The Rule of Hostile Jurisdictions

In a world where various states are divided into antagonistic blocks, there is one interesting possibility for ensuring personal security for agorists, dissidents, and others who hold any positions or engage in any activities that their own stationary bandits do not approve of and may threaten with punishment. It can be called the “rule of hostile jurisdictions.”

The essence of this idea is simple: if you are physically located in the territory of a state belonging to one block, you should use services, host websites, seek clients, store and exchange money, register companies, and employ intermediaries from states belonging to a different block. For example, if you live in Russia, you can use a VPN from Sweden or the USA, an email client in Switzerland, a crypto-card in Lithuania, a shell company in Estonia, and not worry about your security. And if you live in Europe, it will be many times safer for you to use “police-monitored” VK and Mail.ru than Facebook and Gmail.

Many services provide users’ personal information upon request from government authorities of a friendly block. This is inevitable, meaning you need to adapt to the realities of geopolitics. In reality, you only need to be afraid if the service provides information specifically to your own stationary bandit. At the same time, a resident of the RF does not care what some service reveals about them to security forces from the USA. Just as a resident of the USA does not care what security forces from the RF learn about them. As long as it does not involve committing large-scale acts of terrorism resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people—which no sane person would do anyway—it is unlikely that any risk of cooperation between jurisdictions from hostile blocks will arise.

Various fraudsters have long been aware of this. For instance, in the past, Russian hackers intentionally avoided users from Russia and targeted Americans or Britons, which made it very easy to evade punishment. Now, Ukrainian scammers do the same, calling Russians with proposals to transfer money to some “safe account” and then forcing them to perform various “tasks” allegedly to get the money back, since they know no one can do anything to them. Of course, we are absolutely against such fraud, but these cases show that the rule of hostile jurisdictions works.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

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