While the IMF is currently preparing to introduce its new global CBDC (central bank digital currency) system called UMU (also known as Unicoin), the Bank for International Settlements is busy with various projects that have designed to bring together all international banks and central banks into a single network – an “umbrella” that enables fast cross-border transactions using digital currencies.
In other words, a cashless society is being prepared – but at what cost?
One such idea, called Project Icebreaker, specifically concerns the creation of a SWIFT-style system for clearing interbank transactions that would allow banks worldwide to regulate and eventually to homogenize all currencies into a single global clearing system that would enable them to cut out of the system any country or company that does not meet their ideological approval.
The latest idea from BIS is Project Aurora, which may be even more disturbing than Icebreaker in its effects.
Aurora is designed to use artificial intelligence (AI) ‘machine learning’ techniques as a tool to monitor massive flows of financial transactions from around the world in order to identify specific patterns.
BIS says this is aimed at uncovering criminal money laundering structures that are protected through special financial techniques.
Access to individual accounts
However, in order for AI to monitor global transactions in real time, private banks and governments will need to gain extensive access to accounts and then open the doors wide for AI to work seamlessly in monitoring the traffic of accounts.
Some banks already implement their own private AI surveillance systems to catch unusual individual account activity, but Aurora would require access on an international scale that would be incredible in its scale and terrifying in its consequences.
Just as the war on drugs was used as a pretext in the US and Europe to give governments unlimited access to citizens’ financial data, a power that has since been abused in various ways (in some cases accounts can be seized on mere suspicion of a crime rather than a final conviction by judicial authorities), the Aurora project has a legal basis in money laundering to give governments and global banks enormous powers to monitor citizens’ financial transactions in real time.
The project’s focus on artificial intelligence is presented under the guise of protecting privacy, but all AI programs serve their creators. Whoever controls AI also controls who the relevant technology targets.
The idea of a comprehensive AI-powered global bank monitoring system in the hands of the BIS or other institutions that are symbols of globalization is extremely dangerous.
One could even imagine a future in which personal accounts are routinely frozen for any number of infractions – financially or politically motivated.
