Free Money

-- By DanielHawley - 20 Mar 2024

Reflections on My Privacy

I haven't yet given up the smart-ass phone. I did ditch Google Chrome in favor of Brave. Prior to this semester, I moved conversations with close friends to Signal and turned off location services on my phone. But the other weekend, coming home from a night out in Greenpoint and reflecting on how I (love to) move through the city, I felt some despair at the way my movement is surveilled in ways I can't control.

Seeing that my first train was yet 15 minutes away, I ducked into the nearest convenience store to buy a Gatorade. Out of habit and before I could think better of it, I paid with my credit card. The problem: this convenience store doubled as what I assume is an unlicensed dispensary. I don't remember the name of the store, but it was probably a bad weed pun and had a similarly bad, green logo. Anyway, I left the store, walked down the subway stairs, and swiped my credit card again, this time on the military contractor OMNY card reader. The next day I settled up with a friend on the money transmitter Venmo (PayPay). Yet if I had paid in cash, I wouldn't have leaked any data about my location or how much I paid for what thing inside what store.

Preserving Privacy-Respecting Money

Cash is a form of privacy-respecting money. Cash is secret because it coordinates a transaction without gathering any data on the transaction itself. And cash is anonymous because it coordinates a transaction without gathering any data on the transacting parties. Moreover, cash (and similarly privacy-respecting coinage) is part of our constitutional design.

Yet there is a war on cash driving it to manufactured obsolescence. Digital payments are ubiquitous and sometimes mandatory. With it, privacy-respecting means of payment—and therefore of coordination—are disappearing.

I did have control of whether I paid in cash that night. I (probably) could've purchased a MetroCard? from a vending machine with cash. If I wanted to purchase just a single ride to avoid accumulating any transit data on my MetroCard? , I could've paid a small premium of $0.35. I didn't do that because it would be fucking annoying to me. But of course that's one of Professor Moglen's challenges to us all: to stop whining about being annoyed and start building privacy-respecting social practices.

Still, getting over how much it annoys me to look like a tourist for two minutes while I buy a MetroCard? from the vending machine or to carry some change in my pocket after paying for a Gatorade in cash is not going to start a revolution. Inconvenience may be my cross to bear, but it's not enough if the society loses privacy-respecting money in the digital payment age.

Further, consider this all in the on-campus context: the university is moving to a post-print format. Soon every book will be a surveilled book. So too, with money. Cash is to abundant physical books as non-cash digital money is to the post-print university. Soon all money will be surveilled money.

Surveillance-free books are an early and necessary component of social transformation. Minds must be shaped for deliberate action. Then, when it is time to act, people must associate to take that action. Association is not one of the forty-five words of the first amendment. Nevertheless, after NAACP v. Alabama, it is protected. Association requires coordination. It also requires provisioning. Consider also the importance of privacy-respecting means of coordination in the context of organizing dissent. We do not yet know the extent to which the Spring '24 encampment movement was surveilled by the university and its various police entanglements. But we do know that provisioning the movement in sums less than $10,000 was and is crucial.

Indeed, the technology that humans have used to coordination provisioning for the last 4,000 years or so is called money. Contrary to contemporary political, social, and artistic understanding, money is a boundless accounting tool. It allows political units who are too large to be governed by face-to-face interaction (see Graeber) to account for the obligations they owe and are owed. (And obligation is a primary ontological condition of humans, not contingent on monopolized state violence.) Therefore, like books and reading, surveillance-free money is crucial to social provisioning and thus social transformation. Our ability to create imagined new ways of living is contingent on our ability to design a just monetary system.

Advances in privacy-respecting money are promising for communication more broadly, too. In fact, advances in money and information technology have long accompanied one another. “[T]he invention of writing itself[] first began as monetary innovation[], before later taking on wider social and cultural significance.” Solving the engineering problems of privacy-respecting digital cash is promising for creating more privacy-respecting forms of communication. If two offline pieces of hardware can communicate to clear payments, they can also communicate other types of information without third party intermediaries.

Legal Tools

Here I’ll speculate on legal tools that can help us retain privacy-respecting money. The moon-shot argument is that money has been a privacy-respecting public utility and so there is a constitutional obligation to retain that property.

So far, this class has left little opening to make claims based on the 4th amendment. Indeed, the war on cash makes it more and more unreasonable to expect privacy-respecting money. Perhaps the 1st amendment can do better. After all, freedom of association requires some degree of privacy, and I am skeptical that association is possible without money. But the 1st, we’ve learned, aims at things there can’t be laws about. And retaining privacy-respecting money requires affirmative legislation, not just protection from bad legislation. Still, one might argue that if the government creates its own form of digital money, it must be privacy-respecting, unlike current proposals for central bank digital currencies. Sarah Jeong, for example, has argued “if money is speech, and free speech can require a certain degree of privacy, even anonymity, particularly so when the speaker supports an unpopular political cause—then why don’t we have a right to anonymous payments?”

Conclusion

How do you pay for the subway?

One day, let’s hope it’s with e-cash.

Yes, this is part of the problem, doubtless. Payment systems would have included e-cash a generation ago, if US encryption export controls hadn't made it impracticable. Now everyone wants to prevent the untraceable anonymity of cash, except those of us who always use it.

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