Drone Whistleblowers Kicked Out of Fiat System – Consider Bitcoin?
According to National Security and Human Rights lawyer Jesselyn Radack, a group of her clients is being ostracized from the fiat financial system as a result of blowing the whistle on certain aspects of the US government’s drone program. Taking to Twitter to complain, she asked if anyone had any suggestions.
Soon, Bitcoiner Rey Poullard had suggested the new Coinbase debit card – apparently not seeing the irony, since one cannot have a Coinbase account without a bank account.
Nevertheless, for the purposes of moving money around, Bitcoin could still be of use to these patriots. Although they’ll have difficulty with the last mile in terms of transferring the converted funds to themselves, they can always go somewhere like a Bitcoin meet-up, a Bitcoin ATM, or even LocalBitcoins to convert bitcoins to cash.
While cash is increasingly under attack, it can still be used to pay bills and more. The trouble with not having a bank account or even a credit card (she did not mention whether they were able to get pre-paid cards such as Green Dot, which can perform many of the same functions as a regular bank account) is that doing certain things like retaining telephone service, renting a motel room, renting a car, renting a storage unit, among others, becomes virtually impossible.
The whistleblowers can use Bitcoin to store their funds, but the day to day activity of paying bills and grocery shopping and so on, will become more dangerous for them as they are forced to hang on to increasing amounts of cash with nowhere to put it. This is not to discount the usefulness of Bitcoin, but merely to point out the ridiculousness of the fiat system.
For potential “enemies of the state,” as the government would have it, are not the only group who are marginalized in this regard. Immigrant laborers often have trouble maintaining bank accounts along with those being prosecuted for completely banal crimes. Mistakes are also made, with people being entered into the Chex Systems database who’ve not even done anything wrong.
Most notably, an entire industry in a few states, the medical and recreational marijuana industries, suffers from an inability to safely store their funds. This leads, ironically, to the same sort of violent crime that legalizing drugs is supposed to inhibit.
For their part, the whistleblowers are probably glad they haven’t been charged with violating any of the state secrets laws just yet. On Democracy Now! Friday, the four former airmen explained that their motive was more in the interest of the American public than anything. Said Brandon Bryant, one of the four, who may face prosecution for allegedly providing the Drone Papers to the Intercept :
We want the president to have more transparency in this issue, and we want the American people to understand exactly what’s being done in their name. And I think that all this fear and hatred that keeps going on is just out of control, and we need to stop it somewhere.
True patriots, it seems, will go to any lengths, but are rarely rewarded, as can be seen in the cases of Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning and NSA analyst Edward Snowden .
