If his was really true for banks there would be a large number of bankers in jail. This number being close to zero, I guess the courts are very lax at charging bankers for crimes.
Banks are a terrible example for this thread's argument. Banking is essentially the end result of what happens when businesses kowtow to the invasive demands of the government, implement ever-more invasive content policing, becoming de facto arms of the bureaucratic state.
A bank will drop you if they even think you might be doing something (demonstrably on paper) illegal. When opening an account, some of the very first questions a bank asks you are "where did you get this money" and "what do you do for work" - proactively making you responsible for committing to some type of story. All of the illegality you're trying to reference is happening under a backdrop of reams of paperwork that make it look like above board activity to compliance departments. Without that paperwork when shit does hit the fan, people working at the bank do tend to go to jail. But with that paperwork it's "nobody's fault" unless they manage to find a few bank employees to pin it on.
Needless to say, this type of prior restraint regime being applied to free-form communication would be an abject catastrophe.
Banks do a massive amount of tracking and flagging. Even putting a joke “for drugs” in a Venmo field can cause issues. Plus reporting large transactions. There was a massive post on HN yesterday about how often banks close startup accounts due to false positives.
> the real criminals continue doing their business everyday
Any source for that? Media loves to blame banks for everything, but when you go into the details it always seems pretty marginal (e.g. the HSBC Mexico stuff).
It cannot be marginal because drug traffic, just as an example, moves billions of dollars every year. They certainly have schemes and someone in the banking system must be complying with these schemes. Every time the officials uncover one of these schemes, banks are miraculously not charged of anything and they don't even give back the profits of the illegal operation.
If you provide a service that is used for illegal behavior AND you know it’s being used that way AND you explicitly market your services to users behaving illegally AND the majority of your product is used for illegal deeds THEN you’re gonna have a bad time.
If one out of ten thousand people use your product for illegal deeds you’re fine. If it’s 9 out of 10 you probably aren’t.
> If one out of ten thousand people use your product for illegal deeds you’re fine.
This logic clearly makes the prison of someone like the owner of Telegram difficult to justify, since 99.999% of messages in telegram are completely legal.
If 10,000 people out of 10 million are doing illegal things and you know about it or you are going out of your way to turn a blind eye then you’re gonna have a bad time.
Keep in mind that as soon as you store user accounts you keep user data, which is perhaps a trivial form of eavesdropping, but clearly something law enforcement takes an interest in.
