The
war against one of the last traditional bastions of ‘privacy as we once used to
know it’ – cash money – has been raging ever since credit and debit cards
gained mass traction as instruments of payment in the 1970s. Since 9/11, attacks on relative, limited and
conditional anonymity offered by bank notes have been stepped up in a shrill
crescendo under the pretextual justification of “preventing money laundering and terrorist financing.” While this noble and
unquestionably laudable purpose can under no imaginable circumstances be
achieved by ending the use of cash, what it really does is increase transaction
cost for the enjoyment of a modicum of big-brother-free privacy. Given that
bank accounts have come to be ‘interest-bearing’ in a laughably nominal sense
at best, and given increasing chatter about limiting or abolishing deposit
insurance for bank accounts while the Cyprus bailout has opened Pandora’s box
on another taboo – participation of bank customers in the losses of a
government-regulated and presumably highly supervised financial institution –
since those days, lock boxes for cash have become a fairly rational choice.
They ceased to be the stuff of conspiracy theorists, drug lords or made men.
Cash has become one of the last effective tools for limiting public
transparency of the individual.
