Saturday, October 25, 2025

Polaris of Enlightenment

Buying someone’s real-time location is shockingly cheap

You need to stop handing out your cell number. Seriously.

Published July 5, 2025
– By Naomi Brockwell

Most people have no idea how exposed they are.

Your location is one of the most sensitive pieces of personal information, and yet it’s astonishingly easy to access. For just a few dollars, someone can track your real-time location without ever needing to hack your phone.

This isn’t science fiction or a rare edge case. It's a thriving industry.

Telecom providers themselves have a long and disturbing history of selling customer location data to data brokers, who then resell it with little oversight.

In 2018, The New York Times exposed how major U.S. carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, were selling access to phone location data. This data was ultimately accessed by bounty hunters and law enforcement, without user consent or a warrant.

A 2019 investigation by Vice showed that you could buy the real-time location of nearly any phone in the U.S. for about $300.

Other vendors advertise this service for as little as $5 on underground forums and encrypted messaging channels. No need to compromise someone’s device, just give them a phone number.

The big takeaway from this article is that if someone has your number, they can get your location. We’re going to go over how to shut this tracking method down.

Whether you're an activist, journalist, or just someone who values your right to privacy, this newsletter series is designed to give you the tools to disappear from unwanted tracking, one layer at a time.

How cell numbers leak location

Your cell number is a real-time tracking beacon. Every time your phone is powered on, it talks to nearby cell towers. This happens even if you're not making a call.

Your phone's location is continuously updated in a database called the Home Location Register (HLR), which lets your carrier know which tower to route calls and texts through. If someone has access to your number, they can locate you, sometimes within meters, in real time. Here are some ways they can do it:

1. Access to telecom infrastructure

Selling data / corrupting employees:

Telecom providers are notorious for selling customers' location data directly from their HLR. Alternatively, unauthorized individuals or entities can illegally access this data by bribing or corrupting telecom employees who have direct access to the HLR.

The data retrieved from the HLR database reveals only which specific cell tower your phone is currently registered to, and typically identifies your approximate location within tens or hundreds of meters, depending on tower density in the area.

To pinpoint your exact location with greater precision, down to just a few meters, requires additional specialized methods, such as carrier-based triangulation. Triangulation involves actively measuring your phone’s signal strength or timing from multiple cell towers simultaneously. Such detailed, real-time triangulation is typically restricted to telecom companies and authorized law enforcement agencies. However, these advanced methods can also be misused if telecom personnel or authorized entities are compromised through bribery or corruption.

Exploiting the SS7 protocol (telecom network vulnerabilities):

Attackers can also exploit vulnerabilities such as those in SS7, a global telecom signaling protocol, to illicitly request your current cell tower location from the HLR database. SS7 itself doesn't store any location data — it provides the means to query your carrier's HLR and retrieve your current tower association.

2. IMSI catchers ("Stingrays"): Your phone directly reveals its location

IMSI catchers (often called "Stingrays") are specialized surveillance devices acting as fake cell towers. Your phone constantly searches for the strongest available cell signal, automatically connecting to these fake towers if their signals appear stronger than legitimate ones.

In this method, instead of querying telecom databases, your phone directly reveals its own location to whoever is operating the fake cell tower, as soon as the phone connects. Operators of IMSI catchers measure signal strength between your phone and their device, enabling precise location tracking, often accurate within a few meters.

While IMSI catchers were initially developed and primarily used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the legality of their use (even by authorities) is subject to ongoing debate. Unauthorized versions of IMSI catchers have also become increasingly available on black and gray markets.

The solution? Move to VoIP

Cell numbers use your phone's baseband processor to communicate directly with cell towers over the cellular network, continuously updating your physical location in telecom databases.

VoIP numbers (Voice over Internet Protocol), on the other hand, transmit calls and texts through the internet using data connections. They don’t keep HLR records, and so they’re immune to tower-based location tracking.

Instead, the call or message is routed through internet infrastructure and only connects to the cellular network at carrier-level switching stations, removing the direct tower-based tracking of your physical location.

So the takeaway is that you want to stop using cell numbers, and start using VoIP number instead, so that anyone who knows your number isn’t able to use it to track your location.

But there’s a catch: VoIP is heavily regulated. In most countries, quality VoIP options are scarce, and short code SMS support is unreliable. In the US, though, there are good tools.

Action items:

1. Get a VoIP provider

Two good apps that you can download where you can generate VoIP numbers in the U.S. are:

  • MySudo: Great for compartmentalizing identity. Up to 9 identities/numbers per account.
  • Cloaked.com: Great for burner/throwaway numbers.

We are not sponsored by or affiliated with any of the companies mentioned here, they’re just tools I use and like. If you have services that you like and recommend, please let others know in the comments!

Setting up MySudo

Step 1: Install the app

  • You will need a phone with the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.
  • Search for MySudo, download and install it, or visit the store directly via their webpage.

Step 2: Purchase a plan

  • $15/month gets you up to 9 Sudo profiles, each with its own number. Or you can start with just 1 number for $2/month. You will purchase this plan inside the app store on your phone.

Step 3: Set up your first Sudo profile

When prompted, create your first Sudo profile. Think of this as a separate, compartmentalized identity within MySudo, distinct from your main user account.

Each Sudo profile can include:

  • A dedicated phone number
  • Optional extras like an email alias, username handle, virtual credit card, etc.

For now, we’re focusing only on phone numbers:

  • Choose a purpose for this profile (such as Shopping, Medical, Work). This purpose will appear as a heading in your list of Sudos.
  • Create a name for your Sudo profile (I usually match this to the chosen purpose).

Step 4: Add a phone number to your Sudo

  • Tap the Sudo icon in the top-left corner.
  • Select the Sudo profile you just created.
  • Tap "Add a Phone Number."
  • Select your preferred country, then enter a city name or area code.
  • Pick a number from the available options, then tap "Choose Number."

You're now set up and ready to use your VoIP number!

Step 4: Compartmentalize

You don’t need to assign all 9 numbers right away. But here are helpful categories you might consider:

  • Friends and family
  • Work
  • Government
  • Medical
  • Banking
  • Purchases
  • Anonymous purchases
  • High-risk anonymous use
  • Catch-all / disposable

Incoming calls go through the MySudo app, not your default dialer. Same with SMS. The person on the other end doesn’t know it's VoIP.

Short codes don’t always work

Short codes (such as verification codes sent by banks or apps) use a special messaging protocol that's different from regular SMS texts. Many VoIP providers don't consistently support short codes, because this capability depends entirely on the underlying upstream provider (the entity that originally provisioned these numbers) not on the VoIP reseller you purchased from.

If you encounter problems receiving short codes, here are ways around the issue:

  • Use the "Call Me" option:
    Many services offer an alternative verification method: a phone call delivering the verification code verbally. VoIP numbers handle these incoming verification calls without any issue.
  • Try another VoIP provider (temporary):
    If a service blocks your primary VoIP number and insists on a real cellular number, you can borrow a non‑VoIP SIM verification service like SMSPool.net. They provide actual cell‑based phone numbers via the internet, but note: these are intended for temporary or burner use only. Don’t rely on rented numbers from these services for important or long-term accounts, always use stable, long-term numbers for critical purposes.
  • Register using a real cell number and port it to VoIP:
    For critical accounts, another option is to use a prepaid SIM card temporarily to register your account, then immediately port that number to a VoIP provider (such as MySudo or Google Voice). Many services only check whether a number is cellular or VoIP during initial account registration, and don't recheck later.
  • Maintain a separate SIM just for critical 2FA:
    If you find that after porting, you still can't reliably receive certain verification codes (particularly short codes), you might need to maintain a separate, dedicated SIM and cellular number exclusively for receiving critical two-factor authentication (2FA) codes. Do not share this dedicated SIM number with everyone, and do not use it for regular communications.

Important caveat for high-risk users:

Any SIM cards placed into the same phone are linked together by the telecom carrie, which is important information for high-risk threat models. When you insert a SIM card into your device, the SIM itself will independently send special messages called "proactive SIM messages" to your carrier. These proactive messages:

  • Completely bypass your phone's operating system (OS), making them invisible and undetectable from user-level software.
  • Contain device-specific identifiers such as the IMEI or IMEISV of your phone and also usually include the IMEI of previous devices in which the SIM was inserted.

If your threat model is particularly high-risk and requires total compartmentalization between identities or numbers, always use separate physical devices for each compartmentalized identity. Most people don't need to take such extreme precautions, as this generally falls outside their threat model.

Cloaked.com for burner numbers

  • Offers unlimited, disposable phone numbers.
  • Great for one-off verifications, restaurants, or merchants.
  • Doesn't require installing an app, you can just use it in the browser and never link any forwarding number.
  • Be aware that if any of the VoIP numbers you generated inside Cloaked hasn't received any calls or messages for 60 days, it enters a watch period. After an additional 60 days without receiving calls or messages (120 days total of inactivity), you lose the number, and it returns to the available pool for someone else to use. Only use Cloaked for numbers you expect to actively receive calls or messages on, or for temporary use where losing the number isn't an issue.

What to do with your current cell number

Your cell number is already everywhere: breached databases, government forms, medical records, and countless other places. You can't "un-breach" it, and you don’t want to lose that number because it’s probably an important number that people know they can contact you on. But you can stop it from being used to track you.

Solution: Port your existing cell number to a VoIP Provider

Best choice: Google Voice (recommended due to strong security protections)

  • You can choose to just pay a one-time $20 fee, which turns the number into a receiving-only number. You’ll get to receive calls and texts forever on this number with no ongoing fees.
  • Or you can choose to pay an ongoing monthly fee, which will allow you to continue to make outgoing calls and send outgoing messages from the number.

The one-time fee option will be sufficient for most people, because the aim is to gradually make this existing number obsolete and move people over to your new VoIP numbers.

Google Voice is considered a strong option because the threat of SIM swapping (where an attacker fraudulently takes control of your phone number) is very real and dangerous. Unlike basically every other telecom provider, Google lets you secure your account with a hardware security key, making it significantly harder for attackers to port your number away from your control.

Google obviously is not a privacy-respecting company, but remember, your existing cell number isn’t at all private anyway. The idea is to eventually stop using this number completely, while still retaining control of it.

How to port your existing cell number to Google Voice

  1. Check porting eligibility
    Visit the Google Voice porting tool and enter your number to verify it's eligible.
  2. Start the port-in process
    • Navigate to Settings → Phones tab → Change / Port.
    • Select "I want to use my mobile number" and follow the on-screen prompts
  3. Pay the one-time fee
    A $20 fee is required to port your number into Google Voice
  4. Complete the porting process
    • Enter your carrier account details and submit the request. Porting generally completes within 24–48 hours, though it can take longer in some cases.
  5. Post-port setup
    • Porting your number to Google Voice cancels your old cellular service. You’ll need a new SIM or plan for regular mobile connectivity, but you’ll ideally only use this new SIM for data, and use your VoIP numbers for communication not the associated cell number.
    • Configure call forwarding, voicemail transcription, and text forwarding to email from the Google Voice Settings page.

Now, even if someone tries to look you up via your old number, they can’t get your real-time location. It’s no longer tied to a SIM that is logging your location in HLRs.

Summary: Take it one step at a time

Switching to VoIP numbers is a big change, so take it step by step:

  1. Download your VoIP apps of choice (like MySudo) and set up your new numbers.
  2. Gradually migrate your contacts to your new VoIP numbers.
  3. Use burner numbers (via Cloaked or similar services) for reservations, merchants, or anyone who doesn't genuinely need your permanent number.

Keep your existing SIM active for now, until you're comfortable and confident using the new VoIP system.

When ready, finalize your migration:

  1. Port your original cell number to Google Voice.
  2. Get a new SIM card with a fresh number, but don’t use this new number for calls, texts, or identification.
  3. Use the new SIM solely for data connectivity.

This completes your migration, significantly enhancing your privacy and reducing your exposure to location tracking.

GrapheneOS users

You can't currently purchase your MySudo subscription directly on a GrapheneOS device. Instead, you'll first need to buy your MySudo plan through the Google Play Store or Apple App Store using another device.

Once you've purchased your plan, you can migrate your account to your GrapheneOS phone:

  1. On your GrapheneOS device, download and install MySudo from your preferred app store (I personally like the Aurora store as a front-end for the Google Play Store).
  2. Open MySudo on your GrapheneOS device and navigate to:
    Settings → Backup & Import/Export → Import from Another Device
  3. Follow the on-screen prompts to securely migrate your entire account over to your GrapheneOS phone.

You can retain your original device as a secure backup for messages and account data.

To ensure reliable, real-time notifications for calls and messages, make sure sandboxed Google Play is enabled on the GrapheneOS profile where you're using MySudo.

What you’ve achieved

You now have:

  • Up to 9 persistent, compartmentalized VoIP numbers via MySudo.
  • Disposable, on-demand burner numbers via Cloaked.
  • Your original cell number safely ported to Google Voice and secured with a hardware security key.
  • A clear plan for transitioning away from your original cell number.

You've replaced a vulnerable, easily trackable cell identifier. Your real-time location is no longer constantly broadcast through cell towers via a number that is identified as belonging to you, your digital identities are better compartmentalized, and you're significantly harder to track or exploit.

This marks the beginning of a safer digital future. What's next? More layers, better privacy tools, and greater freedom. Remember, privacy isn't a destination, it's a lifestyle. You're now firmly on that path.

 

Yours in Privacy,
Naomi

Naomi Brockwell is a privacy advocacy and professional speaker, MC, interviewer, producer, podcaster, specialising in blockchain, cryptocurrency and economics. She runs the NBTV channel on Rumble.

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The day your financial choices stopped being private

The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 quietly flipped the switch on surveillance.

Published today 10:24 am
– By Naomi Brockwell

This week marks the 55th anniversary of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), a pivotal law that set us on the road to total financial surveillance. Last week I wrote about ways in which the Patriot Act eroded financial privacy, but the modern shift really began in 1970 with the BSA. Since its introduction, the BSA regime has grown staggeringly, and now touches basically every corner of the financial system. Financial privacy used to be assumed, but today the norm has flipped, and pervasive monitoring is treated as ordinary.

Let’s look back over five decades to see what changed, how much privacy we lost, and how this new baseline of surveillance became "just the way things are".

You can watch our video on the history of financial surveillance here.

The big shift

It appears that the collective memory has faded. We’ve forgotten that just a few decades ago, withdrawing one’s own funds was a straightforward right. There were no probing questions about the intended use of those funds or one’s occupation. The routine sharing of bulk transaction data with countless third parties was not the standard.

Today is a different story. We are required to justify our routine financial activities, authenticate our identity, and defend our choices at every financial turn. There has never been so much friction between us and our own money, with surveillance hurdles at every juncture just to pay for something online, and this new normal is an ingrained part of our expectations of using the financial ecosystem.

On top of that, behind the scenes, data pipelines spray a firehose of personal information to countless invisible players, and the data gets cycled from institutions, to brokers, to government entities, and back the other way.

How individuals interacted with the financial system 55 years ago versus today is night and day. Times really have changed, but they changed slowly, with a lot of these changes creeping in behind the scenes before the public ever realized what was going on.

The great privacy paradox

So we’ve established that financial privacy has never been worse. But here’s the confusing part about the situation: many people still go about their daily lives behaving as if what they do just stays between them and their bank, or between them and a given merchant.

A paradoxical situation has emerged, where most people continue to believe in a notion of financial privacy that has ceased to exist.

This widespread assumption that financial activities remain confidential, safeguarded by banks or credit unions, contrasts starkly with reality. In truth, financial privacy in the United States is more illusory than real.

How do we explain this mismatch between what people believe is true and the actual state of financial privacy?

First, privacy was the standard for so long, and then the systematic dismantling of our financial privacy occurred gradually over time without people really paying attention.

Second, the bulk of this increased surveillance has been intentionally kept hidden from the public.

This is the most insidious part of the situation, which I want to make very clear in this newsletter. The privacy we think we have and the privacy we actually have are very different things. Governments and banks would never have been able to get away with this shift if they hadn’t deliberately kept it out of view.

To explore the history of how financial privacy slowly disappeared, and to unveil the extensive financial surveillance apparatus that remains largely opaque to the general public, we have to go back through history and look carefully at how all of this surveillance crept in.

This analysis primarily focuses on developments within the United States, but the implications are global, thanks to the U.S. exporting its legislative and regulatory frameworks abroad. The trend toward financial surveillance is worldwide, with governments now monitoring payment systems across borders.

Where it all started

The year 1970 heralded a transformative period in financial privacy with the enactment of the Bank Secrecy Act. Its aim was to address concerns over secret foreign bank accounts by gathering more information on people’s financial activities, in order to combat the concealment of wealth in overseas accounts.

The BSA introduced a paradigm shift by requiring financial institutions to maintain records of customers’ transactions and personal information and to report significant transactions, specifically those exceeding $10,000, to the Treasury Department. This legislative move transformed financial professionals into de facto government informants, reporting on Americans for the mere act of engaging with their finances.

The law sparked considerable debate, drawing criticism from various quarters, including Congress, the banking sector, and civil liberties organizations. The New York Times even reported at the time that the law was unconstitutional. A legal challenge ensued, questioning the BSA’s compatibility with the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments.

Central to the legal debate was the Fourth Amendment, which safeguards individuals against unreasonable searches. The mandate for financial institutions to divulge personal financial information without a warrant was perceived as an infringement of this constitutional protection.

Despite these concerns, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the BSA, reasoning that information shared with banks constitutes business records rather than private data, thus not warranting the same expectation of privacy. This completely undermined the expectation of privacy that people had always had with their banks.

The Supreme Court at the time commented that the reporting requirements for the banks were not an undue burden, because they applied only to “abnormally large transactions.” $10,000 in 1970 was indeed seen as abnormally large, because the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar was so much higher back then.

To put this amount in context, in 1970 $10,000 would buy you a new house in some areas. From this perspective, if you were paying all cash for an entire, brand new house, it might be a suspicious enough and rare enough occurrence that it was not seen as a burden on financial institutions to report this, nor an unreasonable intrusion into people’s daily lives.

However, the BSA never included any adjustment for inflation. Year after year, the purchasing power of the US dollar disappears, which means that this financial surveillance has silently and insidiously crept further and further into our lives. Now this threshold has extended into everyday transactions.

Since 1970, the Bank Secrecy Act’s powers have not only expanded silently through inflation but explicitly through all kinds of amendments that increase its scope.

The Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act

One subsequent expansion of the BSA worth noting was the Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act of 1992. It broadened the scope of reportable activities through the introduction of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). This shift from reporting threshold-based transactions (of $10,000 or more) to any transaction considered “suspicious,” regardless of size, opened the floodgates to a firehose of financial reporting.

Another big change that the Annunzio-Wylie Anti–Money Laundering Act ushered in was around transparency of these surveillance programs. When the Bank Secrecy Act was first introduced, it was countered with something called the Right to Financial Privacy Act, that essentially said that if people’s finances are being looked into, they at least need to be told about it, and that way individuals would have the right to push back and hold overreaching entities accountable if they felt their rights were being violated.

The 1992 Annunzio-Wylie Anti–Money Laundering Act made it illegal for your bank to tell you if it filed a SAR. To this day, you’re not allowed to know if your bank filed a report to the government for you using your own money.

It also introduced “safe harbors” for banks who share information with law enforcement: under the Annunzio-Wylie Anti–Money Laundering Act banks can’t be sued or held liable for giving data to law enforcement. There were no longer repercussions, or accountability measures to protect citizens against overreach of reporting.

This really ushered in a new era of mass surveillance of the financial activity of innocent Americans. The banking sector’s role has evolved from safeguarding depositor privacy to facilitating government surveillance. It’s also a major reason why people have this illusion of financial privacy. They just don’t realize what’s been happening, by design, because the whole surveillance process has been made confidential.

The Patriot Act

Last week I did a deep dive into the Patriot Act and how it was a watershed moment for financial surveillance, but I’ll provide a quick recap of some of the major changes. Basically, the Patriot Act was the Bank Secrecy Act on steroids. Title III of the Patriot Act, The International Money Laundering Abatement and Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, aggressively cemented financial surveillance as a normalized part of everyday life.

First was the formalization of “Know Your Customer” (KYC) regulations, which have since become a staple in the arsenal of financial surveillance tools.

Before 2001, banks and institutions determined their own risk tolerance, and what customer information they needed to collect. The Patriot Act introduced minimum ID standards. It enforced a Customer Identification Program (CIP) for every bank, broker-dealers, mutual funds, and other similar institute in the US. These entities had to collect and verify government-issued IDs for every customer. They also had to cross-check identities against government watchlists.

This is when financial anonymity became illegal.

The Patriot Act also allowed unprecedented data sharing across agencies and borders. There used to be stringent rules about which government departments are allowed to share data with each other, again to protect citizens from overreach. Sections 351 and 358 broke down specific information-sharing barriers between the FBI, CIA, NSA, FinCEN, and foreign governments.

The Patriot Act also expanded safe harbor laws and allowed banking information to be shared with intelligence agencies. Mass data pipelines from private banks to the surveillance state were legalized overnight. Banks were encouraged to proactively share customer data with intelligence, without fear of being sued by the customer because they would have legal immunity.

It covered liability under “any contract or other legally enforceable agreement.” So if you had a contract with your bank that they’d keep your information private, the government said the bank now had immunity if they shared that information and broke the contract.

The intent of The Fourth Amendment was to stop the government getting your information without a warrant. But right now we have a system where the government has mandated that banks collect this information of their behalf, demanded they hand over the information, and then granted the banks legal immunity for this sharing or data, even if doing so broke “any contract or other legally enforceable agreement” of privacy between you and your bank.

On top of this, Section 314(b) created a safe harbor for financial institutions to share customer and activity information with other financial institutions, when they in good faith suspect money laundering or terrorist financing. It unleashed a torrent of data sharing, all legally protected.

Banks were now both required to report SARs and other information to the government, and they were legally shielded for aggressively and proactively doing so, and were also allowed to exchange intelligence with other banks. It fueled the private-sector surveillance grid that we have today, and deputized the financial system as investigatory agents in it.

The relationship between banks and Intelligence agencies was also formalized and made permanent. For example, it introduced something called government “broadcast lookups” where FinCEN can blast a query to thousands of financial institutions, and and banks must search their records quickly and report back. This shifted the relationship from passive reporting, to creating on-demand, system-wide queries, where banks have been deputized as active responders and participants.

Under the Patriot Act, FinCEN’s mission was also codified as financial intelligence, giving it a permanent mandate and making it a statutory intel hub.

The result is a permanent, legally protected data flow where financial institutions are effectively deputized, and customer information moves quickly to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Furthermore, we were told the Patriot Act would be a temporary measure, but it ended up lasting forever.

Omnibus bills for creeping surveillance

The trend of utilizing omnibus bills to quietly introduce or expand surveillance measures is ongoing. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, another omnibus bill, introduced surveillance to anything involving a payment transmitter (for example, PayPal, Venmo, or Cash App) that has $600 or more of transactions in a year.

In 2022, Congress floated the Special Measures to Fight Modern Threats Act, which aimed to eliminate some of the checks and balances placed on the Treasury. The Treasury Secretary has a special ability to sanction transactions and because this is such a powerful tool, there’s always been a check on this power — The Treasury Secretary has to report every time they do this in the Federal Register. The Fight Modern Threats Act tried to remove this reporting requirement, which would allow the Treasury to use these powers even more.

This bill hasn’t been passed, but it also hasn’t gone away either. Similar ideas keep resurfacing while Treasury continues to use existing Section 311 authorities through fresh 2025 actions.

There is an ongoing onslaught of bills that try to expand financial surveillance, and each time another one slips by, financial privacy in our lives is chiseled further and further away. It’s an offensive attack on the privacy expectations of innocent Americans.

Financial surveillance at the border

In September 2025, the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) renewed and expanded a Geographic Targeting Order (GTO) that dramatically lowers the reporting threshold for cash transactions in certain areas, from $10,000 to transactions as low as $1,000.

This means that thousands of routine financial activities, like cashing a check or sending money to family, are now tracked and reported to federal authorities. The order compels businesses to collect personal information, file detailed reports, and retain records for five years.

Several lawsuits brought by the Institute for Justice have won preliminary injunctions, arguing that the GTO is unconstitutional, burdensome, and offers no proven crime-fighting benefit. Despite those court rulings, the government has appealed and continues to enforce the order in most affected areas.

CBDCs

The worst may be yet to come. Across the world, government officials have been increasingly considering central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. A CBDC is a national currency that is a direct, digital liability of the central bank. You can think of it as a digital form of the dollar, but it’s much more than that. It would put the government in the middle of every financial transaction.

Rather than having to get our financial information from banks, the government would have access to every transaction directly. While right now, cash still affords people a private means of payment, a CBDC would eventually take the place of digital cash and eliminate that final privacy safeguard.

Furthermore, CBDCs aren’t just a digital form of money. They represent what’s known as programmable money. Rules can be coded directly into the money itself, dictating how it can be used. Money could instantly be frozen, savings seized, or certain transactions could automatically be prohibited according to predetermined rules about how money is allowed to move. Politicians are already salivating over such potential use cases.

It’s possible that the government could even do things like erase money that’s not spent fast enough, if they wanted to stimulate the economy.

Unfortunately, CBDCs are not simply theoretical. Basically every country in the world is currently exploring them. You can take a look at the Human Rights Foundation’s CBDC Tracker to see exactly where each country stands, and who has already launched one.

Those who champion CBDCs talk about how it will make our financial system more efficient, and bring it into the new age. Attention is focused on the shiny rhetoric, while yet another financial surveillance tool is slipped silently into our lives, making financial freedom just that little bit harder.

The cost of a zero-crime society

The legislative journey from the Bank Secrecy Act to the present day reflects a steady expansion of financial surveillance, driven by various rationales from combating crime to national security. When you erode financial privacy, critical questions need to be raised about the balance between security measures and individual rights.

Namely, to what extent should we as a society permit pervasive surveillance in the name of stopping crime?

To answer this question, it’s important to first recognize that the optimal crime rate is not zero. It’s a spicy take, but stick with me.

While a world with zero crime may intuitively seem better than a world with some crime, it depends on the costs of getting to that zero-crime world. We can’t bring the world to a halt to stop someone jaywalking, because the cost is too high. You can’t burn down a city to stop someone stealing a pack of gum. The cost is just too high.

We as a society need to have a conversation about which costs we’re willing to bear, and the balance we want between surveillance and privacy.

Traditionally that balance has been the Constitution, and in particular the Fourth Amendment. But the Fourth Amendment has been decimated in the digital age, and we’ve lost sight of that original Schelling point. We’ve tipped the balance scales in the complete opposite direction of the individual by stripping people of their right to privacy and allowing omnipotent surveillance of every financial activity, in the name of stopping anyone from ever committing a crime. And this cost is far too high.

Privacy is essential for a free society. If you eliminate this very thing that makes a free society possible, no matter what righteous cause you profess to be advancing, it’s a cost we can’t afford to bear.

It’s through surveillance that our freedoms are limited. Every totalitarian regime in existence maintained power through pervasive surveillance. Our financial activities reveal intimate details about us, including our religious beliefs, daily habits, and the causes we support that might hold powerful people accountable or challenge political authority.

Without financial privacy, all of these aspects become vulnerable to exploitation, and those involved are susceptible to being targeted. We must be vigilant against creeping surveillance that shifts the balance of power away from the individual.

And don’t get me wrong, removing the mass-surveillance apparatus we’ve created doesn’t mean ending the fight on crime. It just means respecting Fourth Amendment protections. If the government wants your information, they can get a warrant and prove probable cause. It’s not supposed to be absurdly easy for the government to dive into people’s private information. The purpose of the Constitution is to restrict the powers of government and protect the people.

Yet over the past few decades, we have slowly built a system of unchecked financial surveillance that makes it trivial for the government to search your affairs with impunity, and with almost no oversight or accountability. It’s time to question whether this is the world we want to live in.

I was invited to speak last week on a panel in DC about the history of Financial Surveillance. You can watch the whole talk here.

In summary: This is the new normal, and we need to push back.

The landscape of financial interaction was markedly different fifty years ago. Customers enjoyed greater autonomy in opening accounts and managing their money, often choosing to engage with banks based solely on the cash they possessed. The era was characterized by less scrutinized transactions and, occasionally, the absence of ID requirements for account setup. The discretion once afforded to banks in determining necessary information for account creation has been supplanted by federal mandates, with customer information no longer confined to the private domain of the bank-customer relationship.

Financial institutions now file 30 million reports annually under the BSA, often erring on the side of over-reporting to avoid potential penalties. This practice underscores the pervasive nature of financial surveillance, with significant costs borne by both the industry and consumers.

The BSA marked a fundamental shift in the confidentiality dynamics between individuals and financial institutions, effectively involving the government in financial interactions instead of allowing people the dignity of privacy.

As surveillance mechanisms become increasingly embedded within the financial system, the safeguards of freedom are slowly chipped away, and the worst part is that nobody really recognizes that this is what is happening. Most people continue to hold on to the illusion of privacy, because what’s actually going on has been both hidden from view and normalized.

Changing this is an uphill battle, but it’s one that’s worth fighting. The first step is just making people aware of how far financial surveillance norms have shifted in just a few decades. The narrative of combating terrorism and serious crimes, while compelling, must be weighed against the potential for overreach and the erosion of fundamental liberties. It is through ongoing dialogue, rigorous oversight, and a commitment to upholding individual rights that society can navigate these challenges, especially in today’s increasingly interconnected world.

You should be able to use your own money without being tracked, profiled, and stored forever in a government database, and without banks being allowed to trade your financial data with each other. Let’s fight to bring back dignity to the financial landscape.

 

Yours in privacy,
Naomi

Naomi Brockwell is a privacy advocacy and professional speaker, MC, interviewer, producer, podcaster, specialising in blockchain, cryptocurrency and economics. She runs the NBTV channel on Rumble.

Swedish laser method identifies chemical weapons and bacteria

Published yesterday 9:39 am
– By Editorial Staff
Today's analysis of dangerous bacteria requires special equipment and protective suits. The new method can make the work both faster and safer.

Swedish researchers have developed a groundbreaking laser method that can rapidly identify chemical weapons and dangerous bacteria directly in the field – without needing to send samples to a laboratory. The technology is based on the principle that chemicals emit unique light signals when struck by laser.

Hazardous chemicals can be found everywhere – as pollutants in waterways, pesticides in food, or in the form of synthetic substances created to cause harm, such as narcotics and chemical warfare agents. Protecting people from these substances requires fast and reliable detection methods.

A new dissertation from Umeå University in northern Sweden demonstrates how laser technology can solve this problem.

Rasmus Öberg, doctoral student at the Department of Physics and the Industrial Doctoral School at Umeå University, has developed methods in collaboration with the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) that can identify extremely small quantities of hazardous chemicals.

Unique "fingerprint" from each chemical

The principle is based on different molecules reacting differently when exposed to laser light.

— All hazardous chemicals consist of molecules with specific appearances and properties that make them dangerous. When these chemicals interact with light, for example from a laser, they emit a 'fingerprint' – a light signal that is unique to that particular chemical, says Öberg.

The methods can be used in conflict zones or for environmental monitoring to provide a rapid initial assessment of potential hazards. The results can then be followed up with more thorough laboratory analyses if needed.

— Traditional methods for detecting hazardous chemicals are often quite cumbersome and difficult to use outside the lab. With portable instruments and surfaces that amplify the light signals from the chemicals, we can take these methods into the real world. The collaboration with FOI, which has extensive experience working with hazardous substances, has been invaluable in this work, he continues.

Also works against bacteria

The dissertation also shows that similar laser technology can be used to trace dangerous bacteria and bacterial spores. This has great significance for the food industry and healthcare, where antibiotic-resistant bacteria pose a growing threat.

— Biological substances are often more complicated to detect, but by isolating characteristic chemicals from these bacteria and bacterial spores, we can detect even them in relatively small quantities. This is an exciting complement to established biological detection methods such as bacterial culture and PCR, notes the doctoral student.

The researchers now hope for continued development of the technology for use in more contexts where rapid and reliable analysis is crucial. In the long term, the methods could strengthen preparedness and security in areas such as environment, defense, and health.

Musk praises Google’s quantum breakthrough: “Starting to become relevant”

The future of AI

Published October 23, 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Google's quantum computer chip Willow running the Quantum Echoes algorithm is 13,000 times faster than classical supercomputers.

Google has developed a quantum computing algorithm that, according to the company, opens up practical applications in areas including pharmaceutical research and artificial intelligence. The new algorithm is several thousand times faster than classical supercomputers.

Google announced on Wednesday that the company has successfully developed and verified the Quantum Echoes algorithm on its Willow quantum computing chip. The algorithm is 13,000 times faster than the most advanced classical computing algorithms running on supercomputers.

According to the company's researchers, Quantum Echoes could be used in the future to measure molecular structures, which could facilitate the development of new pharmaceuticals. The algorithm may also help identify new materials in materials science.

Another application is generating unique datasets for training AI models, particularly in areas such as life sciences where available datasets are limited.

— If I can't prove that data is correct, how can I do anything with it?, explained Google researcher Tom O'Brien about the importance of the algorithm being verifiable.

Details about Quantum Echoes were published in the scientific journal Nature. Entrepreneur Elon Musk congratulated Google on X and noted that quantum computing is starting to become relevant.

Alphabet's Google is competing with other tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft to develop quantum computers that can solve problems beyond the reach of today's computers.

Over half a billion Chinese users embrace generative AI

The future of AI

Published October 22, 2025
– By Editorial Staff
AI services are used for intelligent search, content creation, as productivity tools, and in smart hardware.

The number of users of generative artificial intelligence in China has increased sharply during the first half of 2025. In June, 515 million Chinese people had access to AI services – an increase of 266 million in six months, according to official Chinese figures.

The data comes from a report presented on Saturday by the China Internet Network Information Center. It notes that domestically developed AI models have become popular among users.

A survey included in the report shows that over 90 percent of users say they prefer Chinese AI models.

Generative AI is being used in areas such as intelligent search, content creation, productivity tools and smart hardware. The technology is also being tested in agriculture, manufacturing and research.

The majority of users are young and middle-aged with higher education. Among users, 74.6 percent are under 40 years old, while 37.5 percent hold college, bachelor's or higher degrees.

The report claims that China has become increasingly important in the global AI field. As of April, the country had filed approximately 1.58 million AI-related patent applications, representing 38.58 percent of the global total – the most in the world.

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