A good post from Cory Doctorow. A snip below but read the whole thing.
The Best Defense Against Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis
In those decades, we have seen a global breakdown of rule of law. As inequality mounted, the world’s wealth was gathered into ever-fewer hands, and the power of the wealthy to suborn the state to their will grew.
A pair of handcuffed hands sticking between prison bars, with the Chevron logo in the bottom left corner.
Chevron committed genocide, then jailed the lawyer who held them to account for it. Russian oligarchs used UK libel law to silence the journalists who reported on their dirty money. Pharma colludes with its regulators to murder people with price gouging. America’s largest bank commits crime after crime after crime.
The common thread in all this corruption is financial secrecy: trillions slosh through the world’s onshore and offshore treasure islands, converted into political dark money that pays for the bribes that ensure that the only laws that pass our legislatures are those that favor the wealthy.
and...
The best defense against rubber-hose cryptanalysis is a political process that answers to voters, not donors. Every billionaire isn’t merely a policy failure: every billionaire is an engine for producing policy failures.
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