they would agree to allow the same untrustworthy actors deeply involved in Tether’s questionable minting activities (and FTX’s brazen fraud) to mint their “regulatory compliant” and “trusted” US+ stablecoin.

The Public-Private Digital Dollar

Following the collapse of FTX, and later Moonstone, Fluent Finance has continued in pursuit of its ultimate goal – to create a “trusted” stablecoin and stablecoin protocol on behalf of the commercial banking giants it was always intended to serve. In a September 2023 op-ed for Cointelegraph tellingly entitled “CBDCs could support a more stable economy – if banks run the show,” Allgood made his allegiances clear. In that article, Allgood writes that “employing CBDCs in an attempt to undercut, circumvent or cannibalize the entire commercial banking sector is as much a pipe dream for efficiency maximalists as it is a recipe for failure.” “Commercial banking will not be left in the dark ages,” he also claims.

In his defense of the commercial bank status quo, Allgood came out against the existing stablecoin paradigm in a recent interview with the IB Times, speaking in favor of bank-issued and regulated stablecoins backed by deposit tokens. “Stablecoins have not panned out the way most expected three years ago.” According to Allgood, deposit token models are now “emerging from the pack” of existing stablecoin issuance as the “most promising stable-valued digital assets.” He goes on to politically clarify that “stablecoins are not the bad guys…just the best effort from a previous era.” In this interview and also the Cointelegraph article, Allgood makes it clear that Fluent Finance not only possesses the necessary digital infrastructure, but also the institutional connections to keep private capital creation in the hands of commercial banks via deposit token architecture.

Source: Cointelegraph

Allgood also told the IB Times that “the sticking point with stablecoins is that their issuers are essentially lean startups…When you consider the inherent security risks, frequent depeggings and compliance issues, it’s not difficult to understand why stablecoins have had no success whatsoever picking up traction in traditional use case scenarios.” The argument for moving the reserves of stablecoins back into the hands of the US banking system under the guise of further stability seems logical only until one remembers that Allgood’s favored custodians are the fractional reserve banking industry –– who would be able to engage in this controversial practice at a much larger scale under this new paradigm. Banking the unbanked –– a common trope from the stablecoin industry –– also sounds good in theory, as long as you ignore who gets to actually do the banking.

“If all goes well,” claims Allgood, “the global adoption of CBDCs will marshal a new financial paradigm where central banks implement superior monetary policy at the wholesale level while allowing commercial banks to do what they do best at the retail level with stablecoins and deposit tokens.”

While many rightly fear the danger to individual freedoms presented by government-issued CBDCs, this is not the paradigm being brought into focus by former Moonstone partner Fluent Finance or other key actors in building out the future of government-approved digital currencies. Instead of giving central bankers complete control over your finances in terms of surveillance and programmability, it will be the big Wall Street banks –– who in the US, own the Fed anyway – that will do the programming and surveilling. The further blurring of the public and private banking sector remains a powerful tool of obfuscation for the digital dollar system to skirt constitutional violations of customer rights in the form of warrantless asset seizure and data harvesting by a private sector that fully collaborates with the public sector. The digitization of the dollar, and the Treasuries that back them, leverage the databases of blockchains to not only demonstrate reserves of deposits, but also to track the users of the system. “The FX settlement process needs increased transparency and traceability”, R3 CEO David Rutter once explained. Rutter then boasted that his company “is fit to deliver on both counts.”

The simulated fear of governments and central banks programming your currency to expire will be conveniently eased by a public rejection of a directly-issued CBDC in the US by the Fed. The upholders of the status quo hope that the realities of this false victory, and the stablecoin/deposit token system to be implemented in lieu of a direct-issue digital dollar, will go unnoticed by the American public, particularly those segments of the population already wary of CBDCs. Whatever excuse or justification is given to move the US – and much of the world – into this new financial paradigm, rest assured that the same old bankers and companies – including those who came under scrutiny as part of the FTX scandal – will not only maintain, but gain, unprecedented control over the financial activity and behavior of every American and whoever else they decide to dollarize.

Unmasking Farmington: FTX, Fluent Finance and the Coming Digital Dollar.

Whitney joined Redacted to discuss the recent news relating to cyberattacks.
Whitney’s interview only here. Full show available on YouTube and Rumble. Whitney’s segment starts at 36:40.

Redacted.

The Palestinian population is intimately familiar with how new technological innovations are first weaponized against them–ranging from electric fences and unmanned drones to trap people in Gaza—to the facial recognition software monitoring Palestinians in the West Bank. Groups like Amnesty International have called Israel an Automated Apartheid and repeatedly highlight stories, testimonies, and reports about cyber-intelligence firms, including the infamous NSO Group (the Israeli surveillance company behind the Pegasus software) conducting field tests and experiments on Palestinians.

When discussing Gaza or the West Bank, it’s critical to understand that Israel’s achievements in AI and overall technological edge is perpetuated by the use of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other warfare technologies that are first tested in Palestine and the occupied territories before being exported abroad. Reports have highlighted:

“testing and deployment of AI surveillance and predictive policing systems in Palestinian territories. In the occupied West Bank, Israel increasingly utilizes facial recognition technology to monitor and regulate the movement of Palestinians…Israeli military leaders described AI as a significant force multiplier, allowing the IDF to use autonomous robotic drone swarms to gather surveillance data, identify targets, and streamline wartime logistics.”

The Palestinian towns and villages near Israeli settlements have been described as laboratories for security solutions companies to experiment their technologies on Palestinians before marketing them to places like Colombia, India, and Mexico. Since at least 2012, NSO Group’s controversial surveillance products–which allow users to penetrate any cell phone without the target’s awareness–have been public knowledge. The debates around “privacy” and “owning your data” seem rather asinine considering all of the open-source information pertaining to the Intel Management Engine’s backdoor capabilities or its Memory Sinkhole vulnerabilities. It’s also worth noting that Intel, a California-based tech juggernaut, considers itself “an Israeli company as much as a US company.”

A recent article in The Intercept asserts that since NSO Group was blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2021, their recent effort to aid the Israeli government in finding Israeli citizens in Gaza, seems like an attempt “to rehabilitate its image in this crisis.” While it’s positive that The Intercept is highlighting NSO Group’s attempt to rebuild its public image, the nature of the alleged “blunder” itself is worth questioning considering Hamas was able to charge into Tel Aviv by slashing through the barricades at a border that’s, supposedly, embedded with a myriad of sophisticated surveillance software and devices (including NSO’s Pegasus spyware). Israel is assumed to have one of, if not the most, advanced border surveillance system with cameras and ground motion sensors. Additionally, Pegasus is presumed to be one of the Israeli tech sector’s most highly sought-after products that’s been sold to intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world.

According to a Washington Post article:

“Hamas fighters neutralized long-range cameras, sophisticated sensors and remote-control weapons — a tactic known inside the group as the ‘blinding plan’ — to breach the high-tech fence…the Post reconstructed the attack by analyzing hundreds of videos and photos posted online, including visuals filmed on Oct. 7 and during preparations by Hamas fighters.”

It’s not clear exactly how the Post “reconstructed” the attack; perhaps they were given access to footage and geolocation data and were able to create a computer model of what could have taken place at the border. The Post also reported on the New York Times story that the Israeli government had information (for over a year) about a planned Hamas attack on Israeli territory. They appear to have ignored warnings from their own and neighboring intelligence services about Hamas’ “blinding plan” which has now led to the Israeli military and tech companies racing to “innovate” and develop new hi-tech weapons, advanced surveillance systems, and AI that will utterly destroy the Gaza strip so that these same forces may then rebuild (or “Build Back Better”) a demilitarized and “deradicalized” Gaza.

Just as the Israeli military and its contractors attempt to perfect their surveillance and AI systems, it seems like the Israeli government hopes to crystalize its “automated apartheid” through the tokenization and privatization of various industries and establishing a technocratic government in Gaza. Much of the groundwork for this was developed and planned out by the Trump Administration. Recently, crypto companies with close ties to Netanyahu and the digital currency advocates selling pipe dreams of “decentralization” to people in Palestine (and also the Global South) are picking up where the Trump administration left off.

Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” Woes & Jared Kushner’s Bahrain Blowout

The Trump administration’s Israel-Palestine “solution,” known formally as the Peace to Prosperity plan, was engineered by Israeli government insiders and needed to be implemented by Likud Party affiliates in Israel. As a result, it was dead on arrival given its one-sided nature. As part of the plan, Donald Trump tapped an Israeli crypto start-up, Orbs, to help his administration leverage smart contracts and blockchain technology for social impact projects in order to bring “verifiable trust, transparency, and external auditability.” In 2018, Orbs raised over $133 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) and, in 2021, partnered with Binance to launch a “DeFi accelerator” (to promote innovation in decentralized finance). Orbs was built as a public blockchain designed to help governments iron out any bureaucratic challenges from migrant identification to tracking aid funds.

https://www.orbs.com/

Netta Korin, a partner at Orbs and founder of its associated Hexa Foundation, was one of the Israeli business executives who attended the Bahrain Conference hosted by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (more on that shortly). Hexa Foundation works on projects involving “identification for refugees, credentials wallets, using blockchain to track aid funds and fund traceability for employment in politically unstable areas of the world.” She was previously an advisor to General Yoav Mordechai, from the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and her husband was an aide to Moshe Kahlon, from the Israeli Ministry of Finance. Korin got her start on Wall Street as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers where she worked under Ron Lubash, founder of Markstone Capital Group. Lubash’s co-founder, Elliott Broidy pled guilty in a pension scandal involving the New York Retirement Fund that Broidy arranged to invest $250 million in Markstone Capital Partners. In 2020, Broidy was convicted for failing to register as a foreign agent on behalf of China and Malaysia. He was later pardoned by Donald Trump.

Haaretz (Source)

Shortly after the Israel-Hamas war broke out, Jared Kushner, went on the All-In Podcast to discuss Trump, Israel, Hamas, and a gathering he organized in Bahrain back in 2019 (where he presented the so-called “Peace to Prosperity” plan). The event was the perfect pretext for Kushner to promote and sell the Abraham Accords to Arab leaders and it was praised by publications like Fortune magazine. The Abraham Accords were a series of cooperation and normalization agreements between Israel and leaders from, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan spearheaded by Kushner and other members of the Trump administration.

During the interview, Kushner talked about how Stephen Schwarzman (from Blackstone Group) and Randall Stephenson (CEO of AT&T) attended the gathering in Bahrain and implied that they seemed eager to invest in the Palestinian economy because of its proximity to Israel, robust population, and cheaper labor–“the prospects for prosperity spillover are massive!” (Kushner exclaimed). Fortunately for Kushner, he wasn’t being interviewed by people who would challenge his ill-considered, accelerationist ideas. He was, instead, surrounded by figures like David Sacks, of the PayPal Mafia, who hosts the All-In Podcast (along with three others). In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Sacks shared that, although he’s against “revolutionary politics” he’s in favor of revolutionary change in the narrow category of technology because it’s the basis of “American prosperity” and, like Peter Thiel, he doesn’t want innovators to be stifled by leftists who want to slow down technological innovation with regulations.

Ultimately, Kushner smugly attempted to argue that practically everyone loves doing business with Israel’s robust economy and that the business tycoons and transnational executives simply wanted to create wealth in the West Bank and Gaza. Create wealth for whom, exactly? It seems like the abundance of cheap labor, unregulated markets, and a population of economically poor and psychologically traumatized people (to steer and mold as one sees fit) were the real incentives, but I digress.

Other Trump officials, like former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, gleefully claimed that venture capitalists were excited to invest money in projects in the West Bank and Gaza like they were “hot new IPOs” (an investment in Palestine’s future). Likewise, Netta Korin (of Orbs) noted that there was a paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy toward Palestine because it was transitioning from a “donations-based” relationship to an “investments-centered” partnership. And in order to get the most “value” from the investments, the solutions would have to be more innovative and game-changing (disruptive).

Mnuchin’s circle also expanded to the crypto sphere because in 2019, one of his top aides, Craig Phillips, stepped down from his position at the White House and joined Ripple’s board of directors to advise the company on strategic regulatory opportunities–as Ripple was in the midst of opening its DC office. This is similar to, in 2015, when Gene Sperling (from the Obama administration) joined Ripple’s board of directors (the DC “revolving door” at work). Ripple is a currency exchange founded by the creator of Mt. Gox, Jed McCaleb, with early funding from big-name investors like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. That being said, Mnuchin referring to Palestine as an IPO and Korin’s remarks about donations vs. investments actually make perfect sense when understood within the context of the 2018 BUILD Act that established the U.S. Development Finance Corporation (or DFC).

Trump’s BUILD Act & Biden’s “Build Back Better” with Impact Finance

Created following the passage of the 2018 BUILD Act, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is a prototypical “public-private partnership”–a government institution that collaborates with private sector entities foaming at the mouth to invest in “commercially sustainable” projects. Furthermore, the DFC plays a central role in advancing the global impact investing market. As noted earlier, Netta Korin’s Hexa Foundation is specifically focused on using blockchain to create social impact through investments (impact investing). I previously wrote about how the BUILD Act and the DFC bolster impact investing projects here and more details about social impact finance here.

For a long time, the prevailing narrative has been “Gaza wants to rebuild, but ensuring funds don’t go to Hamas is slowing the process.” Enter Korin’s Hexa Foundation: they can use blockchain to track aid funds in politically unstable areas (like Gaza). Problem, reaction, (prepackaged) solution–Gaza can rebuild or “Build Back Better” with blockchain. Aly Alexandra’s analysis of “Build Back Better” as a marketing slogan for Agenda 2030–“a fully-globalized economy and society built on predetermined metrics of success” is worth reading.

Another character from the Trump syndicate—also linked to Israel, UAE, and Abraham Accords—is Erik Prince, who, in 2017, spoke at the Oxford Union and argued that Trump needed to create an institution like the UK’s Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) to help bring private capital to the developing world. A year after Prince’s Oxford Union address–the DFC was created to replace the OPIC (Overseas Private Investment Corporation), which was created in the early 1970’s. The current U.S. DFC is a merger of OPIC and USAID. As I’ve noted a while back, by their own declaration:

“USAID coordinates with U.S. Special Operations to address complex challenges in fragile states, particularly in conflict situations, to ensure that diplomatic, development and defense efforts are mutually reinforcing.”

The DFC was modeled after the UK’s CDC because OPIC needed to be reformed in order to compete in the global economy—according to Senate testimony given by Daniel F. Runde (one of the architects of the BUILD Act). The DFC also has a higher lending limit than the OPIC. This is rather ironic because, in this case, the DFC and this expansion of the US’ international aid budget was overseen by the allegedly “fiscally conservative” and “America first” faction of the manufactured political paradigm. My thoughts regarding Erik Prince, DFC, and Prince’s ambitions of “resurrecting the British East India Company” can be found here.

The Prince And The Spy Erik Prince, the man behind Blackwater, recently teamed up with an Israeli spy, creating a front company with her to help Israeli defense technology providers exploit loopholes and sell their products to the American military.

Prince seems to be one of these shadowy figures who can openly operate in the dark with zero consequences. He transitioned from providing private mercenaries for the United States (via Blackwater, later renamed Academi) to being a “logistics” specialist via Frontier Services Group (FSG) in China and the UAE. In 2011, Prince’s company, Reflex Response, obtained a multimillion-dollar contract from the UAE to protect “a string of planned nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity” and Prince planned to earn “billions more…by assembling additional battalions of Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments.” These Latin American mercenaries (mostly hailing from Colombia) were trained by Prince’s “mercenary school for the desperate and disgruntled” and then dropped in Yemen to help the UAE fight against the Houthis.

Prince’s ties to the CIA have been documented for some time (here and here). For instance, Cofer Black was the vice chairman of Blackwater when it was controlled by Prince and before Blackwater, Cofer Black was the CIA’s director of counterterrorism (during the 9/11 event). Then in 2017, Black joined the board of Burisma Group (a Ukrainian energy company with controversial ties to Hunter and Joe Biden). As much as political operatives like Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec love to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop and Hunter’s ties to Burisma, they never ask Prince–a regular fixture on their programs–about figures like Cofer Black when they interview him–interesting how that works.

In addition to the CIA, the UAE, and China, Prince also has connections to Israeli intelligence. For example, in 2022, Prince launched a new smartphone called Unplugged (to “liberate” patriots from Big Tech censorship) and as MIT Technology Review noted, the Unplugged tech operations are run by Eran Karpen, a veteran of Unit 8200 and a former employee of CommuniTake, the Israeli company that started NSO Group (a cyber-intelligence firm that conducts surveillance experiments on Palestinians). Other ties of Prince to Israeli intelligence were covered earlier this year by Unlimited Hangout.

Considering that the DFC is central to advancing global impact investing, it’s no surprise that Israel has companies like 8200 Impact (founded by Unit 8200 veterans) that supports “impact-tech” start-ups that aim “to solve social or environmental problems through advanced technology.”

https://impact.8200.org.il/

In 2020, under Trump, the DFC, Israel, and the UAE established the Abraham Fund which mobilized “more than $3 billion in private sector-led investment and development initiatives to promote regional economic cooperation and prosperity in the Middle East and beyond.” Think of it as a “Build Back Better” plan for the Middle East (funded by the DFC). Biden’s “Build Back Better” is basically a continuation of Trump’s BUILD Act. In fact, earlier this year, this time under Biden, the CEO of the DFC, Scott Nathan, traveled to Israel and the West Bank to, just like under the Trump administration, further “private sector-led development in the Palestinian territories and in countries around the world in partnership with Israeli companies.” Since the Israel-Hamas conflict began, prominent neoconservative think tanks have made suggestions about recreating an Abraham Accords-style policy to help “rebuild” Gaza after the conflict subsides.

Naftali, Bibi & Elon: Emergence of Technocracy in Gaza

Last week, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appeared on the Ben Shapiro program to do some “public diplomacy” (or Hasbara) and claimed that Palestinian civilians, rather than Hamas or the IDF, were the ones who committed “the most heinous atrocities” on Oct 7. He also laid out a plan to “denazify” Gaza, the first stage of which would be to install a “technocratic government” (interesting word choice). Bennett repeated the same rhetoric on Jake Tapper’s program when he said he would create “an interim technocratic self-government that would…for about five years, govern Gaza, denazify Gaza, which means clean out all the incitement…and after five years, we would revisit and figure out how to create a sustainable government.”

When Naftali Bennett was in power, he worked to push the expansion of Israel’s hi-tech industry and the Bennett-Lapid government actively worked to bring “about a situation in which the bulk of the Israeli economy [was] based on the high-tech industry and thus [created] around that sector, a stable coalition (both political and social) that [blocked] any counter-processes.” In Israel, the emergence of technocracy is attributed to 1971 when:

“army officers who…entered the economy as administrators and specialists and who were eager to capitalize on the technical skills they learned in the intelligence units that were expanding across the Palestinian territories…[and] from the 1970s onward, these military-technicians-turned-business-administrators worked closely with politicians, to push the government to adopt policies they favored, including subsidies for high-tech companies, looser regulations for foreign investors, and lenient export controls.”

Earlier this year, Bennett joined the Quantum Source board of directors. Quantum Source develops technology in photonic quantum computing (with funding from Dell Technologies Capital).

Quantum Source

Quantum computing will be integral to the transition to a decentralized (but unified) world of Web3. The image below illustrates the role played by blockchain, which is the next iteration of the “cloud” (as it relates to storing data). Web3 uses artificial intelligence as its logic base (which is where quantum computing fits in because logic requires computation).

The Spatial Web

The day after Naftali Bennet’s interview on the Ben Shapiro program aired, Elon Musk, grandson of a prominent figure in the Technocracy movement, announced that he would like to help Benjamin Netanyahu demilitarize and rebuild a “deradicalized” Gaza (after the destruction of Hamas). Interesting that the poster boy for the “good technocrats” wants to help Netanyahu rebuild a “deradicalized” Gaza just as Naftali Bennett tells Ben Shapiro and Jake Tapper that Israel is going to establish an “interim technocratic government” in Gaza. How symbolic.

Elon’s statements were made during his visit to Israel where he got a tour of the areas where the violence occurred on October 7th. Bibi and Elon compared “rebuilding a deradicalized Gaza” to the post WW2 era when Germany was rebuilt through denazification and Japan through cultural reformation (Netanyahu’s words). They equated the majority of the Palestinian population to Nazis in Germany (Naftali Bennett also made that same comparison).

Ultimately, Musk seemed like he was in Israel to perform the ritual apology that comes after making any spicy comments regarding the chosen community–especially since some have accused Twitter of not enforcing its policies on “anti-semitic” content, threats, and tropes on the platform. Thus, Elon was required to make a public spectacle and reassure Israel that he stands with them and the “civilized world” against the primitive “anti-west” barbarians. Elon concluded his apology tour, kissed the ring (as he always does) and agreed “that Starlink would only operate in Israel and Gaza with the Israeli government’s approval.” So brave. Hamas asked Musk if he wanted to visit Gaza after Israel, but he declined the offer. It’s also worth noting that Twitter (or X) partnered with an Israeli firm, AU10TIX, to handle the identity verification process for Twitter Blue users.

From Gaza to Africa: How Zionist Tech Entrepreneurs Profit from Chaos and Calamity

One of the paths to the impending post-conflict “technocracy” in Gaza–as envisioned by the “Peace to Prosperity” crew–is through Silicon Valley’s efforts to train Palestinians to work as low-wage coders. Given Gaza’s high unemployment rate well before the conflict, along with other factors, the exploitation of Gazan workers is a well-documented occurrence. Polish entrepreneur and former Google employee, Iliana Montauk, is the director of Gaza’s first start-up incubator called Gaza Sky Geeks, backed by Google’s philanthropic arm and funded by figures like Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder who lobbied the Ethiopian government to adopt Bitcoin) and Marc Bennioff, CEO of Salesforce (which launched an impact investing alliance with Robin Hood). Gaza Sky Geeks was created by Mercy Corps, a humanitarian aid organization that partnered with Celo Foundation to advance “digital microwork” and drive financial inclusion (discussed in greater detail here).

Montauk decided to get involved in Gaza Sky Geeks after she discovered “a rich pool of female engineers who were struggling to find jobs in the region” and, as she noted elsewhere, Gazans’ economic insecurity and forced isolation presented “a world of opportunity [for] women’s leadership in the Gazan startup sector.” A few years after getting involved with Gaza Sky Geeks, Montauk created Manara, a social impact startup that explicitly refers to the Middle East and North Africa as the next “Eastern Europe, which used to export refugees and is now a destination for world-class tech talent.” Manara was funded by Paul Graham (founder of start-up accelerator, Y Combinator) and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder). Hoffman, a member of the so-called Paypal Mafia, had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. While Montauk may have the best of intentions, her backers are – in several cases – closely intertwined with the Israeli military and intelligence services seeking to “Build Back Better” in Gaza by taking advantage of the vulnerable and cultivating a high-skill but low-wage labor force. Unsurprisingly, the same network of Silicon Valley billionaires, as well as politically connected Israeli tech firms, are following the same model in other economically impoverished nations, particularly in Africa.

A 2019 Coindesk article highlighted the deepening ties between the Israeli crypto industry and the Israeli government, specifically, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal connections to Guy and Galia Ben-Artzi, co-founders of Bancor, a blockchain startup. An earlier article from The Times of Israel echoed the same point, noting that, according to Israel’s corporate registry, the company that operates Bancor is owned “by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s niece, Galia Ben-Artzi, among other shareholders.” In 2017, Tim Draper (venture capital guru invested in bitcoin and companies including SpaceX, Tesla, Skype, and Coinbase) partnered with Bancor and joined their advisory team. A year later, in 2018, Bancor launched a new blockchain service in Kenya to facilitate the creation of “community currencies” (I previously wrote about Bancor and community currencies here).

https://bancor.network/

Bancor hired Will Ruddick (of Grassroots Economics) to oversee the “community inclusion currencies” project in Kenya (the tech hub in Kenya is called Silicon Savannah). In 2013, Will Ruddick was arrested by the Kenyan government for suspicion of forgery and links to the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC), a separatist organization that advocates for the secession of Mombasa (Kenya’s second-largest city after Nairobi and a commercial hub of the coast). For a more detailed and concise look at the subject matter, check out Leo Sareceno’s article on community inclusion currencies and the use of digital twinning in social impact finance and catastrophe insurance securities.

In addition to Kenya’s Silicon Savannah, the Silicon Valley technocrats are well entrenched in Rwanda’s Innovation City in Kigali and Sheba Valley in Ethiopia. In the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia plays the same role that Israel plays in the Middle East (neighborhood watch). Similar to how Israel and the U.S. share raw intelligence with one another, facilitated by the NSA, Ethiopia has also played a vital role in U.S. signals surveillance. In fact, in 2002, the Ethiopian government collaborated with the NSA to launch the Deployed Signals Intelligence Operations Center known as Lion’s Pride. Furthermore, Ethiopia has used Cyberbit, Israeli spyware, to monitor citizens and journalists.

In the last months of 2020, Ethiopia was embroiled in a brutal civil war. In the midst of that conflict, developers behind Cardano and IOHK announced their plan to help Ethiopia rise from the wreckage by collaborating with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education to register the identities of five-million school children on the Cardano blockchain (detailed coverage on this topic by Alison McDowell here). It’s worth noting that in 2014, an AI company based out of Hong Kong, OpenCog Foundation (with funding from the Jeffrey Epstein IV Foundation) launched an AI and Robotics lab in Sheba Valley called iCog Labs (with Ben Goerzel as an advisor). The iCog Labs in Ethiopia is also partnered with Charles Hoskinson’s blockchain venture, Cardano. It makes one wonder if these “innovators” are drawn to nations in turmoil because they want to fix things or because poverty and corruption are the ideal conditions for entrepreneurs looking to capitalize off of vulnerable communities.

Another tech guru actively exploiting Africans is the current darling of the AI world, Sam Altman. In 2019, Altman launched the Worldcoin Initiative, an identity authentication project that collects highly sensitive biometric data in exchange for digital tokens (usually from desperate people living in economically insecure conditions). Kenya served as a major testing ground for the iris-scanning chrome contraption (or Orb) designed to resemble “a decapitated robot head.”

Cityam.com: Worldcoin’s iris-scanning chrome Orb. (Source)

In Kenya, Worldcoin required “users to give their iris scans in exchange for a digital ID…as part of plans to create a new identity and financial network…[and] more than 350,000 Kenyans had signed up for Worldcoin…in exchange for free cryptocurrency tokens worth around 7,000 Kenyan shillings ($49).” Furthermore, an investigation conducted by MIT Technology Review revealed:

“wide gaps between Worldcoin’s public messaging, which focused on protecting privacy, and what users experienced. [They] found that the company’s representatives used deceptive marketing practices, collected more personal data than it acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent.”

Eventually, the Kenyan Interior Ministry suspended the company’s activities–like authenticating human identities via Proof of Personhood protocols–in Kenya.

Identity Authentication: Proof of Personhood (Source)

From Bancor’s community currencies and Sam Altman’s biometric data grab in Kenya to Cardano using war as a pretext to engineer and then crystalize a surveillance apparatus built on blockchain in Ethiopia, African countries are regularly used as testbeds for new financial instruments and monitoring techniques. This is not unlike how the Israeli military and tech companies use Gaza and the West Bank as labs to experiment with new surveillance technology and weaponry (like the AI-controlled “riot gun” installed at a checkpoint in Hebron).

Kohelet Policy Forum, Jeff Yass & Poker Philosophy

Other crypto-linked billionaires are playing an even bigger role in contouring the layout for a “new” Middle East, specifically as it relates to the current iteration of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Earlier this year, I wrote a post about Kohelet Policy Forum (the organization responsible for crafting many of Netanyahu’s recent judicial and policy reforms in Israel). Kohelet is funded by a network of billionaires, like Jeff Yass, who helped create the options-trading powerhouse, Susquehanna International Group and sits on the advisory board of the Cato Institute (he’s been called the Sheldon Adleson of Israel). Yass adheres to a concept called “poker philosophy” (crafting policies based on futures markets). It’s similar to futarchy, an idea that originated from the economist Robin Hanson who envisioned a futuristic form of government where prediction markets can be used to determine public policies. Vitalik Buterin, computer programer and co-founder of Ethereum, also champions the principles of futarchy and liquid democracy–as illustrated by his 2014 post titled, An Introduction to Futarchy.

According to a Haaretz exposé, Kohelet operates under the radar to shape critical centers of power in the Knesset government and the judicial branch (with a focus on promoting settlements and advocating for the privatization of the public sector). The Tikvah Fund, another U.S.-based organization, finances and works closely with Kohelet (the two entities even share board members).

https://en.kohelet.org.il/team/who-we-are

In addition to Kohelet, Tikvah has also financially supported the Institute for Zionist Strategies–the think tank that crafted a paper entitled, “A Plan for Resettlement and Final Rehabilitation in Egypt of the Entire Population of Gaza”(suggesting a Nakba 2.0). As I stated in a previous post, Kohelet was the intellectual architect behind Netanyahu’s judicial coup that sparked a national crisis leading to hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting against Netanyahu (many even calling for his removal). Conveniently, much of the fervor against Netanyahu and his government vanished after the events on October 7th.

In essence, Kohelet attempts to “bridge the gap” between the ultra-conservative zionists and the libertarian-minded business class in Israel to create a big “centrist” tent. They do this by focusing on issues they agree on and avoiding scissor issues that can divide the “conservative” base (Likud Party). This strategy is similar to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” agenda, which plans to “unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.” Jeff Yass finances “bridge-building” institutions (e.g. Kohelet) and actors (e.g. U.S. Senator Rand Paul) in both Israel and the United States. Rand Paul plays an intermediary role within the Republican Party–connecting the free-market libertarians with the Christian nationalists (the same role played by his father, Ron Paul, in the 1980s).

It’s worth noting that in the summer of 2022, Susquehanna International Group was due to follow the footsteps of Sam Bankman-Fried (of FTX) and open an office in the Bahamas (because of the island’s relatively friendly crypto regulations). Jeff Yass is also the largest outside investor of ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok). Yass being an early investor in a global phenomenon like TikTok validates my assertion that Susquehanna International Group plays a crucial role in culture creation: shaping synthetic, algorithmically amplified phenomena online (i.e. what trends or goes viral). Since Yass is one of Rand Paul’s top individual donors, it makes one wonder if Rand Paul’s opposition to banning TikTok was because of his commitment to “free speech” or because of his ties to one of TikTok’s top investors.

Bank Leumi, Paxos & Fireblocks’ Project Eden + Crypto Aid Israel

In 2022, Bank Leumi was the first Israeli bank to enable crypto trading. They partnered with the U.S.-based company, Paxos because “the company holds several licenses to operate with Bitcoin, altcoins, and blockchain technology…[and] has managed to consolidate important partnerships with PayPal, Revolut, and the Bank of America.” It’s worth noting that, a few years ago, Bank Leumi was under investigation for helping many diaspora Israelis launder their money and eventually admitted “that it conspired to aid and assist U.S. taxpayers to prepare and present false tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) by hiding income and assets in offshore bank accounts in Israel and elsewhere around the world.” Israel is often described as a “Switzerland for Jews” because it provides all of the same services (sans the banking secrecy laws).

In December of 2021, the co-founder of Paxos (Bank Leumi’s new partner), Charles Cascarilla, testified at the Digital Assets and the Future of Finance hearing in Congress alongside Sam Bankman-Fried (disgraced FTX founder) and Brian Brooks (former Comptroller of Currency under Trump and executive at Binance and Coinbase). Paxos was one of the first crypto-native syndicates to receive a conditional charter (granted by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency or OCC) to establish a national Bank Trust. More details regarding FTX, the OCC, rebranding the IMF, financial intermediation unbundling, and neobanks can be found on my Bitcoin Bandits post here.

In 2022, Israel’s Ministry of Finance and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange established the first digital government bond with Fireblocks (a digital assets security platform). The initiative was called Project Eden and it focused on three features: “the tokenization of fiat, the tokenization of government bonds, and instructions to prompt the exchange of assets.” Fireblock’s CEO and co-founder, Michael Shaulov, was a team leader in an elite military outfit, Unit 8200 (participating in the most demanding and mission-critical IDF projects).

LinkedIn: Michael Shaulov (Source)

“Eden” (meaning paradise) is an odd name for a project focused on applying blockchain technology to the issuance, settlement, and clearing of digital government bonds. Are they implying that the transition to digital governance is a quantum leap to some sort of cyber paradise? Either seems at odds with reality, as Project Eden is apparently assembling the infrastructure necessary for an electronic panopticon (not exactly cultivating a realm of eternal pleasure and delight).

In 2022, Fireblocks was the highest valued digital (tokenized) asset infrastructure provider, supporting over 800 major institutions. That same year, BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custodian bank, tapped Fireblocks to develop a financial infrastructure for managing their digital assets and, since then, Fireblocks has secured the transfer of $2 trillion in digital assets.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began (on October 7th), Israeli banks and regulators have assisted Crypto Aid Israel with the flow of crypto donations. It’s unclear who started the fund, but Fireblocks (of Project Eden) has stepped in to handle those crypto assets.

Crypto Aid Israel (cryptoaidisrael.com/)

During the height of the Russia-Ukraine war, I noted that cryptocurrency was being touted as a “savior” from the central banking cartel (on both sides). Since Ukraine’s central bank banned electronic cash transfers and shut down ATMs, Ukrainians turned to cryptocurrencies to deal with the economic crisis caused by the martial law declared by their government (as a result of Russia’s invasion). Similarly, as the Russian ruble took a hit, Russians also turned to cryptocurrencies. Most notably, the Ukrainian government partnered with FTX (Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraudulent enterprise) to launch a crypto donation website. Refer to my Crypto Conundrum in Ukraine & Russia and Bitcoin Bandits posts (here and here) to get a clearer understanding of why these “crowdfund your war with crypto” platforms are highly suspect (whether in Israel or Ukraine).

Tokenizing Real Estate to Expedite Israeli Settlements, Tony Blair & Fireblocks

A few months ago, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israel’s Land Authority was developing mechanisms to tokenize the real estate industry by seeking blockchain consultants to aid in the transition to smart contract-based real estate agreements and license management. The use of distributed ledger technology and blockchain would help the Israeli government streamline the property registration process (especially in the West Bank). Fireblocks is also leading the charge in advocating for Israel’s real estate industry to adopt blockchain and tokenization.

The Israeli Land Authority most likely wants to tokenize the real estate industry because it would speed up transactions and reduce feeds. This could pose a problem because many of the transactions processed by the Israeli Land Authority are those that involve the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on occupied land. For instance, in May of 2023, The Jerusalem Post noted that the Israeli Land Authority website published a list of 1,248 new housing units in the West Bank and, despite pushback from Palestinians, Netanyahu’s government pressed ahead with settlement expansion. Perhaps the Israeli government is tokenizing the real estate industry to not only stay ahead of the tokenized asset economy, but to create a fast and legal process for illegal land grabs in the West Bank. After all, Mike Pompeo did announce that the United States no longer viewed Israeli settlements (legal or illegal) as “inconsistent” with international law. Furthermore, Israel’s Absentees Property Law gives the state legal authority to transfer buildings (that were abandoned by Palestinians during the Nakba) to the Israeli government.

As Netanyahu’s government is being rightfully criticized, The Times of Israel reported that, in an effort to temper international concerns over civilian deaths, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to appoint former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, as a “humanitarian” coordinator for Gaza. This would allow Blair to play the role of “liberal hero” in the midst of conflict–which would give Netanyahu’s war efforts more legitimacy on the international stage. This is perfect timing for Blair because he’s a key figure in 4IR-driven regulations for global governance and transparency. A lot of this advocacy work is done through the Tony Blair Institute, known for publishing lousy puffery, like this piece applauding Malta’s transition from colonized dependence to blockchain leader.

In 2002, Tony Blair launched the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa. Blair’s EITI is an international regulatory organization that claims to promote and support government transparency in resource-rich countries. I previously noted that the EITI announced the CAR was finally on “a path to acceptance” and lifted its suspension, in 2021, after the CAR agreed to implement the EITI’s recommendations. From my estimation, the CAR likely tokenized its natural resources in order to comply with the EITI standards about transparency. Since then, the CAR expanded from resource tokenization to land tokenization. In 2022, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Sam Bankman-Fried all attended a rather exclusive crypto conference in the Bahamas to talk about Web3 and the future of cryptocurrencies. It seems as though Blair and Clinton were there to give crypto a “strange new respectability” and reassure legacy investors that it’s legitimate.

Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Sam Bankman-Fried on stage at the Crypto Bahamas conference (Source)

Tokenizing real estate permits fractional ownership and allows “a group of friends to buy a property together…[and] adjust the group ownership…as opposed to transferring a traditional land title.” In fact, the Chief of Risk and Strategy at Fireblocks, Roi Karo, argued that the fractional ownership of assets enables people with less means to participate, which “lowers the barrier to entry and opens up access to a much bigger pool of investors” (translation: it gives predatory fintech scoundrels access to an untapped market).

According to Boston Consulting Group, “the total size of illiquid asset tokenization globally would be $16 trillion by 2030” (with 20% of that in real estate). Furthermore, as highlighted by a Newsweek article, down the road, smart contracts can be automated “to do things like disable keys…[when the] rental agreement is no longer current.” This is definitely a tool that can be used to torment the already dispossessed. Technological advancements don’t inherently fix human challenges because only humans can alleviate human problems. The tools are neutral, but how they are used is not. Individuals or groups with different values and character traits can use those tools to operationalize their half-baked, immoral ideas. As long as there is free will, some people may choose to engage in any number of corrupt and destructive behaviors that fall within the spectrum of the Human Condition.

Alex Gladstein’s “Bitcoin is Human Rights” Crusade & the Techno-Tyranny Continuum YouTube: Bitcoin and Human Rights w/ Alex Gladstein (Source)

A few words on the, crypto bros, including Bitcoin maximalists who profess that countries in the Global South can free themselves from their imperial masters by just adopting Bitcoin and/or other cryptocurrencies: “fix the money, fix the world” (as they like to say). One such offender is, astroturf extraordinaire, Alex Gladstein. I wrote about Gladstein last year in my French Imperialism vs. Crypto Colonialism piece (posted here and here); however, he’s worth highlighting again because of an article he wrote about how Palestinians can use Bitcoin as a tool for “liberation.” Gladstein is notorious for using legitimate criticisms about the impact of economic imperialism as a pretext to propose his decentralized, “free market” Austrian school of economics solutions. He seems to think that blockchain technology and Bitcoin can rectify the consequences of nearly a century of colonial occupation, economic warfare through neoliberal policies, inhumane austerity, and corruption from within and outside the nations. As articulated by an article on MERIP:

“At best, the faux-humanitarian promises made by crypto’s cheerleaders to the Palestinian movement naively peddle an unattainable escape from deeper geopolitical ills. At worst, it cynically uses Palestinians’ experiences of persecution and domination to advance an external agenda…An independent Palestinian economy will not arise magically out of a sovereign currency, digital or otherwise.”

In his article on Palestine, Gladstein raves about a company called Paxful and their “vibrant peer-to-peer marketplaces in Palestine” and asserts that if Palestinians adopted Bitcoin in big numbers, it could “become a remarkably powerful peaceful protest.” In 2019, the same company Gladstein praised, roughly two years later, Paxful, was accused of blocking Nigerian users from millions in crypto funds. A Nigerian organization called United Global Resolve for Peace alleged that Paxful had confiscated the crypto investments of many Nigerian users by deactivating their wallets. Following an investigation, some of the users were cleared of any wrongdoings, but Paxful still refused to return the funds. Earlier this year, Paxful shut down its operation in Nigeria. Perhaps, Gladstein didn’t know about these allegations against Paxful when he wrote the article; however, if he did know, but just thought the charges were false then he could have explained why he didn’t think they had any merit.

Gladstein also argues that since Palestinians are a people with a history filled with confiscation, Bitcoin can give them a way “to take the fruits of their labor and time and lock it into an asset in cyberspace, beyond the control of Hamas, Israel, the PA or the World Bank.” This assertion has been proven false considering the Israeli government partnered with exchanges like Binance and stablecoin issuers like Tether and has been using those partnerships to freeze and deactivate Palestinian accounts deemed “Hamas affiliated”–how is that beyond the control of Israel?

In his painfully verbose and lengthy article, Gladstein’s thesis can be found buried toward the end of the report when he finally makes a clear pitch:

“There is a possibility here for Palestinians — or any vulnerable population, whether trapped by foreign occupation, domestic authoritarianism, a collapsing economy, or a structural lack of opportunity — to adopt Bitcoin as a new currency. Millions of individuals are already making this choice in Turkey, Argentina, Nigeria, Iran, Lebanon and beyond.”

Gladstein is part of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), which explains why his rhetoric is taken straight out of the “How to Market Bitcoin for Dummies” handbook sprinkled with the U.S. State Department line on nearly all nations in the southern hemisphere: domestic authoritarianism. Gladstein is also part of the Oslo Freedom Forum (where Peter Thiel is a patron) and Singularity University (founded by, futurist, Ray Kurzweil).

Most mainstream and alternative public discourse (regarding the ethics around the cynical use of technological innovations) is rather rudimentary. It’s usually around a narrow dialectic that focuses on the larger than life “globalist liberal elite” (represented Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg) facing off against the “based” traditional-conservative (tradcon), libertarian technocrats (championed by characters like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Donald Trump). When, in reality, both sides are attempting to shift society toward a similar direction–using different routes to reach the same destination.

The Dayz of Noah channel has a segment that dissects this particular dialectic and the part about Musk’s “human authentication” vs. Altman’s “proof of personhood” is especially illuminating because Musk and Altman have similar objectives: trust, compliance, and demand. The video breaks it down as follows: characters like Elon Musk use social media to create trust through culture creation, hence why Musk purchased Twitter and made a spectacle about the “Twitter Files” and fighting liberal censorship. This helped Musk cultivate a digital army of loyal “anti-woke” warriors who would use the “twitter leaks” to fight the culture war. Next, compliance is achieved by making it super convenient to obey and unbearable to resist; then, eventually, people start to demand the “technological solutions” to human problems.

As I noted earlier, Musk partnered with Israel’s AU10TIX to verify the identities of Twitter Blue users. That being said, one could argue that Musk has ambitions to implement, streamline, and scale his “human authentication” objectives–which are not that different from Altman’s “proof of personhood” goals (minus the spooky crystal ball looking Orb).

https://www.au10tix.com/ (HumanAuthentication)

Gladstein most likely emerged from the Thiel-Musk faction of the “techno-tyranny” continuum, considering Thiel has been a vocal advocate of the HRF and the Oslo Freedom Forum for over a decade (with both of which Gladstein is affiliated). Gladstein seems to believe that money is at the root of Palestinian struggles, so they should just adopt Bitcoin; however, as noted by MERIP, his explanation is naive because “the monetary relationship between Israel and the Palestinians reflects a more fundamental political asymmetry of power.” I would add that there’s a layer deeper than the “political” and that’s the realm of ethics and morals–which cannot be quantified or analyzed through dialectical materialism.

In his article, Gladstein argues that Palestine could become the El Salvador of the Middle East (since El Salvador was the first country to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender). He continues his Bitcoin spiel by commending Nayib Bukele (El Salvador president) for his tremendous job at providing the world with a template of how Bitcoin can be operationalized on a national scale. He was also excited by the irony of the first leader to adopt Bitcoin (Nayib Bukele) being of Palestinian origin and how that’s all the more reason for Palestine to follow the same path as El Salvador.

He concludes his article by highlighting that “the left” attacks Bitcoin from a position of “privilege” because all they do is “virtue signal” online instead of offering solutions (like advocating for Palestine to adopt Bitcoin or other crypto). I don’t think you can call Bitcoin a concrete solution if the move toward crypto is due to desperation and not necessarily because of innovation or creative expression. This type of argument is humorous because it’s predicated on the assumption that Gladstein and his faction of the “Bitcoin as human rights” cult understand the nature of the problem in the first place. It’s a premature leap toward superficial solutions without properly diagnosing the problem. Plus, Gladstein deducing human problems to “the economic system” is incredibly narrow-minded, shortsighted, and indicative of an individual who has yet to grapple with the philosophical underpinnings of his beliefs and overall perspective.

U.S. Bipartisan Support of Israel

To be clear, Trump’s predecessors (democrat or republican) also supported the ambitions laid out in the “Peace to Prosperity” plan. This article’s focus on Trump’s shenanigans in the Middle East should not be misconstrued as downplaying the Democrat’s transgressions because the United States’ support of Israel is, and has always been, bipartisan. Even though neocon hacks like Ben Shapiro try to argue that Barack Obama was the most “anti-Israel” president–it’s simply not true. For instance, in 2011, Palestine was granted full membership in UNESCO, and in response, Obama pulled U.S. funding for UNESCO. That same year, the Heritage Foundation published an article applauding the Obama administration for correctly perceiving that the Palestinian push “for statehood absent a negotiated agreement with Israel [was] an attempt to isolate Israel.” That being said, it’s also true that UNESCO was created by advocates of eugenics (like Julian Huxley) who believed that humanity could be improved through deliberate eugenic measures. Nevertheless, the point still stands because it’s one of many examples that dispels any notion that the democratic establishment is anti-Israel.

In addition to the Republican Party’s connections to Israeli intelligence and figures involved with NSO Group (via Erik Prince and others), it’s also worth noting that US Senator Mark Warner (Democrat from Virginia) has been linked to one of the co-founders of NSO Group. This episode of The AnteDote podcast deals with Senator Warner’s alleged ties to Omrie Lavie (co-founder of NSO Group) through Warner’s private and political relationship with Nicholas Perrins.

To Conclude

In this exploration, the goal was to, first, highlight how the Trump Administration, UAE, Netanyahu, and the Kohelet Policy Forum all played significant roles in establishing the mechanisms that have led to the hyperreality-level peril and tragedy currently unfolding in the Middle East. Second, to show the common thread that runs through Trump’s BUILD Act (which most likely provided the resources to lure the Arab world into normalizing relations with Israel via the Kushner-brokered Abraham Accords) and Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan. In addition to unveiling some of the crypto industry’s links to Netanyahu (along with Nafali Bennett’s recent remarks about engineering a technocratic panopticon in Gaza) and showcasing the parallels between Ukraine and Israel both using cryptocurrencies to fund their “humanitarian” efforts.

This examination, ideally, demonstrates how Israel’s Land Authority–seemingly–strives to expedite Israeli settlements by tokenizing the real estate industry (a move which would streamline illegal land grabs in the West Bank). And hopefully it’s clear why it’s not only problematic, but a misdiagnosis of the problem itself, for the crypto and Bitcoin enthusiasts to market digital currencies as an antidote to government corruption in the “Global South” (including Palestine).

It’s important to discuss the technological innovations and financial instruments being tested in “developing” countries because, first and foremost, they’re human beings, so their lives are inherently precious and important. Second, these pilot programs are usually augmented worldwide and, eventually, they make their way to the “developed” world. Many of the new monitoring and compliance frameworks and policies are first tested out in nations with little to no existing physical or legal infrastructure because it’s easier to build on a “blank slate state” than to transition an old structure into a new one. Either way, the chickens always come home to roost.

Palestine: “Peace to Prosperity” Through Technocracy.

Whitney joined TLAV to discuss CTIL, AI, and Gaza.
See 2020 article that Whitney wrote about CTIL here.

Show page
Clips available on Odysee.

• AI (short), AI (long)
• How is AI choosing targets in Gaza 
• President of Argentina – Javier Milei
• CTIL
  

Links discussed:

• WEF Warns Of Cyber Attack Leading To Systemic Collapse Of The Global Financial System
• Ending Anonymity: Why The WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens The Future Of Privacy
• What exactly is killware, and why is it the next major cyberthreat?
• 11 infamous malware attacks: The first and the worst | CSO Online
• Meet the IDF-Linked Cybersecurity Group “Protecting” US Hospitals ‘Pro Bono’
• CTIL Files
• DHS Secretary: “Killware,” Malware Designed To Do Real-World Harm, Poised To Be World’s Next Breakout Cybersecurity Threat – CPO Magazine
• ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
• Was Al-Aqsa Flood a False Flag?

TLAV.

Whitney joined Redacted to discuss the recent news about CTIL, who she wrote about in 2020. Available on Rumble or YouTube. Segment starts at the 83:00 minute mark.

Clip about CTIL here.

Redacted.

Available on Rumble or Rokfin.

AM Wake Up.

The Department of Justice’s and Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s recent announcement of its $4.3 billion settlement with cryptocurrency exchange Binance has jolted the digital finance world and sparked rumors that the massive exchange could soon face collapse roughly one year after the implosion of another massive exchange, FTX. Those criminal cases, which charged Binance with money laundering and failing to report suspicious transactions tied to terror groups and entities under U.S. sanctions, placed considerable blame on Binance’s former Chief Compliance Officer, Samuel Lim. Lim, who left the company in 2022, was subsequently replaced with Noah Perlman.

In that role, Perlman has clearly been a crucial part of Binance’s attempts to navigate the US government investigations targeting the exchange, including its recent settlement with the DOJ and CFTC as well as the exchange’s ongoing litigation with the SEC. Now, with Binance’s long-time head Changpeng Zhao, or “CZ,” stepping down as part of the DOJ settlement, Perlman is one of the few executives who has chosen to stay on to steer the world’s largest crypto exchange into the post-CZ era.

In his current role, Perlman will have even more power to decide to whom to withhold or offer access to Binance’s services and if, like other exchanges and major players in the crypto market, Binance will collaborate even more closely with the DOJ in requiring KYC protocols as well as helping law enforcement to seize bitcoin and other digital currencies it deems connected to “illicit” financing (something Perlman has been doing since he joined Binance). Perlman is also poised to work closely, perhaps more than any other Binance executive, with the government compliance monitor to be appointed to oversee Binance as part of its settlement with the DOJ.

Despite his more critical-than-ever role at the world’s largest crypto exchange, there has been surprisingly little interest among the media in looking deeper into Perlman, who boasts connections to some of the more mysterious aspects of the FTX collapse, controversies at the Winklevoss-owned exchange Gemini, and even notorious sex trafficker and financial criminal Jeffrey Epstein.

A Lawyer with a Famous Father Noah Perlman with his mother Toby Perlman, Source

Noah Perlman is the son of the famous violinist Itzhak Perlman and attended Harvard University, graduating in 1991. He went on to attend Columbia Law School and after graduating in 1997, joined the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, a white-shoe law firm in New York deeply tied to political and financial power in the U.S. (e.g., Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell is one of its many influential alumni). After working there and then as a law clerk in the Eastern District of New York, Perlman became a federal prosecutor for the Department of Justice, where he held posts such as Special Coordinator for Crimes against Children during his five-year stint with the DOJ.

Perlman’s role as Special Coordinator for Crimes against Children is notable given his father’s apparently close relationship with a notorious sex trafficker of minors, Jeffrey Epstein. Itzhak Perlman flew on Epstein’s plane at least twice, in 1992 and 1993, where he accompanied Epstein to Michigan’s Interlochen Center for the Arts. Epstein, who once attended the school on a scholarship at age 14, began donating heavily to the school in 1990 and continued to donate through 2003. At least one of those two known flights involved Epstein bringing Perlman to Interlochen for a performance. From 1989 through the mid-1990s, Perlman performed annually at Interlochen’s Arts Camp, according to the school’s website.

According to Tim Ambrose, former Vice president of Institutional Advancement at Interlochen, Epstein initially built his now infamous lodge at Interlochen, sometimes referred to in media reports as a “lair to target girls,” in order to facilitate Perlman’s stays at the school:

We did not have a suitable facility for Mr Perlman to stay at that was handicap-accessible [Perlman lost the normal use of his legs after contracting polio as a child]. Epstein said he was interested in helping build a place for people to stay when they are on campus.

I got an architect and had them draw some plans, but I got a call from Jeffrey and he said: ‘I don’t want that’. He said: ‘I want to build a log cabin and I want it all handicap accessible so when Mr Perlman comes he is comfortable. I want a walk-in tub, I want countertops that are handicap accessible’. So, I got an architect and we came up with something.

Epstein approved of the new design and sent a cheque for up to £313,000 (between US$300,000 and US$400,000 at the time) for it to be built.

Around the same time Perlman had traveled on his plane with him to Interlochen and construction on the cabin began, Epstein was already using his privileged status as a donor to gain access to, recruit and abuse young girls attending the school. Perlman’s address and three phone numbers are also listed in Epstein’s infamous black book.

The lodge Epstein built at Interlochen allegedly for Itzhak Perlman’s benefit and use, Source

Itzhak’s son Noah Perlman left his role as a federal prosecutor focused on crimes targeting children in 2004 and then became general counsel for the New York division of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). After two years there, he joined Morgan Stanley, first as Global Head of Special Investigations and then as Global Head of Financial Crimes. There he focused on issues related to “money laundering and sanctions” and spoke publicly in 2018 about the need for better data “to track financial compliance” due to the spread of “populism and authoritarianism” and, in 2017, spoke of how much of his work at the time stood at the intersection of financial services and national security.

Joining the Crypto Industry

After years of straddling national security and Wall Street interests at Morgan Stanley, Perlman joined Gemini, the exchange co-founded by twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, in September 2019. He served first as the company’s Chief Compliance Officer. According to Perlman, his actions at the exchange were guided by the Winklevoss’ “vision that compliance really could be a competitive advantage” and that the company has long been focused “on security, regulation, compliance.” In August 2020 and until his departure this January, Perlman was Gemini’s Chief Operating Officer.

Despite its somewhat cozy relationship with New York regulators, a lawsuit filed last month by New York Attorney General charged Gemini with engaging in a $1.1 billion fraud. The focus of that fraud, the Gemini Earn program, a partnership between Gemini and crypto lender Genesis, had involved Perlman considerably, per past reports. However, Perlman had departed Gemini several months before the recent lawsuit was filed and the Winklevoss twins had sued Genesis’ parent company DCG back in July, claiming that Genesis had misled them in the lead-up to the collapse of Gemini Earn. Gemini then sued Genesis itself in late October, shortly after the NYAG’s lawsuit was filed. Genesis has recently sued Gemini in an effort to claw back withdrawals related to Gemini Earn’s implosion last November, which subsequently resulted in Genesis filing for bankruptcy in January.

The Winklevoss Twins, Source

The Gemini Earn program ran into major problems with the collapse of FTX last year, with the program temporarily halting withdrawals due to fallout from FTX’s bankruptcy and later imploding entirely. It was later revealed that nearly 60% of Genesis’ loans were at one point tied to the FTX-linked hedge fund Alameda Research. However, well before FTX collapsed, Gemini knew internally that there were issues with Genesis and had downgraded “its own estimate of Genesis’ credit rating to a junk trade in February 2022,” even though it continued to promote Gemini Earn as “low-risk” until its collapse roughly nine months later. Genesis has also notably been investigated for its apparent role in the collapse of the Terra/Luna fraud in early 2022, a collapse in which Binance also played an interesting role. Binance would go on to play a similarly interesting role in the collapse of FTX several months later, likely part of what Sam Bankman-Fried had once referred to as the “second great stablecoin war” going on behind the scenes in the crypto industry.

The NY Attorney General’s lawsuit against Gemini notes that key Gemini risk management personnel knew that Genesis was financially unstable and pulled their personal money out of the Earn program well before its collapse. It specifically mentions that Gemini’s Chief Operating Officer “allegedly withdrew his entire investment of more than $100,000 from Earn on June 16 and 17 of last year.” Though the suit declined to name Gemini’s Chief Operating Officer, Perlman held that role at the time of the events detailed in the lawsuit.

Perlman’s exact role in Gemini Earn and in Gemini’s decision to partner with Genesis remains murky. Like Genesis, Perlman has his own unusual connections to aspects of the FTX scandal, including one of the most mysterious components of the FTX network – Farmington State Bank in rural Washington. In 2019, the same year that Perlman joined Gemini, Perlman was listed as a director of FBH Corp. in SEC filings alongside Jean Chalopin, the executive chairman of Deltec, the Bahamian bank that had been deeply tied to FTX and continues to be deeply tied to the controversial stablecoin Tether. FTX and Tether were also deeply connected before the exchange collapsed.

Farmington State Bank’s only branch, as shown on Google Maps, Source

FBH Corp., soon after its incorporation, took over the miniscule and extremely rural Farmington State Bank, which soon adopted the name Moonstone Bank. Just days after the name change, Alameda Research bought a $11.5 million stake in the bank and FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried allegedly poured $50 million into the bank in the months that followed under an account labeled “FTX Digital Markets.” Bankman-Fried’s deposits accounted for the vast majority of the $71 million in funds that were deposited into Farmington/Moonstone after the name change and up until the collapse of FTX in November 2022, which brought Farmington under heavy scrutiny.

Media reports published during and after the collapse of FTX noted that Farmington’s relationship with regulators in Washington State and the Federal Reserve system was both highly unusual and suspect, as the ties of Chalopin and Alameda to the bank should have raised numerous red flags for fiscal authorities. The Federal Reserve still refuses to comment “about the process that federal regulators undertook to approve Chalopin’s purchase of the charter of Farmington State Bank in 2020,” but filed an enforcement action against Farmington in August, just days after Farmington announced its plan to sell its deposits and assets to the Bank of Eastern Oregon and close down.

Perlman, who was also on Moonstone’s board in addition to being a director of FBH Corp., has yet to publicly comment on his connection to the small, rural bank that has emerged as a key component of the massive fraud tied to FTX. Perlman also never publicly listed or commented on his affiliation with Moonstone or FBH Corp.

FTX and the Curious History of Farmington State Bank Since FTX’s collapse, a tiny bank in rural Washington has come under heavy scrutiny for the role it may have played in the crypto exchange’s fraudulent activities. Ed Berger and Whitney Webb investigate the history of the bank and unearth some troubling connections.

As Unlimited Hangout reported last year, Moonstone, prior to the FTX scandal, was working with a very suspect stablecoin company called Fluent Finance to “accelerate adoption” of Fluent’s stablecoin US+. Fluent frames US+ as a regulation compliant dollar-backed stablecoin, a “trustworthy” Tether competitor. Its relationship with Farmington as well as Tether-connected entities like Deltec and FTX suggests that Moonstone/Farmington was poised to be a vehicle for Sam Bankman-Fried in the “great stablecoin war,” had FTX not collapsed in such spectacular fashion.

The Compliance Crackdown Cometh

Not long after the FTX scandal and also after his role at Moonstone/Farmington was publicly (though quietly) disclosed, Perlman became head of Binance’s compliance team in January. Around that same time, Binance brought on Kristen Hecht to become its Global Head of Corporate Compliance. Hecht formerly worked for the US Treasury Department in financial crime compliance and then for HSBC China and a Facebook/Meta-owned digital asset wallet company. Perlman, in his role at Binance, has spent the past year overseeing Binance’s relationship with global law enforcement and its Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols. He also oversaw Binance’s decision to cease operations in Russia, a decision most likely motivated by US government lawsuits against the exchange, including those which were recently settled, as they targeted Binance chiefly for failing to block transactions in countries or with companies/entities/people under US sanctions.

Now, in the wake of the Binance-DOJ settlement, Perlman is poised to do more of the same and steer the world’s largest crypto exchange into an era of unprecedented compliance. While this obviously has clear implications for Binance moving forward, it also has important implications for Binance’s troves of customer data from past transactions. As Perlman had stated while at Morgan Stanley, better data leads to increased financial compliance, and now the US Treasury Department will have access to all of Binance’s current, future and past records going forward. This will invariably be used to track past “suspicious” transactions to spur a new round of retroactive DOJ crypto seizures and civil asset forfeitures in the months leading up to the next bitcoin halving and an anticipated major crypto bull run in 2024. Perlman, a DOJ veteran, will most likely be more than happy to help his former employer in this endeavor.

While all attention has recently been focused on the Binance-DOJ settlement, few are seeing the big picture of what that settlement and a post-CZ Binance means, not just for the crypto space, but the future of financial privacy. Just as the settlement was announced, USDT stablecoin issuer Tether announced that it had “recently onboarded” the Secret Service to its platform and are working with the FBI to do the same. With other major players in the crypto space looking to bend over backward for the US government (if they weren’t already) in the name of compliance, the DOJ-FBI have an even greater ability to seize crypto holdings deemed to be “uncompliant” whenever they see fit. DOJ seizures of bitcoin prior to the settlement with Binance are estimated at 205,515 bitcoin (nearly $7.6 billion at the time of this article’s publication) which makes the DOJ one of the largest holders of bitcoin in the world.

This is significant as the DOJ, FBI and Secret Service are all major, active members of the World Economic Forum Partnership Against Cybercrime (WEF-PAC), a public-private partnership of law enforcement, commercial banks and intelligence-linked tech companies that are openly planning to erode both financial and online privacy in the name of greater centralized control over the online flow of money and information. As previously reported, WEF-PAC, which is led by a career intelligence agent, anticipates a major cyberattack on the financial system before 2025 and has spent years developing systems and architecture for an internet and a financial system completely devoid of anonymity or privacy – “solutions” that would conveniently be in high demand should the anticipated cyberattack unfold. WEF-PAC also sees bitcoin, including the value of bitcoin and the use of privacy-enhancing tools in bitcoin transactions, as a threat to its policy plans and has floated the idea that manipulating the price of bitcoin could help it and its members achieve their policy goals related to financial privacy. Thus, the DOJ’s significant bitcoin holdings take on new meaning in this context.

Ending Anonymity: Why The WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens The Future Of Privacy With many focusing on tomorrow’s Cyber Polygon exercise, less attention has been paid to the World Economic Forum’s real ambitions in cybersecurity – to create a global organization aimed at gutting even the possibility of anonymity online. With the governments of the US, UK and Israel on board, along with some of the world’s most powerful corporations, it is important to pay attention to their endgame, not just the simulations.

While framed as necessary to stop a litany of crimes – from child abuse to money laundering – the obvious problem, with members like the DOJ and FBI, is that many of WEF-PAC’s members have committed those same crimes and routinely protect powerful people who also commit those same crimes on scales much, much larger than those they do prosecute. Jeffrey Epstein is one obvious and well-known example of what amounts to a mafia protection racket masquerading as law enforcement.

Noah Perlman is a symptom of this larger problem. He is not in charge of compliance with the law as written, as his past associations/behavior with Gemini Earn and Farmington show that he is very willing to not comply with the law if it benefits him. Instead, he is in charge of compliance with the financial mafia that runs commercial and central banks. While the Binance settlement has been heralded as “bullish” for crypto, it is hardly a thing to celebrate. Binance most certainly engaged in money laundering and illicit financial activity, but those crimes are dwarfed by those overseen or protected by the DOJ, FBI and American intelligence agencies. By giving the biggest criminals in the game greater control over the digital currency space, we inch closer and closer to the end of financial privacy and surveillable, programmable money – an end-game that gravely threatens not just financial freedom, but human freedom.

Binance’s Noah Perlman: Ties to FTX, Epstein and Gemini Earn.

The internet is about to change. In many countries, there’s currently a coordinated legislative push to effectively outlaw encryption of user uploaded content under the guise of protecting children. This means websites or internet services (messaging apps, email, etc.) could be held criminally or civilly liable if someone used it to upload abusive material. If these bills become law, people like myself who help supply private communication services could be penalized or put into prison for simply protecting the privacy of our users. In fact, anyone who runs a website with user-uploaded content could be punished the same way. In today’s article, I’ll show you why these bills not only fail at protecting children, but also put the internet as we know it in jeopardy, as well as why we should question the organizations behind the push.

Let’s quickly recap some of the legislation.

European Union

– Chat Control: would require internet services (Email, chat, storage) to scan all messages and content and report flagged content to the EU. This would require that every internet based service scans everything uploaded to it, even if it’s end-to-end encrypted. Content would be analyzed using machine learning (i.e. AI) and matches would automatically be reported to the police. This is awaiting a vote from the EU LIBE committee.

Chat Control is overwhelmingly opposed by EU citizens, but is advancing regardless. Source

United Kingdom

–The Online Safety Act 2023: would require user service providers to enforce age limits and checks, remove legal but harmful content for children, and require scanning photos for materials related to child sexual abuse & exploitation, as well as terrorism. It would require providers to be able to identify these types of materials in private communications and to take down that content. This means providers would need visibility into messaging, even those messages are end-to-end encrypted. End to end encrypted messaging providers such as WhatsApp, Viber, Signal, and Element have indicated in an open letter that surveillance on of this type simply isn’t possible without breaking end to end encryption entirely, and have threatened to leave the UK if the bill was passed & enforced without the offending Clause 122. This bill was recently passed by parliament unchanged and will become enforceable in 2024.

United States
– The EARN IT Act 2023: would allow US states to hold websites criminally liable for not scanning user uploaded content for CSAM (child sexual abuse material). This would effectively ban end to end encryption. This bill has 22 cosponsors and is awaiting an order to report to the Senate.

– The STOP CSAM Act 2023 (Full Text): would allow victims who suffered abuse or exploitation as children to sue any website that hosted pictures of the exploitation or abuse “recklessly”, e.g. if your website was not automatically scanning uploads. Websites are already required by law to remove CSAM if made aware of it, but this would require providers to scan all files uploaded. This bill has 4 cosponsors, and is awaiting an order to report to the Senate.

– Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA): would require platforms to verify the ages of its visitors and filter content promoting self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, and sexual exploitation. This would inherently require an age verification system for all users and transparency into content algorithms, including data sharing with third parties. This bill has 47 bi-partisan cosponsors and is awaiting an order to report to the Senate.

Its important to note that the language in these bills and the definition for “service providers” extends to any website or online property that has user-uploaded content. This could be as simple as a blog that allows comments, or a site that allows file uploads. It could be a message board or chatroom, literally anything on the internet that has two-way communication. Most websites are operated by everyday people – not huge tech companies. They have neither the resources or ability to implement scanning on their websites under threat of fine or imprisonment. They would risk operating in violation or be forced to shut down their website. This means your favorite independent media site, hobbyist forum, or random message board could disappear. These bills would crumble the internet as we know it and centralize it further for the benefit of Big Tech who are rapidly expanding the surveillance agenda.

We must pause and ask ourselves, is this effort to ramp up surveillance really about protecting children?

How do companies currently deal with CSAM?

In the United States, tracking CSAM is recognized as a joint effort between ESPs (Electronic Service Providers) like Google, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) a private non-profit established by Congress in 1984 and primarily funded by the United States Department of Justice. Unlimited Hangout has previously reported on the NCMEC and its ties to figures such as Hillary Clinton and intelligence-funded NGOs such as Thorn. They also receive corporate contributions from big names such as Adobe, Disney, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, Ring Doorbell, Verizon, and Zoom.

Ashton Kutcher’s NGO Supplies Police with ‘Free’ CIA-linked Surveillance Tool to ‘Protect Kids’ A suspect NGO claiming to combat child trafficking by providing surveillance tech to US police has allowed Amazon to continue supplying U.S. law enforcement with facial recognition software despite the tech giant’s moratorium on its sale to police.

Electronic service providers in the United States are already required to report to the CyberTipline (Federal statute 18 USC 2258A) if they become aware of CSAM, otherwise they may face fines or prison time. These CyberTipline reports combine offending content with additional information such as identifying the potential perpetrator, the victim, and other context that is combined and sent off to law enforcement.

Photo & content scanning measures are not required. However, several prominent companies have voluntarily implemented scanning of communications and media, such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Photos, Facebook, Instagram Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, iCloud email, and Microsoft’s Xbox. If you use these services, then your messages and media may automatically be scanned for abusive material.

Ironically and not surprisingly, its these very platforms that have the most malicious activity, including drug & guns sales, child abuse material, and cyberbullying/harassment.

Does voluntary content scanning actually help protect children?

Google began publishing a CSAM transparency report in 2021 which gives numbers on how much CSAM was identified and reported on across Google & Youtube. It includes data since 2020, with counts for how many reports were made to the NCMEC, how many different Google accounts were disabled, and how many “hashes” (photo fingerprints) were contributed to the NCMEC hash database.

It is unclear exactly when Google started creating “hashes” of its users photos, but they have contributed 2.5 million new hashes to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Hash Database to date. Reports are published every 6 months, and we’ve seen staggering growth in all types of reports since 2020. For example, Google’s CyberTipline reports have grown from ~547,000 in 2020, ~870,000 in 2021, to more than 2.1 million reports in 2022. The first half of 2023 has shown a decline, totaling ~750,000 reports from January to June.

As seen on NCMEC’s CyberTipline Data page, Google’s reports represent a mere fraction of the total number of reports submitted to the NCMEC, which works with over 1,500 ESPs – mostly US companies. 5 electronic service providers (Facebook, Instagram, Google, WhatsApp, and Omegle) accounted for more than 90% of the 32 million reports in 2022. Around half (49%) of these reports in 2022 are “actionable”, meaning there is sufficient information for law enforcement to proceed with an investigation. Additionally, 89.9% of reports involved content uploaded by users outside of the US.

The NCMEC also reports the numbers of CyberTipline reports made to different law enforcement organizations such as Internet Crimes Against Children, Local LE, Federal LE, and International LE.

Law enforcement is not required to give any feedback on what happens with these reports and, as a result, they hardly provide feedback. Using the NCMEC’s own numbers, we can see there is little visibility on how the reports are used.

In 2022, we saw the following rates of feedback from law enforcement and other groups who received reports.

• International Crimes Against Children Groups – 491,655 actionable reports resulted in 41.59% Feedback
• Local Law Enforcement – 1,462 actionable reports resulted in 3.48% Feedback
• Federal Law Enforcement – 1,356,988 reports resulted in 0.03% Feedback
• International Law Enforcement – 13,995,567 reports resulted in 0.4% Feedback

Keep in mind, a feedback response doesn’t necessarily mean an arrest or conviction. Feedback responses could may indicate the report was closed or incomplete feedback. Also, these results are not open to the public, although a FOIA request could change that. However, these numbers make it clear that whether companies are voluntarily scanning their content or creating reports after becoming aware of CSAM – there’s no visibility on what actually happens with the reports.

Given the huge volume of reports not acted upon, forcing technology providers to automatically scan content & generate reports is not going to magically change things. It will require law enforcement to act on reports to put child predators behind bars and save children. That is, after all, what legislators say they want.

That’s not to say nothing is being done. A 2022 report of CyberTipline success stories in the United States stated that close to 714 different cases used CyberTipline reports. Only 16 of these cases explicitly reported the assistance of a service provider.

Again, out of 1.35 million actionable CyberTipline reports in the United States in 2022, there have been 714 arrests so far. Its possible there are ongoing investigations that will bring this number higher, but we can only guess without transparency. I was unable to find success stories for any prior years.

I commend these efforts to protect children from dangerous predators; however, these efforts do not necessitate automatic scanning of everyone’s messages or the gutting of encryption. Generating more reports from service providers obviously does not lead to more arrests being made. Lastly, the majority of CSAM material comes from big tech providers, many of whom are voluntarily scanning content anyways. Why enforce this requirement on every website on the internet?

If legislators around the world want to make a genuine impact on child abuse, then they should push for transparency and accountability practices for law enforcement and work to ensure that law enforcement properly investigates the millions upon millions of reports they already receive every year, and make the data available to the public.

We the people need to know that the groups responsible for investigating child abuse are doing their jobs with the processes and data already available, rather than further sacrifice our individual privacy and security for more of the same. The bills/laws in question also lack an understanding of encryption, are not technically feasible to implement, put unnecessary legal liability on technology companies, and lack evidence that the policies will improve outcomes for children.

How can the online child abuse laws across Western countries be so consistent with their practices? How did they all reach the same strategies of age verification, content filtering, and client side scanning?

The framework for this legislation has been in the works for years. One key architect of this push has been the WePROTECT Global Alliance, a merger of initiatives between the European Commission, the US Department of Justice, and the UK Government. Their first summit was hosted in 2014 and is now comprised of 97 governments, 25 technology companies, and 30 civil society organizations.

UNICEF, a member of WePROTECT, released a “model national response” which outlines many of the elements we see in these different child safety bills today. UNICEF and organizations like the US Department of Justice state that sexual exploitation of children cannot be addressed by one country, company, or organization working in isolation. Troublingly, both of those groups have a history of turning a blind eye to child abuse in their respective organizations and/or jurisdictions (see here, here, here and here for examples).

Working groups like the “Five Country” government counterparts (Five Eyes) – USA, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand– have met with the corporate executives of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Roblox, Snap, and Twitter to collaborate on guidelines such as the “Voluntary Principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse” (justice.gov link). These groups are all working together, via public-private partnerships like the Global Cyber Alliance, among others, to change the face of the internet.

Earlier this year, the Department of Justice outlined the “risky” aspects of technology in a 2023 National Strategy Report on Child Exploitation:

– an uneven response to online child safety by the tech sector;
– a CyberTipline system that is overwhelmed;
– anonymization of offenders;
– encryption of data storage and communications;
– online environments where children and adults interact without supervision or controls;
– globalized, often sovereignless, platforms;
– remote, often extraterritorial, storage; and
– a compounding lack of public awareness of these risks.

While the issue of child exploitation online is grave and child abusers need to be held accountable – this shouldn’t come of our individual privacy and freedom. From the publicly stated perspectives of these groups, anonymization, encryption, and not allowing governments or tech companies to track all content is equivalent to contributing to child exploitation.

Ignoring the child abuse right in front of their noses

As noted earlier, many of these groups have a track record of responding very poorly to serious child abuse issues when these crimes involve their own organization or persons with political value. For instance, there have been nearly 2,000 allegations of child sexual abuse and exploitations made against U.N “Peacekeepers” worldwide between 2004 and 2016, as reported by the Associated Press. This includes the child sex ring in Haiti from 2004 to 2007 where Sri Lankan UN “Peacekeepers” traded food in exchange for sex with children as young as nine years old.

The names of the offenders are kept confidential by the UN, and the UN puts the responsibility on member states to investigate & prosecute. UN records on these allegations are also incomplete and hundreds of cases have been closed without explanation. The United Nations even continues to send Sri Lankan peacekeepers to Haiti, despite the scandals. In the United States, we can see a similar level of accountability with the Department of Justice still withholding the client list for Jeffrey Epstein’s child prostitution ring, among many, many other examples.

The very organizations that try to convince us to give up our individual liberties for the sake of the children will completely ignore crimes against children when it suits them. Can we really trust these organizations to protect children?

The real-time monitoring of messages and outlawing of privacy will not protect children. On the contrary, it would put their communications into the hands of more third parties. The wiser choice would be to encourage parental awareness and conscious use of technology, e.g. not giving children unlimited access to mobile phones or devices and avoiding use of popular social media platforms and messengers.

If these actors truly cared about protecting children, then they would call an end to the genocide & war crimes occurring in Gaza. Instead, the US is rushing to provide aid to Israel in the form of munitions. In the UK, only 80 out of 650 MP’s have called for a ceasefire. Instead, there is more interest in clamping down on and controlling the internet, a crucial resource for all people in a time of great need.

Inter-governmental organizations are pushing towards an internet where our identities are verified and our messages are tracked. With such legislation coming our way all over the world, how can we retain any privacy?

The answer is simple – do not comply. Do not follow along with big tech companies that voluntarily follow legislative guidelines. Find ways to decentralize your use of software. Invest your time into divesting from big tech and learning alternative solutions for communications, storage, and encryption. Given the stakes, there has never been a more important time to divest from these companies and their software.

Thankfully, there are still many ways that individuals can limit their dependence on centralized software services that perform content or AI scanning. We can boycott those Big Tech companies that scan our content including Microsoft, Google, Apple and countless others. It’s just a matter of learning how to take back our technology.

At this point you might be asking:

• How do we continue to find information on the internet without Google’s search engine?
• Or use our computers without Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s macOS?
• Or use our phones without Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS?
• Or use our browser without Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge, or Apple’s Safari? (the oligopoly of these behemoths extends everywhere.)

Solving these problems with alternative software has been the mission of my initiative Take Back Our Tech, and today I am honored to share 5 Ways To Protect Yourself from Incoming Internet Surveillance Bills with the Unlimited Hangout community.

1. Use a “free” operating system for your computer.

Traditional operating systems (“OSs”) like Windows and macOS are proprietary software, which is distinct from free software. It’s important to understand the difference between the two, as the topic will come up again. So let’s define proprietary and free software.

Proprietary software, or “non-free software,” is not available for users to study, observe, or change. As the user, you are given no rights.

For example, only the developers of Microsoft Windows can get a clear look at the code of the operating system and understand what it does. Users have no way to view the code, and verify what the program does.

In contrast, free software (also known as Free & Open Source Software FOSS) gives users rights. The Free Software Foundation, one of the leading organizations behind the Free Software movement, provides an extended definition:

“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.

You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got them, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.

Alternative operating systems based on GNU/Linux are free software. They offer many intended benefits:

• Visibility into changes: Any user or developer can take a look at code updates and ensure that the operating system is not acting unexpectedly or maliciously. For instance, users of the Ubuntu OS fought back against changes that sent search results to Amazon and got the changes overturned.
• More choices: Because others can modify and distribute free software at will, far more software choices exist in the free software ecosystem — choices that often outcompete and provide more value than proprietary software.
• Costs: All Linux distributions are FREE as in cost. Compare this to paying for Windows activation keys.
• Freedom: Your computer will not automatically track every program that you run, as does macOS, or force updates on you, as Windows does (and to which you agree in their terms of service, a document very few take the time to read).

So what are you waiting for? Throw your proprietary software in the trash and enjoy an operating system that respects your freedom and your data.

• If you’re still not convinced and want to see all the ways traditional operating systems take advantage of you, read our Leap to Linux article.
• If you’re interested in learning how to install a Linux-based OS, please follow #TBOT’s guide.
• If you’re interested in other Linux learning articles, here is #TBOT’s content series on Linux.

Here are some recommendations for free operating systems based on Linux. You can download the .iso file (in which the OS is contained) for each operating system from the following links as well as feature walkthroughs.

Once you’ve made your decision of OS you can follow the guide linked above to get it installed on your machine.

• (Features) Linux Mint: https://linuxmint.com/
• (Features) KDE Neon: https://neon.kde.org/
• (Features) MX Linux: https://mxlinux.org/

2. Use open-source software on your phone.

The two main choices for traditional mobile operating systems today is Google’s Android, and Apple’s iOS. These two options make up 99%+ of the global market share of mobile operating systems. With over 6.6 billion phones on earth, the data pipeline to these two companies is incomprehensibly large – they’ve got real-time data for almost every person on the planet.

Observational studies of both Android and iOS-based phones found that these devices connect back to their parent companies every 5 minutes. In addition, they collect unique device identifiers, phone numbers, locations, and other surprising info.

Although it would be too lengthy to discuss these issues in-depth in this article, if you’d like to see exactly what tracking and data collection occurs on these mobile operating systems, you can read #TBOT’s analysis here.

A few alternative operating systems have popped up in recent years that can compete with the likes of Google and Apple. These operating systems are referred to as “de-googled” operating systems, and are typically built on top of Android’s Open Source Platform (AOSP). This code is maintained by Google, but other developers have been able to build new features on top of it, and more importantly, to remove any behind-the-scenes tracking or data collection.

You can use one of these alternative operating systems today to configure your own “privacy phone.”

I recommend these three operating systems (note that each is compatible with only certain phones):

• GrapheneOS (leading standard for security): https://grapheneos.org/
• DivestOS (device compatibility with 0 Google Services): https://divestos.org/
• LibreMobileOS (a newer OS with great features): https://libremobileos.com/

You can get more information on supported phones and the install instructions on each website.

Alternatively, if you are pressed for time or don’t want to do the research and make the tech decisions yourself, you can get a phone out of the box that comes complete with GrapheneOS and useful free software apps and communication services, through my project Above Phone.

De-googled phones use alternative app stores like F-Droid (where all apps are free software) and Aurora Store (which will allow you to download apps anonymously from the Google Play Store).

Normal Android phones also have access to these apps, but will still suffer from centralized tracking through Google Services. If you have an Android-based phone you can get started with these alternative app stores right away. Get more details on the links below:

F-Droid FOSS App Catalogue: https://f-droid.org/
Aurora Store: https://auroraoss.com/

You may be surprised at how easily you can transition to a de-googled phone — there are user friendly, private, and functional options for almost all of your app needs. You can also use apps like Uber & AirBnb, which don’t work without Google services, but there is usually a workaround, like using those services from within a web browser, or by using advanced features like GrapheneOS’s sandboxing to isolate Google Services from the rest of your phone.

3. Own your data.

If a major cyber event caused the internet to go down, how would you recover the photos/files/information you stored on cloud services? How would you get the information you needed to prepare for a survival situation?

It would be best to have this information on hand when you need it – not desperately trying to recover it in the event of a cyber disaster.

At a minimum, you should back up all of the following on your local computer instead of on the cloud service you use currently: passwords, legal documents, books, photos, reference material, and maps.

Here are some suggestions to be “cyber-pandemic” ready.

1. Knowledge is power. Download all the books you need in PDF format. A great site to start is PDFDrive
2. Need to navigate offline? Organic Maps (available on F-Droid and for Android phones) lets you download maps of most of the regions on the planet — and you can route to different locations using GPS only (which means you don’t need a SIM card in your phone).
3. If you use Google Drive or iCloud, now is the time to export all of your photos, videos, and documents to a local hard drive. Here’s a tutorial on how to export Google Drive files. Here’s an tutorial on how to export files on iCloud.
4. Are you managing your passwords in the cloud? Know that cloud password managers are not immune to hacking attempts. The best place for your passwords is in an encrypted password vault on your computer. An attacker would need not only the password vault file on your computer, but also the master password used to encrypt the vault. A collection of software called Keepass offers a cohesive way to manage and sync passwords locally on your computer and on your phone.

4. Support alternatives.

A wide range of software can serve as alternatives in the open-source software ecosystem. I’ve categorized and listed several great ones below, all of which are programs for Linux computers!

You can also find an important set of core software for Linux with details on how to use it on #TBOT’s Open-Source Survival Toolkit. A larger list of programs is available on #TBOT’s Open Source Survival Library.

Password Managers

KeepassXC: Offline password manager.
Bitwarden: Cloud-based password manager

Privacy / Security

I2P: Private peer-to-peer networking layer.
VeraCrypt: Open-source cross-platform disk encryption

Browsers

Ungoogled Chromium: A (fork) copy of Google’s Chromium engine with tracking removed
LibreWolf: Firefox fork with improved privacy
Falkon: KDE Project’s web browser

Email

Evolution: A mail client, calendar, address book, and task manager in one
Thunderbird: Mozilla Foundation’s email, chat, and calendaring client
Mailspring: Easy-to-use, modern mail client with integrations to major email providers
KMail: KDE’s email client that supports many mail protocols

Communication

Kotatogram: Alternate Telegram client with improved offline features
AnyDesk: Remote desktop / support software
Jitsi: Free video conferencing
Jami: Free and open-source peer-to-peer video conferencing.

Social Media

Nostr: a decentralized social media protocol
PeerTube: Decentralized video broadcasting
Nitter: Alternative twitter front end
Invidious: Alternative YouTube front end
Libreddit: Alternative Reddit front end
Owncast: Self-hosted live video and web chat server

Graphics

Krita: Free and open source digital illustration program
Inkscape: Professional vector-based graphics editor
GIMP: One of the oldest and best- known image editors
Pinta: Bitmap editor similar to Paint.NET
Gravit Designer: Vector-based design app
Blender: End-to-end 3D creation suite

Photography

DarkTable: Virtual light table and darkroom for photography
DigiKam: Personal photo management

Video Editors

Kdenlive: The KDE project’s video editor
Davinci Resolve: High-end professional video editor
OpenShot: Easy-to-use, powerful video editor

Video Utilities

OBS Studio: Video recording and live streaming
Kazam: Record videos of your screen
Peek: Record videos and gifs of your screen
Spectacle: KDE’s screenshot tool

Technical Tools

Remmina: A remote desktop client
VirtualBox: Create virtual machines

Writing

CherryTree: Hierarchical note-taking application that stores multimedia notes in an encrypted database (not markdown)
Trillium Notes: Build knowledge bases & graphs with this extensible note-taking application (not markdown)
Joplin Notes: Create simple notes and to do lists using markdown

Reading

Foxit PDF: Feature-rich PDF reader.
Sioyek: PDF reader for academic papers.

Office

LibreOffice: Most popular open-source office suite for Linux
OnlyOffice: Collaborative online document editor
CryptPad: Browser-based encrypted document editor
HomeBank: Personal money management

5. Own your communications.

Although social messengers like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger can be useful, many of them are not open source. Even the ones that claim to be open source often only make the front end of the application visible for inspection (that part you interact with directly), not the server-side code that is responsible for delivering messages.

Chat protocols like XMPP and Nostr are fully open source, meaning the code is available for the client and server. This is especially important because it means that you can run the server-side software yourself on a computer under your control. This is called self-hosting, and it’s crucial to censorship resistance and verifying that a software does what it says.

XMPP is over 20 years old and can support tens of thousands of users on a single server. It offers end-to-end encrypted messaging, voice calls, and video calls (as well as files and audio messages). It can be used on computers, phones, and in a web browser, and it’s also completely free to join (you can join any public server). It can even be bridged to the phone network (anonymous phone numbers without needing a SIM card anyone?).

It’s a wonder why XMPP isn’t more well known, but part of the reason could be that it’s hard to monetize (make money) on XMPP. The protocol has been used under the hood for major chat services run by big tech companies scaling to millions of users, unfortunately these big companies hid the underlying technology.

Above Phone is attempting to change this. The Above Privacy Suite offers a professional XMPP service with enhanced privacy. It comes in a bundle with 5 other privacy services.

• If you want more information about XMPP, you can read #TBOT’s most popular article to date, which gives a comprehensive overview.
• If you want video lessons on how to use XMPP for chats, calls, and video calls, you can check out Above Phone’s webinar.

Conclusion

The internet is changing and battle lines are being drawn. On one side, government organizations have become obsessed with invading our personal communications and drastically advancing the ever encroaching surveillance state, supposedly “for the sake of the children.” Together with enthusiastic help from Big Tech, they threaten to monitor even single thought, idea, or creation you share on the internet.

On the other side are people who are not going to let that happen. We’re the underdogs, a small but growing number of people who are demanding privacy and freedom over convenience. It doesn’t have to be their way or the highway when it comes to technology, we can carve our own path, experimenting with software that is friendly and in alignment with our values. Hopefully, this guide can give you a starting point to understand your technology and places to find alternatives.

I encourage you to not only explore and use the software listed in this guide, but to support the developers with financial donations. Their projects may be the key to both surviving and thriving in the growing surveillance state.

5 Ways To Prepare for the Online Privacy Crackdown.

Whitney joined Marty to discuss the conflict in the Levant and how the bankers intend to use AI to control your life.

Clips on Podverse.

TFTC.