Report Release & Call To Action: Financial Confidentiality in the Age of Digital Surveillance
By Lia Holland
Today, Fight for the Future is publicly releasing an audit of current financial privacy technologies available to mutual aid organizations, which was created for us by the fantastic team at Convocation Research+Design.
For our allies in mutual aid:
This report should, first and foremost, be of use to our friends and those we admire in the mutual aid space: abortion and gender-affirming care funds, bail funds, disaster relief mutual aid funds, etcetera. We’ve been having conversations for a while about the promises and failures of FinTech—both traditional and decentralized—when it comes to the needs of our most vulnerable and marginalized communities.
Along with the report, we are asking our friends in the mutual aid space to participate in a confidential case study with the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic, so that we can offer a comprehensive guide for developers who *actually* want to build products for them (not just say they’re building for marginalized communities and never deliver).
Mutual aid organizations large and small can learn more about the case study and how to participate here.
For friends and strangers alike working in DeFi: We fight for you, when are you going to build for us?
Fight for the Future is an unapologetically queer women- and artist- led activist organization that has stood up for the right to code and defended the human rights potential of private, uncensorable digital money for years. This report we released today, from and by a cadre of crypto-skeptics, shows that DeFi could be a real, privacy-preserving solution.
If only you’d get it together and make a tool we all can use.
As it stands, you all have yet to deliver a privacy-preserving DeFi solution that is practical and accessible for activists, mutual aid funds, and everyday people. You’re still living in a walled garden while financial data is weaponized for oppression, mutual aid funds face deplatforming with no due process, and the values that spawned crypto wilt on the vine.
This past fall, my colleague Evan Greer confronted transphobic Rep. Nancy Mace at Project Liberty’s DC Summit—not to try and change Rep. Mace’s mind, but to beg the question: how can you build a better Internet for everyone if you prioritize hateful bigots over marginalized communities?
She was immediately manhandled out of the room by a prominent decentralized tech proponent. Then, when Mace disparaged Evan and made comments about her genitals in this auditorium full of people Fight for the Future has worked with for years to defend decentralized tech? Half the audience booed. The rest were silent.
As you see with the launch of this report, we won’t be. We know that anyone seeking to defend traditionally marginalized and undervalued communities from the onslaught of human rights harms a second Trump administration promises are up against a ubiquitous oppressive power: surveillance. A non-consensual, centralized force that has only worsened under Democratic rule. Yet, with both parties capitulating to “nonprofit killer” bills like H.R. 9495 that could decimate funding in the human rights sector, we may not be equipped to fight for the right to privacy like we want to. And after Evan took action for the trans community, maybe some in the space are saying good riddance to organizations like ours that won’t play nice with hatemongers.
Yet despite these threats, digital human rights groups like ours are still ramping up to force a reckoning with centralized surveillance regimes such as FinTech, biometric tech, and data brokers. There is fertile organizing ground on a state, local, and corporate accountability level, where implementing privacy-preserving tools could shield folks like abortion patients, queer kids, immigrants, librarians, and racial justice advocates from persecution.
For alternatives that won’t fuel oppression and intimidation in the coming years, more and more activists and vulnerable people may be turning to open-source, decentralized technologies. That is, if the decentralized tech community still remembers the cypherpunk ideals of privacy and freedom that their technology movement was founded upon.
It’s difficult to tell through the noise how many folks, particularly in the blockchain space where the decentralized tech community is most visible, are motivated by anything but “number temporarily go up” anymore. With so much crypto PAC spending thrown in with Big Tech’s support of the Trump regime, we wonder if DeFi and Web3 have lost interest in their tools being liberatory in a collective, durable sense. Your space’s lack of advocacy for privacy tech developers like Roman Storm also has us wondering.
When our organization Fight for the Future fought for crypto in the 2021 infrastructure package, driving 40,000 calls to Congress in a sea-change moment that launched the concerns of DeFi onto the national stage, the right to code decentralized, open-source, privacy preserving tools was what we were fighting for. And today, while most of the US tech justice sphere has abandoned DeFi in disgust at their love affair with authoritarianism, we still spoke to its role in our 2024 election statement. Its potential to offer meaningful alternatives, ones that truly put power and sovereignty in the hands of everyday people, remain too large to conscionably abandon.
We swim against the tide because again and again, our principled work is vindicated. Most recently: after years of being dragged for our pro end-to-end encryption advocacy, now even the FBI is recommending the best practices we’ve unflinchingly championed. Our financial data is facing the same threats as our communications data, and if you build it, accessible end-to-end encryption for money will become the gold standard for defending against these threats in time.
With the incoming administration’s aspirations to fascism, it’s time for decentralized tech’s development of real world use cases to shift into high gear. If there is, in fact, any “there” there.
The writing is on the wall:
- To say it again: mutual aid organizations that serve communities in crisis—everything from funding abortions to disaster relief—currently rely on traditional FinTech like Venmo or PayPal to distribute funds. These surveillance-forward Web2 tools often deplatform activist users, and create a data honeypot of everyone connected to a service like an abortion fund for law enforcement to subpoena. Data from PayPal was even recently used to try and shut down a prominent bail fund. Privacy-preserving decentralized tools could be an answer that, at minimum, decouples sender from recipient and foils bad-faith investigations intent on punishing abortion funds, mutual aid organizers, and oppositional political groups.
- With even digital library books vulnerable to censorship and erasure, AI slop replacing troves of viable content in search results, and the Internet Archive under attack from all sides, the resiliency of information access is coming more into question than ever before. Decentralized authenticity verification powers, micro-payment potential to support new waves of journalism and organizing, and uncensorable data storage are all efforts that become more urgent as Trump’s cabinet picks seem poised to launch a concerted effort to dissolve online truth and history.
- And as we confront once again the administration that extra-judicially abducted racial justice protesters in unmarked vans, decentralized tools stand to offer important documentation and verification protocols for the citizen journalists we will increasingly rely upon in the US’s gutted news ecosystem.
In the midst of such potential goods, Trump’s own tech policy seems more likely to focus on enriching himself and his allies with crypto. Unfortunately, this means that Democrats and the left will likely become even more radicalized in their misguided backlash against privacy-preserving tools—particularly cryptocurrencies. Yet, it’s a dire mistake to meet authoritarianism with authoritarianism. Activists, journalists, and politically targeted groups need the option of using decentralized tech and private crypto for protection.
And they need such projects to urgently build with members of these communities at the center, not as a theoretical end user only ever considered in marketing blabber or a lobbyist two-pager.
Digital justice activists are now waiting to see if the decentralized tech community will step up to the plate and scale the liberatory tools they promised—the ones worth fighting for precisely because the safety and liberation of marginalized people is worth fighting for.