In June 2025, President Trump played a serious card in the decades-long dispute between the United States and International Criminal Court. He imposed the full weight of U.S. economic sanctions on several judges of the court.
The disagreement is over jurisdiction. Does the ICC have jurisdiction over non-member states, particularly the U.S. and Israel? The U.S. thinks no. The ICC argues it has jurisdiction if the alleged crimes occurred in territories that did sign the treaty, Afghanistan and Palestine.
Setting aside their actual dispute, the sanctions give us a unique opportunity to see American economic power in action. Typically when we think of sanctions we think of shadowy oligarchs and hidden terror groups. With these particular sanctions, we get to see what happens when a professionally established person living in a developed city is suddenly cut off from the U.S. financial/tech system.
The stories from those sanctioned paint a scary picture.
The effects were immediate yet remarkably mundane. Credit cards stopped working, including cards issued by banks outside the United States. European bank transfers were rejected or blocked. Peruvian judge Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza had a card cancelled by her Dutch bank. “Why? It’s a European bank, not an American bank,” she told The Guardian. She blamed “a kind of over-compliance,” with foreign banks terrified of jeopardizing their relationships with U.S. institutions.
Then things got stranger. Canadian judge Kimberly Prost lost her Amazon account and came home to discover that Alexa would no longer respond to her. While traveling in New Zealand, her debit card failed when she tried to buy breakfast: “I wasn’t having breakfast that morning.” French judge Nicolas Guillou lost access to Amazon, Airbnb and PayPal, and even had a hotel reservation in France cancelled because he had booked it through Expedia. Slovenian judge Beti Hohler says a friend sent her a Christmas present through Amazon and subsequently had THEIR Amazon accounts suspended.
The effects could also spread to family members and other people who dealt with those sanctioned. A transfer from ICC prosecutor Karim Khan to his former wife for their children reportedly resulted in her bank account being frozen. Some officials lost access to email and other online services. Italian lawyer and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese says she has been unable to obtain ordinary banking services even in Europe and has resorted to cash and borrowing from friends and family. Her description of the experience gives this piece its title: “It equates to a civil death.”
The online world is intermediated. Those intermediaries are overwhelmingly dominated by U.S. companies, and most of the world follows our lead. The financial system is extremely risk averse. Both finance and tech are completely deferential in the name of compliance. Put those things together and sanctions are a magic order that can strike a person from the internet and banking completely.
No matter where you live in the world, even if you never touch dollars, if you do not take sovereignty into your own hands you are subject to the control of the current U.S. administration.
Seeing sanctions, a tool typically reserved for terrorists and rogue states, used in what would ordinarily be a wonkish international political debate must be striking to the rest of the world. It’s surely accelerating the European push for ‘digital sovereignty’ and the digital euro (which we analyzed from a privacy perspective last week). And perhaps is another talking point for Xi Jinping on his global tour promoting China as a stable partner amid US-led geopolitical uncertainty.
The recently sanctioned far-left hacker collective Autistici/Inventati (A/I) learned this. We covered those sanctions last week as well. Since then the story has developed. A/I was betting on its Italian bank defending Italian sovereignty by keeping their account open. Instead, their account was closed and funds seized.
When the sanctions were announced, I of course ran to their donation page to see they took crypto. They did not and have strong feelings as to why.
All this is to say, if you are doing anything that challenges the United States in any way, even if it’s just political activism or through the established processes of international law, you should consider reducing your reliance on compliance driven intermediaries. - Neeraj
You may remember that last week Peter “went off” about the leaking of 150 million ID documents.
Now it’s Laz’s turn, in a new op-ed for Coindesk:
Taking all this into account, why do we surrender our sensitive personal information if all we receive in return are false promises of security? Americans are not safer because they identify themselves in each waking moment to every service provider they come across. Far from it. And yet, governments at home and abroad wish to expand the identification regime even further with age verification under the guise of protecting children. But we are again witnessing that these “protections” cause more harm than good. Our information is out there, being traded amongst criminals because governments and corporations wanted to know who we were and what we were doing. And now we pay the price.
If there were ever a time for stronger privacy, it is right now. However, we cannot ignore nuance. There are calls for abolishing identification and verification processes entirely. This is an attractive alternative, but the reality is that the underlying purpose of anti-fraud processes is to protect Americans and their property, and they protect businesses’ revenue and operational integrity — the current approach is just unsuccessful. There is real utility here, but this does not mean that we need to remain with the status quo.
Read the full thing here: KYC data is an irresistible honeypot for hackers, and we must change how it is collected
Laz also “went off” on 404media’s reporting on a secretive predictive policing unit in DHS that apparently pulls in financial and other data to assess potential criminality.
And Neeraj threw in something too.
What else we’re reading
Bitcoin’s Overlooked Promise: Freedom - An essay in the WSJ from our friend Alex Gladstein
The ‘papers, please’ era of the internet will decimate your privacy
If you have something you would like to see discussed here, please let us know.
> When the sanctions were announced, I of course ran to their donation page to see they took crypto. They did not and have strong feelings as to why.
That's hilarious. Well, evolution in action for ideologies.
I'd love to see progressive policy around technology that help paint a more progressive vision around how people ought to relate to the technology that affects their lives.