Taiwan Joins Global War On Cash: Plans To Ban Purchases Of Houses, Cars, & Jewelry

 

The cancerous virus of freedom-destroying worldwide cash-bans – in the name of fighting terrorism – has reached Taiwan this week. With the aim of ‘preventing money-laundering’, Taiwan may ban cash purchases of properties and luxury goods, Taipei-based Economic Daily News reports, citing unidentified official at Ministry of Justice.

As we previously noted, the War on Cash is not merely continuing, it is intensifying.

Leaked TISA Documents Reveal Privacy Threat

Under the draft provisions of the latest trade deal to be leaked by Wikileaks, countries could be barred from trying to control where their citizens’ personal data is held or whether it’s accessible from outside the country.

Wikileaks has released 17 documents relating to the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), currently under negotiation between the US, the European Union and 23 other nations. These negotiating texts are supposed to remain secret for five years after TISA is finalized and brought into force.

Germans Are Paranoid that the US Is Spying on Their Data

The idea of personal data privacy is deeply ingrained in German culture. Germans even have a word for it: Datensparsamkeit, the principle of only collecting the bare minimum of data necessary.

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In June 2014, the German Bundestag, or national parliament, canceled its internet-service contract with US telecom Verizon, opting to entrust its data to German company Deutsche Telekom, instead. The alleged tapping of Angela Merkel’s personal cell phone in Dec. 2013, has led the German chancellor to compare the NSA to the East German secret police, and German citizens remain outraged at the NSA’s actions in their country—just yesterday, Apr. 23, national news magazine Der Spiegel revealed (link in German) that the agency had monitored Western European businesses for more than a year.

Facebook Wants To Listen In On What You’re Doing

“The aim was to remove every last bit of friction from the way we reference bits of pop culture on the social network,” writes Ryan Tate of Wired. Depending on how you feel about informational privacy and/or your friends’ taste in pop culture, that statement is either exhilarating or terrifying.

How Many of Your Emails Does Google Have?

Benjamin Mako Hill does just that, but Google still has access to a shocking amount of his messages.

“For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work correspondence,” Hill wrote on his blog. “I do so to keep autonomy, control, and privacy over my email and so that no big company has copies of all of my personal email.”

Of course, running your own server doesn’t magically keep all of your emails hidden — if you respond to an email coming from a big tech company address, like a Gmail account, the company gets the message.