National’s Anti-Money Laundering & Countering Financing of Terrorism Monster - iPredict the State Gulag

This piece of Soviet legislation took down the brilliant iPredict today:

Prediction website iPredict is to be closed down, with the Government deciding it represents a money laundering risk.

The site, run by Victoria University of Wellington's commercialisation arm, VicLink, issued a statement to its website and on Twitter on Thursday.

According to the iPredict statement, Associate Justice Minister Simon Bridges refused to grant it an exemption from the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act, declaring that it was a "legitimate money laundering risk" because of the lack of customer due diligence.

The raison d’etat of the Act revolves around identifying all individuals to a financial or property transaction. The cost of that on the economy, however, is huge. I have a small client base, but the reach of the Act’s bureaucracy is too much for me:

What a bizarre and nutty decision by the Government.  https://t.co/D9KhSneTOr

— David Farrar (@dpfdpf) November 25, 2015

@dpfdpf This governments anti-money laundering legislation has reached the point of total idiocy. It's so draconian I'm shedding every 1/2

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) November 25, 2015

@dpfdpf independent trusteeship I do. The cost on the economy must be enormous, so I'd love to see the supposed scale of crime is to ...

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) November 25, 2015

@dpfdpf justify it. Just this last week I've charged a three hour trip to a client to have my signature verified by a lawyer who has

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) November 25, 2015

@dpfdpf known me for 20 years, and over an asset I have no beneficial interest in. It's ludicrous .. above for @JudithCollinsMP

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) November 25, 2015

Although, of course, my problem is chiefly philosophical. It’s always about philosophy. Put this Act together with the tax surveillance state, and the Soviet reference in my first sentence is no hyperbole (remember Twitter – don’t mind the typo):

I always hated our anti-money laundering legislation because of its (total) inconvenience, and cost to the economy, but the worst aspect 1/x

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) November 26, 2015

@MarkHubbard33 of its central motif, identity, is also what makes it for the govt and integral part of the surveillance state.

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) November 26, 2015

@MarkHubbard33 I don't get it why people don't understand that the surveillance states of the West go deeper than Orwell now. #EndOfLunch

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) November 26, 2015

Yes, the Left getting in will finish off the economy and take us all to the Big State Gulag (also), but these National autocrats are way past their use-by date. If I could stand people in numbers – I can’t – I'd say go get your pitchforks and meet me in the foyer.

PS: hope everyone got their flag voting slips in (FFS). National, the party which put back the ‘us’ at the front of useful idiots.

Mils Muliaina and Reversing the Burden of Proof in Sexual Assault Cases.

Mils Muliania should be able to sue the Welsh police for the harm they have done him. The judge hearing his sexual assault case has thrown it out, and on the face of the reportage, I find it incredible this former All Black has had his life, and reputation, shredded over the last seven months on the basis of this:

 Proceedings in Wales have ended because the Cardiff Crown Court ruled there was insufficient evidence, and no realistic prospect of a conviction.

Muliaina, 35, had been charged with sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman in Cardiff in March.

His defence counsel, John Charles Rees, said the Crown's case was "outrageous".

He said the allegation was that the complainant's bottom had been fleetingly touched [outside her trousers] on a busy nightclub dancefloor.

Muliaina was later [publicly with TV cameras in attendance] arrested by police moments after a cup match before being charged with sexual assault.

Speaking outside the court, Muliaina said the past seven months have been difficult for him and his family.

"While I understand the police have a job to do, the manner in which I was arrested I find difficult to understand.

"I can still hold my head up high and, as the judge said, this is no stain on my character. I have always known that I did not do anything wrong.

"I don't even know the woman and I don't know what happened, but I wasn't the person who had done what she said had happened."

I have written previously on how identity feminism (as opposed to a feminism based on individualism) has the agenda of reversing the burden of proof in sexual assault cases such as this, and further, that women making false rape complaints are not prosecuted (noting I’m not saying ‘this’ was a false complaint, but certainly a wrong-headed one. Although, to invite censorious condemnation on my head, this public demolition of a prominent 'male' for a 'fleetingly' touched bottom in a nightclub - really?) ... Matters of scale and gravity in Muliaina's case aside, if won, this reversal of proof will destroy the hard fought for principle that justice is best served by innocent until proven guilty, and turn our legal system into a mechanism for vendetta (by social justice thugs) and politicking.

Worse, this notion, along with the concomitant concept there be no right to silence in such cases, has been given oxygen way too high up in the current government, including Prime Minister Key.

There is one other field in our modern tax surveillance states where the burden of proof is reversed against the individual: taxation. IRD assess you, and it’s your job to prove them wrong. This is a system loaded toward the state, where individuals are on the back foot, with few resources (compared to the entire tax-pool turned against them), and consequently over the last fifteen or so years IRD haven’t lost an important, precedent setting tax avoidance case. And that has meant everything is tax avoidance now, pretty much wherever the taxpayer is not paying the maximum quantum of tax. The standard of classical liberalism we had in the Commonwealth protecting us from this abuse by a rampant state, the Westminster Principle, is destroyed at the enfeebled hands of a judiciary captured by Gramsci from their earliest state-schooled infancy who firmly believe that property in your effort and income vests in the state, not you individually.

This is a vicious dystopia. Because turn Muliaina’s burden of proof around to the Welsh police simply being able to have charged he touched her bottom, and rather than they have to prove he did, he has to prove he didn’t - how well would he have got on then? This would be playing out differently, and not in the cause of truth and justice.

We need to find our way back to individualism, because the foundations of the next Western gulags are clearly visible.


Related Reading (Not Linked in Source Post):

Retrieving Roger Sutton's Corpse from the Cross of Shesus.

How Many Ways You No Longer Have a Private Life:

Two days ago I said this:

IRD operates above our Privacy Act: it can raid my business premises without warrant; it will never be denied a warrant to raid my home; it can demand my bank statements from the bank and my bank will acquiesce without my knowledge; I have no right to remain silent when an interview is 'requested' by IRD; and as a taxpayer the burden of proof is turned against me - unlike for an accused murderer, burglar, et al, I am not innocent until proven guilty before the tax courts, IRD can simply assess me and I have to prove my innocence, so breaching a fundamental tenet of a free society.

Some years ago I wrote how the Revenues around the world routinely snoop on social media for thought crimes - if you look at the footnoted update, you'll see IRD read that post.

Yesterday I wrote on how your bank is now required to snoop on you under Judith Collins’ Anti-Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism Act:

RIP the economy (and any privacy you ever had). This National government is generating more red tape than the previous Labour one did. To capture a minor subset of transactions, every single commercial and private transaction, be it financial (where your bank has to report you to police if irregularities are found), or property, are being delayed, and weighed done by cost on cost on cost on penalty of the snitch society. God I want out.

Over the weekend Rodney Hide wrote a chilling piece on the investigation on him by the Official Assignee, covertly targeting his friends and family:

The interesting thing for me is how upsetting it has proved to be. I have nothing to hide. I am well used to being in the public spotlight. It was once part of my life to have others talk about me in less than flattering terms.

I would have thought it no big deal to have a state agency do similar.

But I have found it extremely disturbing to have friends and colleagues compelled to appear under threat of arrest and answer questions about me and my family put to them by a private investigator under contract to the Government.

Oh, and to have those friends and colleagues warned not to tell me what they were asked.

 It's extremely invasive and sinister. It's what we expect of totalitarian regimes, not free and democratic societies such as ours.

So of course today we find the police have taken their pointless war on drugs to your Facebook page:

The monitoring has been exposed by members of a blackmarket Facebook group, who complained of receiving letters out of the blue from police, warning them they were being watched.

One unidentified user received a letter from the Canterbury Organised Crime Squad, dated July 15, warned that their membership of a group suspected to be aiding illegal drug deals had been noticed.

There are no parts of our lives not being surveiled and intruded upon. From a letter to the editor of today’s Press, penned by no other than Sir David Hay:

ECan employees who screen for smoke from wood burners invade our domestic lives and put people who try to heat their homes affordably at risk of a $750 fine. The invitation for neighbours to inform on neighbours reeks of a totalitarian state.

But hey, the sacrifice of our private lives is justified: we’re catching the tax evaders, we’re catching the money launderers, we're catching the polluters to ensure they don't heat themselves, and we’re catching the druggies.

No.

For freedom lovers, the price has been too high. Those who’ve read George Orwell’s 1984 will remember the proles thought everything largely fine in the prison cells of their minds, it was only those who had foot-tripped over the State who figured out the nature of the entrapment, and the total loss of liberty that defined them. Which explains why the below photo is not from that novel, it’s from a street in England, courtesy HMRC – though I think I know what they’re using as their manual:

Next time you’re updating your Facebook, you be careful out there. Don’t go thinking you’re living in a free country. That, and we all live in the snitch society now. Forget the threat of external terrorism, we have an internal surveillance state which is far beyond the bounds of what a free, western society should have settled for without (at least) civil rebellion.