on the internet gambling payment ban that got in as a rider to port security...

[acroyear]

PBS | I, Cringely . October 6, 2006 - Risky Business:

Now it is proposed that they apply the same diligence to transactions as small as one dollar.

This is ridiculous, not just because it is an unwarranted invasion of privacy, not just because we as consumers will ultimately have to pay for the cost of snitching on ourselves, but because the system of regulation ultimately won't work. With an Internet gambling market approaching $20 billion per year, there is a huge incentive for new enterprises to spring into being specifically to get around this law. Frankly, it ought to be easy.

Just off the top of my head I can think of several possible approaches to subverting this new law. Working within the banking system it might be possible to aggregate payments to make their individual origins less obvious, especially if the aggregation involves some non-gambling money. Remember, these restrictions are being placed on the U.S. banks, not their foreign counterparts, so any bank in the Caymans or on the Isle of Man ought to be able to chug through such aggregated payments without violating any local laws. Another option, since intrastate gambling is authorized, is to make interstate and international gambling debts effectively local by creating thousands of local virtual bookies. All of these are old school ideas that don't even need technology to implement. What if we bring to bear the capabilities of Web 2.0 and create payment mashups by the dozen Ð little PayPals that rise and set like the Sun?

Any random group of 535 nerds is smarter than the 535 members of the U.S. Congress and able to circumvent ANY regulation if there is enough profit incentive to do so. Well the U.S. Congress has just created such an incentive where there was none before. And once these various payment schemes start appearing, what's to say some of them can't be equally used to finance terrorism? Of course they can be used for that purpose. Thanks a lot Senator Frist.

Here's a law that purports to end Internet gambling but will instead enable it, a law that is intended to make certain types of financial transactions harder to do but will ultimately make them easier, a law that says nothing about terrorism but will ultimately abet it, making us all less secure in the process.

There is, to my knowledge, no center for Al-Qaida hacking, nor is terrorism as an industry big enough to attract much third-party software development. But ally the interests of terrorists and Internet gamblers who all want to be paid, that's a $20 billion incentive to corrupt the world financial system -- an incentive that didn't exist before last week.

And what will be our institutional response to these obvious flaws when they come to light? More regulation of course! More scrutiny of financial transactions, not less. But as we've seen in recent years, this greater scrutiny often comes with lax or unequal enforcement, depending on your campaign contributions.

Once again, Congress is proposing to regulate something it ought not to -- something that in any practical sense is probably beyond its power. And the result will be only bad, not good. And Congress's response will probably be even more regulation, not less. And all this to push one man's presidential ambitions?

There ought to be a law against THAT.