The European Commission is proposing the creation of a database that will hold information on those using virtual currencies and that will record data on the users’ real-world identity, along with all associated wallet addresses. This is under the guise of “fighting terrorism.”

This is the first proposal part of an action plan that the EU got rolling after the Paris November 2015 terror attacks and that it officially put forward in February 2016 and later approved at the start of July 2016.

As we wrote in our article from a few weeks back, the action plan, a reform of the Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD) so it would also include the terms “virtual currency,” was only approved by the (EU President) Juncker Commission.

New AMLD will end anonymous Bitcoin transactions in the EU

This action plan is now making its way through the rest of the EU regulatory body, with the European Commission now in charge of putting the reformed AMLD to paper. As expected, the first draft of the AMLD now includes mentions to virtual currencies.

Besides recognizing crypto-currencies as another form of money, the draft also includes a set of regulations that would provide FIUs (financial intelligence units) with the tools needed to keep track of digital currencies, in the same way they do with fiat currencies.

To combat money laundering via digital currencies, EU officials plan to create a database that links Bitcoin and other crypto-currency addresses with real-world individuals, essentially putting an end to the anonymity that accompanies such payments.

FIUs across member states will have the power to create and then manage such databases, but users will also be allowed to register on their own, as a sign of good faith. The current AMLD draft reads:

The report shall be accompanied, if necessary, by appropriate proposals, including, where appropriate, with respect to virtual currencies, empowerments to set-up and maintain a central database registering users’ identities and wallet addresses accessible to FIUs, as well as self-declaration forms for the use of virtual currency users.

As mentioned when ministers from various countries met in Brussels last year, the EU is interested in regulating Bitcoin and similar currencies so that it would be harder for terrorists and cyber-criminal groups to use the currency to hide their operations and move large sums of money across borders.

Digital currency exchanges and wallet providers operating in Europe will most likely have to abide by the reformed AMLD and force EU users to register with their real information so that FIUs could track down individuals behind suspicious operations.

Bitcoin is regularly used for ransomware payments, in human trafficking (slavery, prostitution rings), kidnappings, extortions, hacking tools, and all sorts of illegal services and products.

Initial estimations have the reformed AMLD reaching the European Parliament for a final vote later in the year.

By Virgil Vaduva

Bitcoin and technology media is in a feeding frenzy over the revelations from Wired Magazine and Gizmodo about the latest news: Satoshi Nakamoto has been identified! And his name is Craig Steven Wright, an Australian man living in a modest Sidney home, who has a lot of “big computer equipment” in his basement, needing a lot of electricity.

In what appears to be an elaborate hoax played on the media, an unknown individual (or a group of individuals ), likely Craig Wright himself, managed to disseminate just enough circumstantial evidence in order to motivate an eager journalist to determine that he, namely Craig Wright, is Satoshi Nakamoto, the original creator of Bitcoin.

Virtually all of Wired Magazine’s original article is in essence concluding that Wright is Satoshi based on blog post time stamps dating as far back as 2008, supposed leaked e-mail messages and transcripts of conversations between Wright and New South Wales government employees. The Gizmodo article also attempts to use the same evidence to reach similar conclusions. The irony in all these explosive revelations is that all authors involved in the writing of the Wired and Gizmodo articles are going out of their way to not repeat the mistakes of the Newsweek 2014 article which erroneously outed an innocent bystander named Dorian Nakamoto as the creator of Bitcoin. They are using words like “probably” and even include an unambiguous disclaimer in the piece, stating,

Despite that overwhelming collection of clues, none of it fully proves that Wright is Nakamoto.

In October 2014, Dorian Nakamoto announced that he intended to sue Newsweek, and months after taking relentless mocking and heat from the general public, Newsweek appears to have moved the original piece on Nakamoto behind a paywall that ignores the “5 Free Articles” limit extended to non-subscribers. Having learned from Newsweek’s mistakes, perhaps Wired and Gizmodo are simply trying to have it both ways: create a massive amount of publicity and traffic, and be able to walk away from a highly controversial story saying that they never claimed with certainty that Wright is Satoshi .

Here is why I believe that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto:

1. Time stamps on blog posts can be easily faked. A blog post’s date and time can easily be written today and made to look as if it was written in 2008.
2. Any documents claimed to be “leaked” coming from anonymous sources can also be faked and manipulated. This includes audio recordings, transcripts and supposed e-mail messages.
3. Wired’s claim that e-mail addresses used by Craig Wright are “very similar” to e-mail addresses used by Satoshi Nakamoto is just journalistic hyperbole and cannot be used to prove that Wright is Satoshi .
4. The claims that PGP keys used by Wright and Satoshi are “linked to the creation of Bitcoin” also lack any substance.  A PGP signature can offer concrete evidence of authorship, or verification that the person possessing the private key used to sign a specific file or e-mail message is in fact the true person behind the messages. Wright has not provided any such evidence, and this evidence should be easily provided. He could simply make a public post stating that he is Satoshi Nakamoto and sign that post with Satoshi’s original PGP key, which he has never use and can be found here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/Satoshi_Nakamoto.asc
5. Satoshi Nakamoto has never shown the desire to be a media hog or a public person, while Wright has. Satoshi has always shown the desire to be private and live in the shadows; Wright has not.
6. Wright is still mining Bitcoin. According to the Sidney police who have raided Wright’s home shortly after the Wired article was published, there was a substantial amount of equipment in Wright’s home, most likely used for Bitcoin mining. According to the landlord, Wright had a three phase, high amperage circuit pulled into the building, also indicating that a mining operation is ongoing. It is extremely unlikely that Satoshi would have a need to mine bitcoin as he mined the original genesis blocks. These bitcoin have never moved on the Blockchain since they were originally mined in January 2009. It is generally accepted that Satoshi has a ton of Bitcoin already, about 1 million of them. He would not spend valuable time and resources on mining activity that is no longer very profitable.
7. Wright is in trouble with the government of New South Wales. While this does not prove much, we can speculate that this may be a ploy by Craig Wright to create publicity to advertise his business enterprises, one of which is a “Bitcoin bank” called DeMorgan LTD, a “pre-IPO” company which would greatly benefit financially from the suggestion that its founder and majority owner is Satoshi himself. Not coincidentally, the price of Bitcoin has gone up substantially since Wright’s claims were publicized.

It appears to be quite evident that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. Until Wright provides some solid cryptographic evidence that he is Satoshi, Wired and Gizmodo should stick to celebrity boob-job news and try to resist the temptation to write sensational news which do not really benefit the Bitcoin community. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And the claims that Wright is Satoshi are very poor, at best.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

Left: former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges; Right: former DEA agent Carl Force

A former Secret Service agent charged with stealing over $800,000 worth of bitcoin during an investigation will plead guilty to a number of charges, according to court documents filed Wednesday by federal prosecutors.

Shaun Bridges, a computer forensics specialist working for the Secret Service, was charged in connection with the theft after investigators claim he obtained credentials to the now-defunct Silk Road, an online free marketplace famous for facilitating the peaceful trade of narcotics and other contraband. Bridges was in a position to obtain the credentials because he was involved in the arrest of a Silk Road associate who managed the marketplace’s passwords.

After being charged earlier this month, Bridges resigned from his position with the Secret Service. Bridges is expected to plead guilty to money laundering and obstruction of justice.

Another agent involved in the theft, former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Carl Force, has also been charged with extortion of Ross Ulbricht, whom investigators believe to be the person behind the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, former operator of the Silk Road. Force worked undercover for the DEA and was tasked with communicating with Ulbricht.

Ulbricht was sentenced in February to life in prison after being convicted in an extremely contentious trial which has sparked protests and condemnation from around the world. It is not yet known whether the arrest of the agents will aid in any possible appeals Ulbricht may file.

Force faces a number of other charges including conflict of interest, money laundering, wire fraud, and theft of government property. Like Bridges, Force also resigned from his position shortly after being charged.

Force is currently behind bars after a judge denied bail, agreeing with prosecutors that Force is a flight risk.

Judge Katherine Forrest was the judge in the trial of Ross Ulbricht.

by Virgil Vaduva

Even outrage is now a crime in the empire of lies. The Department of Justice is apparently not happy with just  sending Ross Ulbricht to prison for the rest of his life. Now they want to punish the public who is outraged by the behavior of the judge in his trial.

We just found out that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has issued a grand jury subpoena to Reason Magazine, a libertarian publication that often covers liberty-oriented issues and pieces. The subpoena can be read here (The Reason Magazine Grand Jury Subpoena)

The subpoena is dated June 2 and commands Reason to provide the grand jury “any and all identifying information” Reason has about participants in what it is referring to as a “chat.”  The comments in question were part of a discussion thread on an article authored by Nick Gillespie titled “Silk Road Trial: Read Ross Ulbricht’s Haunting Sentencing Letter to Judge.”

Many of the comments that may be perceived as being “questionable” are now gone and appear to have been deleted by the folks at Reason.  A short list of the comments in question were archived by Popehat, and none of them appear to be outright threats directed at this judge, rather just generic and frustrated statements about her actions:

AgammamonI5.31.15 @ lO:47AMltt
Its judges like these that should be taken out back and shot.

AlanI5.31.15 @ 12:09PMltt
It’s judges like these that will be taken out back and shot.
FTFY.

croakerI6.1.15 @ 11:06AMltt
Why waste ammunition? Wood chippers get the message across clearly. Especially if you
feed them in feet first.

Cloudbusterl6.l.15 @ 2:40PMIIt
Why do it out back? Shoot them out front, on the steps of the courthouse.

Rhywunl5.3l.15 @ 11:35AMIIt
I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman.

AlanI5.31.15 @ 12:11PMIIt
There is.

Product PlacementI5.31.15 @ 1:22PMIIt
I’d prefer a hellish place on Earth be reserved for her as well.

croakerl6.l.15 @ 11:09AMIIt
Fuck that. I don’t want to oay for that cunt’s food, housing, and medical. Send her through
the wood chipper.

US Attorney Preet Bharara

The subpoena, which is authored by United States Attorney Preet Bharara and signed by Assistant Attorney Niketh Velamoor claims that it is seeking “evidence in regard to an alleged violation of: Title 18, United States Code, Section 875.” This U.S. Attorney is looking for evidence of violations of the federal law against interstate threats which is the same statute that was at issue in the Supreme Court’s decision in Elonis v. U.S. last week, in which the Court decided that to be a “true threat” in violation of Section 875, the speaker must have some level of knowledge or intent that the hearer will take the threat seriously.

The political nature of the subpoena is quite transparent. According to his profile, Preet Bharara has made a career out of prosecuting cases related to “terrorism” and the war on drugs in the Southern District of New York.  This means that he appears before this particular judge almost daily for various cases; the subpoena appears to be little more than a political favor to this judge and also perhaps a subtle threat to the rest of the online dissenters out there: be careful who you criticize, and how you do it…or else.

Regardless of how one feels about the trial of Ross Ulbricht or his personal exploits, liberty advocates should be out on the roof tops shouting their outrage over this attack on online speech. It is ludicrous to claim that comments such as “he/she should be shot on the steps of the courthouse” are to be construed as actual threats, especially if the individual in question is a “public servant” or someone involved in making public and controversial decisions on a daily basis. As a journalist I have seen it all myself, including death threats received from anonymous critics. I shrug them off, put on my Glock and move on.

The implication here is that not only should we, the members of the public, accept what amount to outrageous, unconstitutional and tyrannical decisions from our “servants,” but that we must do so silently and without any outward sign of displeasure in accepting these decisions.  In essence, there is a clear expectation on the part of the ruling elite for the general public to accept, without questioning, their assault on our public liberties and freedoms.

The judge in this case, Katherine Forrest, has been doxed several times in the last year, by users of 4chan, 8chan and the TOR site, The Hidden Wiki. Her home address, telephone number and other information, none of which would be considered to be private for the rest of us, was published and then subsequently removed from all these forums.

A redacted screen shot from The Hidden Wiki showing some information about Katherine Forrest

So the question is, how can a federal judge and a government attorney, who are both paid through coercive taxation by the American people, be in a position where their actions are outside of the scope of “outrage” that we as the public have the right to express? Let us pretend for one moment that this judge did in fact err in her decision to sentence Ross Ulbricht to life in prison. What recourse do we have in this situation? One basic right is to take the outrage online and post online, sometimes angrily, about how this judge has violated her oath of office.

So if this very basic right to speak against decisions made by government bureaucrats is scrutinized and threatened with subpoenas, what else can Americans resort to? Is this not the government which was established after strong dissent towards the British crown? Even violent dissent? So why was this dissent acceptable then but not now?

When the guys from Popehat.com called the U.S. attorney that signed the subpoena sent to Reason Magazine, Mr. Velamoor responded with defensive and sometimes intimidating comments, claiming that there is a gag order on the subpoena, which is a statement that contradicts what the subpoena actually states, namely that it does NOT have a gag order associated with it.

Velamoor misspoke yet again when he claimed that the commenters did not commit a crime, however they need to be unmasked first in order to make a full determination.  In essence, these government lawyers are on a fishing trip aimed at punishing anonymous dissenters and sending a message to the rest of us: shut up, keep your voices down and stop complaining about unjust judicial decisions.

Perhaps Judge Katherine Forrest should be doxed, exposed or threatened by the general public if she made a horrific decision; after all she is a public servant who is seeking to not be accountable to the public and hiding behind a wall of subpoenas aimed at unmasking her anonymous critics.  She has made a career out of destroying to lives of peaceful Americans engaged in non-violent activities. Ross Ulbricht simply ran a commerce website and provided services which made the lives of everyone involved more peaceful and less violent. This judge has showed little desire for real justice in her courtroom throughout the trial by repeatedly blocking evidence beneficial to the defense and even ruling that emojis are admissible as evidence. At best she is just incompetent. At worst, she is corrupt and malicious.

It is for the American people to choose the path to a hopefully peaceful revolution and decide when they’ve had enough and when they can take back the reigns of power from their “public servants.” And perhaps it can be done without violence, executions of judges or war, but unlike their government, most American people are only calling out for action and are not acting on their statements yet. What will this judge and what will these government attorneys do when millions of people stop commenting online and instead go on the streets to take action? Will they subpoena us all?

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

This story written by Kashmir Hill and featured on Fusion

by Virgil Vaduva

It’s a web of mistrust, accusations and outrage. It all started earlier this year when the Department of Homeland Security send Reddit a subpoena for the identities of some members of the DarkNetMarkets subreddit, an online community where users share information and discuss various online markets located on the “dark net,” which is an euphemism used to describe services, sites and machines using anonymizing protocols such as TOR.

This is the current relationship between members of the DarkNetMarkets subreddit and the Bitcoin wallet hosting service, Coinbase.

On May 2nd, a Coinbase customer posted an ominous warning on Reddit, accompanied by screenshots, demonstrating that Coinbase is actively monitoring customer transactions. This particular user claims to have made a donation to Gwern Branwen, who is a researcher and the moderator of the DarkNetMarkets subreddit.

The complain went on to state:

“When I donated to gwern, I hadn’t made any other transactions with Coinbase for two weeks or more. The only transaction in Coinbase for the last two weeks until right now is the gwern donation. It’s no coincidence.”

A second user followed with a post a day later stating,

“Last friday a user posted that after donating to one of Gwern’s wallets coinbase sent him an email shortly after confirmed. Me being an inquisitive person and supporter of /u/gwern decided to give the theory a go and donated 5 dollars to the account. Well pics or it didn’t happen right? Proof: http://imgur.com/XrzWwo4“

Then, after another day, a third user wrote about an even a worse experience; he claims in his post that he made a payment to a dark net market from his Coinbase account and local cops showed up at his house in an attempt to interview him about onine activities:

“I wasn’t home yet from work, but my wife tells me local LE showed up and wanted to have a “chat”. Asked if I or anone had ever ordered anything illicit in the mail. Said “nobody’s in trouble, we’re just following up on something that might be nothing””

Many more Reddit users have been railing against Coinbase and speculating about the reasons behind what appears to be clear monitoring of transactions, especially to wallet addresses associated with dark net markets or researchers, activists or dissidents.

A Coinbase spokesperson e-mailed a comment to The Daily Dot and said, “We don’t comment on specific cases, however, Coinbase is required to monitor activity on its platform in accordance with the Bank Secrecy Act and other regulation governing all Money Service Businesses.”

It was unclear how donations made to specific users constitute a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.

Until Coinbase explains their monitoring activities in more detail, my recommendation would be to either stay away from their services or practice more caution when using them to make donations to people like Gwern Branwen, Edward Snowden or Ross Ulbricht.

Also, do not send Bitcoin to questionable address directly from your Coinbase account as Coinbase has a physical address for all their customers; if you do need to make anonymous donations or payments to certain individuals, withdraw all your Bitcoin from Coinbase and then make use of a Bitcoin mixing service like bitmixer.io.

Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology which can facilitate anonymous and safe transactions, but it is not anonymous by default. Learn about it and use it correctly before assuming anonymity.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak.  He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

As national fiat currencies slowly, but surely, fall by the wayside, or get outright replaced by digital currencies, its time to review the advantages of using Bitcoin as money going forward.

Currency and money are not the same things, they just have many of the same properties. The textbook definition in your dictionary may even give credence to money being “stamped by public authority”. That’s interesting, given the fact that before there were governments creating paper currency people did exchange beads for feathers, or milk for eggs. There was barter, as currency, and Gold was real money for its ability to hold value since the dawn of time.

Currency is man-made to remove Gold as an independent, natural medium of exchange, to great effect. It takes power from the people and passes it to government in the form of “currency”. Money pre-dates government-created currency throughout the history of man, and their central banking system. If man only existed in the last three hundred years, currency as money would be fairly accurate, but overall, given definitions are incomplete. Knowing the difference between currency and money is important to your future, as the global economy becomes more and more unstable under a mountain of fiat-induced debt.

Money and currency are similar, but not the same

Both money and currency share many properties: They are both units of account (are numbered in value), a medium of accepted exchange and portable. They are both divisible (into smaller units of measure), durable (won’t physically turn to dust after a couple of days) and fungible (the value of the unit is the same for you as it is for me; has similar value here or there). What makes money different is it is also a store of value, meaning it will hold value, or grow, over a long period. Can you put it in a bank, safe deposit box, or under a mattress, save it, and it will retain its monetary value over time? Some currencies are better monies than others.

The Difference between Currency and Money

Many don’t understand the difference between currency and money, and which is which. For the sake of familiarity, let us use the U.S. Dollar, the world’s global reserve currency, the creme-de-la-creme, as an example. Is it currency and money, or just a currency? It is portable, fungible, durable, a unit of account, a medium of exchange and divisible into smaller units. Is it a store of value?

Your government, particularly in the U.S., will use a national scale to show an annual inflation rate called a CPI (Consumer Price Index) to reflect the value of of money versus various goods and services. In the U.S., the government has a vested interest in keeping the rate of inflation at around 2%. Any fiat currency is built on trust in the currency since it isn’t actually backed by anything of intrinsic value. The problem with the government’s numbers is they tend to be fudged to reflect the desired result. If beef is going up in price at 20% a year, which it has done very recently, it is replaced in the CPI with something else that will get the numbers desired. Suffice to say, if your look at the factors that make up CPI or the inflation rate, the goods and services used has changed dramatically over the last generation. This has been to keep the 2% story alive and well. (Just don’t look behind the curtain too much.)

Plus, you have the government on the hook for cost-of-living increases in many entitlement programs. And with more and more people dependent on the government, and the government over $18,000,000,000,000 in debt, showing the cost-of-living is stable helps the government immensely. Whether it is the truth or not is another story. Perianne Boring did a great article on this subject for Forbes last year if you want more detail on this topic. It explains how actual inflation, as of last year, was closer to 5% than 2%. A pretty big margin for error, I’d say. If you avoid the establishment narrative and do your own due diligence, it’s amazing what you can find out about how the economic world really turns.

So you can make a weak argument that Dollars are a kind of money but are just very “bad actors” as money unless you like losing value, consistently. The point is dollars are not an effective store of value because they lose value every year. Since the privately-owned and operated Federal Reserve took over national currency production in 1913, the U.S. Dollar has lost approximately 97% of its value. Many economic experts believe that it will continue doing what it has been doing for over a century, declining, until it reaches its true value of zero. Inflation means your dollar loses value every year, so how can it be a store of value? It cannot.

Bitcoin, or gold, in contrast, can be considered money in its truest definition. Bitcoin’s market value, in US Dollars, was about a five cents five years ago and is currently just under $250 USD. Critics love to bring up the peak of $1100 in November of 2013, but that was obviously a bubble created by Mt. Gox “Willy Bots” and China’s ability to buy Bitcoin before government intervention. Now that the market has corrected itself, Bitcoin has returned to its original trajectory it would’ve had if Mt. Gox hadn’t occurred. Its current value is well ahead of its value in October of 2013. The point is Bitcoin is anti-inflationary and is designed to be a store of value. It cannot be inflated to destroy its future value to pay for wars or debt. It is not debt-based, nor government controlled by a private subcontractor. It is governed by mathematic algorithms, and you know how many bitcoins there will be now and decades into the future.

Gold also has seen plenty of bubbles and market manipulation. It has been as high as $1900 USD or as low as under one thousand dollars over the last few years. Bitcoin certainly didn’t invent market bubbles and manipulation. Gold has been seen as money for thousands of years. The only real problem is making it divisible. It is somewhat difficult to mine and create coins and use them in the general exchange of goods and services. One nugget of gold is not worth the same as another nugget of Gold. You can make them all divisible and fungible, but it takes a government or a private company to do that. Gold is generally not circulated as money but held for overall investment value, and it has value as a useful metal in industrial capacities.

No currency or money has “intrinsic value”. We all give these things value or assign things value, based on our belief that we can exchange them now and in the future. Many have deep questions about how long Bitcoin will be around, as well as the U.S. Dollar. You may not want to invest, long-term, in currencies as much as you should in money. Money always beats currency over time, because of money’s definition as a store of value over time. Just look at Gold versus every paper currency that’s ever existed. Gold has remained valuable for thousands of years running. Gold is money; it’s just not very good at being money. Gold is a great investment, past, present, and in the future. Paper currencies of human history, not so much. Paper currencies have a very poor track record of lasting over time. The Dollar has been no different than any other fiat currency. The U.S. Military has just been able to “stretch the soup”, if you will. Nothing last forever in fiat currency.

Bitcoin has been declared dead over 50 times by the mainstream media, yet it has shown to be a great store of value if volatile. It is volatile while growing in relative value; upwardly volatile. Paper currencies, like the dollar, have shown volatility on a downward spiral over time. Just something you should think about.

If you haven’t already, Mike Maloney does a great job of going into detail about these key differences in this video, “The Hidden Secrets of Money”, Part one of a four-part series. Watching and subscribing to him would be a wise move to further your financial education, and understand where this all may lead, and where Bitcoin may fit into your future.

Originally published at https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-qualifies-money-dollar-just-currency/

Barack Obama smoking Marijuana

by Virgil Vaduva

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In what is turning out to be a very poorly timed April 1, 2015 press release, the White House announced a new executive order signed by Barack Obama.  The order titled “Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities” is a very generic and vaguely written executive order allowing the Federal Government to confiscate all property of persons engaging in cyber activities which may be deemed inappropriate.

The order allowed for the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, to confiscate all property of persons which are deemed to be responsible for or complicit in “cyber-enabled activities.”

It is not very clear what “cyber-enabled activities” means, however the actions resulting in the following seem to be banned by this order:

(A) harming, or otherwise significantly compromising the provision of services by, a computer or network of computers that support one or more entities in a critical infrastructure sector;

(B) significantly compromising the provision of services by one or more entities in a critical infrastructure sector;

(C) causing a significant disruption to the availability of a computer or network of computers; or

(D) causing a significant misappropriation of funds or economic resources, trade secrets, personal identifiers, or financial information for commercial or competitive advantage or private financial gain; or

(A) to be responsible for or complicit in, or to have engaged in, the receipt or use for commercial or competitive advantage or private financial gain, or by a commercial entity, outside the United States of trade secrets misappropriated through cyber-enabled means, knowing they have been misappropriated, where the misappropriation of such trade secrets is reasonably likely to result in, or has materially contributed to, a significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States;

(B) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services in support of, any activity described in subsections (a)(i) or (a)(ii)(A) of this section or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order;

(C) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(D) to have attempted to engage in any of the activities described in subsections (a)(i) and (a)(ii)(A)-(C) of this section.

By using “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” as the vehicle to push this agenda, Barack Obama has bypassed all the Constitutional rights to due process that an American citizen has.  Just like the Patriot Act has done, this order allows for government agents to take someone’s private property or the contents of a bank account without due process and without criminal charges being brought against someone.

As the order clearly defined who it affected by this promulgation, the term “United States person” means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.

The language of the order also includes persons which are deemed to be complicit in such actions language which is believed to be aimed at punishing financial supporters of Edward Snowden or other detractors and whistle blowers that have exposed the criminal and unconstitutional activities in which the United States government has been engaging.

The language clearly specifies that those targeted under this order will receive no prior notification of their funds and property being confiscated: “…there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1 of this order.“

Fortunately there are alternative means to pseudo-anonymously provide financial support to Edward Snowden.  An official legal support fund has been created which accepts Bitcoin donations: https://blockchain.info/address/1snowqQP5VmZgU47i5AWwz9fsgHQg94Fa

 While the Obama administration claims to be the most transparent administration in history, reality paints a different picture.  The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based journalist advocacy organization, released Washington Post’s Leonard Downie’s findings in its first comprehensive look at press freedom in the United States: “The Obama Administration and the Press: Leak investigations and surveillance in post-9/11 America.”

The conclusion is shocking.  In the words of David Sanger, a correspondent for The New York Times, “this is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered.”  Marcus Brauchli, the former Washington Post executive editor, said the Bush administration had a worse reputation” for transparency, but “in practice, it was much more accepting of the role of journalism in national security.”

“What I see here is that Obama campaigned against excessive secrecy, promised to have the most transparent government in American history, signed presidential directives in his first day of office with a lot of fanfare, continues to say in speeches and interviews and press conferences that transparency is a high priority for him, and it hasn’t happened,” Leonard Downie said. “It doesn’t matter if he’s a Republican or Democrat. It matters what he has promised and has not delivered.”

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak.  He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

For the first time in nearly 200 years since its inception, the New York Stock Exchange makes an investment in a company. NYSE’s decision to invest follows a trend of higher-risk investment strategy following their acquisition by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in late 2013.

Coinbase, a startup based in San Francisco, is the most popular way to buy and sell Bitcoins in the United States. It is also the largest and most well-funded Bitcoin startup, with over 2 million users and over $75 million raised since its launch in 2012.