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Law Decoded: Police and thieves on their screens, Oct 2–9

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Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law.

Editor’s note

Historians typically date the birth of international policing as we know it today to the 1800s, a response to the explosion in nationalist movements and non-governmental political radicalism in Europe. Just as new linking technologies like the telegraph and the steam engine aided and abetted new networks of political deplorables and any number of Sherlock Holmes plots, the explosion of communications tech of the last quarter-century has brought about new forms of crime. 

Which is, y’know, something everyone passively knows. In crypto, association with crime is a familiar reputational issue that is present but certainly not unique. New technology giveth and taketh away. Law enforcement’s interest in controlling new networks also grows. Paranational organizations like drug cartels and terrorist cells come to mind.

This week saw the U.S. Department of Justice press criminal charges against ISIS agents behind American deaths including James Foley’s, a move that expands their power to prosecute foreign agents as criminals under U.S. law. The FBI also busted up a home-grown far-right conspiracy to kidnap the governor of my home state of Michigan. In crypto, several jurisdictions have laid claim to new authority, with the DoJ in particular making a number of moves to expand its jurisdiction.

DoJ vs. everybody

The Justice Department’s new “Cryptocurrency Enforcement Framework” laid claim to a whole host of powers over crypto businesses that had previously been in limbo. Most notable is the generosity of what the DoJ is calling its own jurisdiction — basically anything that touches a U.S. server.

The new framework heralds a new era in the department’s crypto authority, but it’s just the clearest summary of a growing body of precedent that U.S. regulators from the SEC to the IRS have been building out for years.

The DoJ’s criminal charges against Seychelles-registered BitMEX’s leadership last week in some ways telegraphed their particular interest in combatting crime in crypto wherever in the world it may be. Most earlier involvement in crypto-linked prosecutions abroad had been focused on networks the DoJ saw as being primarily designed to finance terrorism or funnel money to sanctioned individuals. While the DoJ accused BitMEX of being a means for such action, the allegations against the leadership are not really accusing them of ideological or political illegality, but rather old-fashioned greed.

Distressing for the crypto community is, as always, the association with criminal activity. The DoJ’s report pays lip service to blockchain technology’s ability to revolutionize payments, finance, international trade, shipping, trust, consensus et al — I assume that this readership is familiar with the myriad use cases — but the report pivots compulsively to crime. From the DoJ’s side of things, that is their trade, so it makes sense, but it also adds to the unfair stigma against a technology.

Another cause for concern is that tech-savvy people in the U.S. can get around the barriers by really any crypto company, given enough time and potential profit. So as with the general trends of the last year, U.S. authorities really do seem to be building out the legal framework to give themselves jurisdiction over crypto basically anywhere. World Police indeed.

UK shuts door on whole genre of crypto investment

The United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority nixed trading of crypto-based derivatives — including futures, options and swaps — for all retail investors starting in January.

While the FCA may not be as globally hawkish on crypto as its U.S. analogues, London remains Europe’s financial center. Much like Brexit itself, the predicted exodus from London has seen delays that seem to mock all bold predictions.

With its focus on retail investors, however, the FCA has obviously designed its new ban to be more of a protective maneuver for regular Britons rather than a handicap on the reigning heavyweight champs of the London Stock Exchange.

Nonetheless, as the UK’s position within both Europe and the global economy is vulnerable, implementing a stringent ban on a new asset class seems like yet another way of recusing itself from the financial future. As mentioned earlier, determined UK crypto investors will almost certainly be able to get around the new ban to access offshore exchanges with less legal accountability to the UK and more extravagant and risky leveraged offerings. 

But maybe a somewhat built-in assumption is that, while the technological implementation of any ban is going to be slow and imperfect, a retail investor capable of working around it is not exactly the person the FCA is most worried about protecting.

DoJ vs. the elusive Mr. McAfee

After decades of intercontinental outrageousness, John McAfee was arrested in Spain for tax evasion. He also faces a suit from the SEC for fraudulent ICO promotion.

McAfee first found success in the 80s at the head of the firm that produces the antivirus software that still bears his name. He left the company in the 90s and has been bouncing around the world more or less ever since, racking up guns, substance addictions, and allegations of sexual assault and murder. Also not paying his taxes, allegedly. He was posted up in Cuba out of the reach of U.S. authorities for a while.

Despite his early successes in technology, McAfee has for decades built a personal brand on foundations of infamy. The SEC’s allegations suggest that he managed to translate that megaphone into millions of dollars by plugging into the curious hypedraulic mechanics of the ICO boom. Earlier this year, he tried to launch a privacy token that he admitted was largely taken from another project. McAfee is hardly what you would call a builder. While everyone is innocent until proven guilty, McAfee’s absence from the crypto scene would be a blessing for the industry’s reputation.

Further reads

The Bank for International Settlements put out a new and extensive report on Central Bank Digital Currencies and the associated risks and prospects.

Tax attorney Jason Freeman runs down the latest memorandum from the IRS on how to get your taxes on virtual assets in order.

Writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Rainey Reitman talks problems with the extradition hearings for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Law Decoded: Police and thieves on their screens, Oct 2–9

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Felix Capital closes $300M fund to double down on DTC, break into fintech and make late-stage deals

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To kick off 2020, one of Europe’s newer — and more successful — investment firms has closed a fresh, oversubscribed fund, one sign that VC in the region will continue to run strong in the year ahead after startups across Europe raised between $35 billion and $36 billion in 2019.

Felix Capital, the London VC founded by Frederic Court that was one of the earlier firms to identify and invest in the trend of direct-to-consumer businesses, has raised $300 million, money that it plans to use to continue investing in creative and consumer startups and platform plays as well as begin to tap into a newer area, fintech — specifically startups that are focused on consumer finance. 

Felix up to now has focused mostly on earlier-stage investments — it now has $600 million under management and 32 companies in its portfolio in eight countries — based across both Europe and the U.S. Court said in an interview that a portion of this fund will now also go into later, growth rounds, both for companies that Felix has been backing for some time as well as newer faces.

As with the focus of the investments, the make-up of the fund itself has a strong European current: the majority of the LPs are European, Court noted. Although Asia is something it would like to tackle more in the future both as a market for its current portfolio and as an investment opportunity, he added, the firm has yet to invest into the region or substantially raise money from it.

Felix made its debut in 2015, founded by Court after a strong run at Advent Capital, where he was involved in a number of big exits. While Court had been a strong player in enterprise software, Felix was a step-change for him into more of a primary focus on consumer startups focused on fashion, lifestyle and creative pursuits.

That has over the years included investing in companies like the breakout high-fashion marketplace Farfetch (which he started to back when still at Advent and is now public), Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP, the jewelry startup Mejuri, trend-watching HighSnobiety and fitness startup Peloton (which has also IPO’d).

It’s not an altogether easygoing, vanilla list of cool stuff. Peloton and GOOP have been mightily doused in snarky and sharky sentiments; and sometimes it even seems as if the brands themselves own and cultivate that image. As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad press, I guess.

Although it wasn’t something especially articulated in startup land at the time of Felix’s launch, what the firm was homing in on was a rising category of direct-to-consumer startups, essentially all in the area of e-commerce and building brands and businesses that were bypassing traditional retailers and retail channels to develop primary relationships with consumers through newer digital channels such as social media, messaging and email (alongside their own DTC websites). 

This is not Felix’s sole focus, with investments into a range of platform businesses like corporate travel site TravelPerk, Amazon -backed food delivery juggernaut Deliveroo and Moonbug (a platform for children’s entertainment content) and increasingly later-stage rounds (for example it was part of a $104 million round at TravelPerk; a $70 million round for marketplace-building service Mirakl; and $23 million for Mejuri).

Court’s track record prior to Felix, and the success of the current firm to date, are two likely reasons why this latest fund was oversubscribed, and why Court says it wants to further spread its wings into a wider range of areas and investment stages.

The interest in consumer finance is not such a large step away from these areas, when you consider that they are just the other side of the coin from e-commerce: saving money versus spending money.

“We see this as our prism of opportunity,” said Court. “Just as we had the intuition that there was a space for investors looking at [DTC]… we now think there is enough evidence that there is demand from consumers for new ways of dealing with money and personal finance.”

The firm has from the start operated with a board of advisors who also invest money through Felix while also holding down day jobs.

They include the likes of executives from eBay, Facebook and more. David Marcus — who Court backed when he built payments company Zong and eventually sold it to eBay before he went on to become a major mover and shaker at Facebook (and now has the possibly Sisyphean task of building Calibra) — is on the list, but that has not translated into Felix dabbling in cryptocurrency.

“We are watching cryptocurrency, but if you take a Felix stance on the area, it’s only had one amazing brand so far, bitcoin,” said Court. “The rest, for a consumer, is very difficult to understand and access. It’s still really early, but I’ve got no doubt that there will be some things emerging, particularly around the idea of ‘invisible money.’ “

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/felix-capital-closes-300m-fund-to-double-down-on-dtc-break-into-fintech-and-make-late-stage-deals/

Elliptic banks $23M to shrink crypto risk, eyeing growth in Asia

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Crypto means risk. To UK company Elliptic it also means business. The startup has just closed a $23M Series B to step up growth for a crypto risk-management play that involves selling tech and services to help others navigate the choppy darks of cryptocurrencies.

The round was led by financial services and asset management firm SBI Group, a Tokyo-based erstwhile subsidiary of SoftBank . Also joining as a new investor this round is London-based AlbionVC. Existing investors including SignalFire, Octopus Ventures and Santander Innoventures also participated. SBI Group’s Tomoyuki Nii and Ed Lascelles of AlbionVC are also joining Elliptic’s board.

Flush with a sizeable injection of Series B capital, Elliptic is especially targeting business growth at Asia — with a plan to open new offices in Japan and Singapore. It says client revenues in the region have risen 11x over the past two years.

We last spoke to Elliptic back in 2016 when it had just raised a $5M Series A.

The 2013-founded startup began by testing the crypto waters with a storage product before zeroing in on financial compliance as a pain-point worth its time. It went on to develop machine learning tech that screens transactions to identify suspicious patterns and, via them, dubious transactors.

Now it offers an integrated suite of products and services for financial institutions and crypto businesses to screen volumes of crypto-flows that sum to billions of dollars in transactions per day — analyzing them for links to illicit activity such as money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and other financial crimes.

It’s focused on selling anti-money laundering compliance, crypto forensics and cryptocurrency investigation services to the private sector — though has also sold tools direct to law enforcement agencies in the past.

Billions of dollars in financial services terms is of course just a tiny drop in a massive ocean of money movements. And growth in the crypto risk-management space has clearly required more than a little patience, from a startup perspective.

Three years ago Elliptic’s first blockchain analytics product had 10-20 Bitcoin companies as customers. That’s now up to 100+ crypto businesses and financial institutions using its products to shrink their risk of financial crime when dealing with crypto-assets. But the more three than year gap between Elliptic’s Series A and B is notable.

“To date, we’ve focused on product development and assembling the right team as the market has matured. This new funding will help us expand in the right way, namely by making the push into Asia without diluting our focus on the US and EMEA,” says co-founder and CEO James Smith when asked about the gap between financing rounds.

He declines to comment on how far off Elliptic is from achieving breakeven or profitability yet.

“We provide best-in-class transaction monitoring products for crypto-assets, which are trusted by crypto exchanges and financial institutions worldwide,” he adds of its product suite. “Our products are used as key components of larger compliance processes that are designed to minimise money laundering risks.”

With the addition of SBI Group to its investor roster Elliptic gains a strategic partner in Asia to help push what it dubs “bank-grade risk data” at a new wave of established financial institutions it believes are eyeing crypto with growing appetite for risk as larger players wade in.

Larger players like Facebook . Elliptic’s PR name-drops the likes of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency, Line Corporation’s LINK and central bank digital currencies, as markers of a rise in mainstream attention on crypto assets. And it says Series B funds will be used to accelerate product development to support “an emerging class of asset-backed crypto-assets”.

Regulatory attention on crypto — which has been rising globally for years but looks set to zip up several gears now that Facebook has ripped the curtain off of an ambitious global digital currency plan which also has buy-in from a number of other household tech and fintech names — is another claimed feed in for Elliptic’s business. More crypto implies growing risk.

It also points to the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force’s global regulatory framework for crypto-assets as an example of some of the wider risk-based requirements and now wrapped around those dealing in crypto.

The focus on Asia for business expansion is a measure of relative maturity of interest in opportunities around crypto-assets and localized attention to regulation, according to Smith.

“Revenue growth is certainly very strong in this region. We have been working with customers in Asia for a number of years and have seen first-hand how vibrant their crypto-asset ecosystems are. Countries such as Singapore and Japan have developed clear crypto-asset regulatory frameworks, and businesses based in these countries are serious about meeting their compliance obligations,” he says.

“We have also found that traditional financial institutions in Asia are particularly keen to engage with crypto-assets, and we will be working with them as they take their first steps into this new asset class.”

“We believe that crypto-assets will play an increasingly important role in our everyday lives and are shaping the future of banking. Our investment in Elliptic is a further commitment to this belief and to SBI Holding’s appetite to help build the digital asset-related ecosystem,” adds Yoshitaka Kitao, CEO of the SBI Group, in a supporting statement.

“Elliptic’s pioneering approach is enabling the transparency, integrity, and trust necessary for this vision to become reality. We are seeing a growing demand for their services across our portfolio of crypto-assets related companies and view Elliptic as best-placed to meet this considerable opportunity.”

While Elliptic’s business is focused on reducing the risk for other businesses of inadvertently transacting with criminals using crypto to launder money or otherwise shift assets under the legal radar, the proportion of transactions that such illicit activity represents in the Bitcoin space represents a tiny fraction of overall transactions.

“According to our analysis, approximately $1BN in Bitcoin has been spent on the dark web, so far in 2019, on items ranging from narcotics to stolen credit cards. This represents a very small share of all Bitcoin activity — less than 0.5% of Bitcoin payments over this period,” says Smith.

Not that that diminishes the regulatory risk. Nor, therefore, the business opportunity for Elliptic to sell support services to help others avoid touching the hot stuff.

“Crypto money launderers are continually developing new techniques to cover their tracks — from the use of mixers to transacting in privacy coins such as monero,” Smith adds. “We are also constantly innovating to keep pace with this and help our clients to detect money laundering. For example our work with researchers from MIT and IBM demonstrated the application of deep learning techniques to the identification of illicit crypto-asset transactions.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/03/elliptic-banks-23m-to-shrink-crypto-risk-eyeing-growth-in-asia/

The Great Hack: Netflix doc unpacks Cambridge Analytica, Trump, Brexit and democracys death

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It’s perhaps not for nothing that The Great Hack — the new Netflix documentary about the connections between Cambridge Analytica, the U.S. election and Brexit, out on July 23 — opens with a scene from Burning Man. There, Brittany Kaiser, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, scrawls the name of the company onto a strut of “the temple” that will eventually get burned in that fiery annual ritual. It’s an apt opening.

There are probably many of us who’d wish quite a lot of the last couple of years could be thrown into that temple fire, but this documentary is the first I’ve seen to expertly peer into the flames of what has become the real-world dumpster fire that is social media, dark advertising and global politics which have all become inextricably, and, often fatally, combined.

The documentary is also the first that you could plausibly recommend to those of your relatives and friends who don’t work in tech, as it explains how social media — specifically Facebook — is now manipulating our lives and society, whether we like it or not.

As New York Professor David Carroll puts it at the beginning, Facebook gives “any buyer direct access to my emotional pulse” — and that included political campaigns during the Brexit referendum and the Trump election. Privacy campaigner Carroll is pivotal to the film’s story of how our data is being manipulated and essentially kept from us by Facebook.

The U.K.’s referendum decision to leave the European Union, in fact, became “the Petri dish” for a Cambridge Analytica (CA) experiment, says Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr. She broke the story of how the political consultancy, led by Eton-educated CEO Alexander Nix, applied to the democratic operations of the U.S. and U.K., and many other countries, over a chilling 20+ year history techniques normally used by “psyops” operatives in Afghanistan. Watching this film, you literally start to wonder if history has been warped toward a sickening dystopia.

carole

The Petri-dish of Brexit worked. Millions of adverts, explains the documentary, targeted individuals, exploiting fear and anger, to switch them from “persuadables,” as CA called them, into passionate advocates for, first Brexit in the U.K., and then Trump later on.

Switching to the U.S., the filmmakers show how CA worked directly with Trump’s “Project Alamo” campaign, spending a million dollars a day on Facebook ads ahead of the 2016 election.

The film expertly explains the timeline of how CA first worked off Ted Cruz’s campaign, and nearly propelled that lack-luster candidate into first place in the Republican nominations. It was then that the Trump campaign picked up on CA’s military-like operation.

After loading up the psychographic survey information CA obtained from Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, the world had become their oyster. Or, perhaps more accurately, their oyster farm.

Back in London, Cadwalladr notices triumphant Brexit campaigners fraternizing with Trump and starts digging. There is a thread connecting them to Breitbart owner Steve Bannon. There is a thread connecting them to Cambridge Analytica. She tugs on those threads and, like that iconic scene in The Hurt Locker, where all the threads pull up unexploded mines, she starts to realize that Cambridge Analytica links them all. She needs a source though. That came in the form of former employee Chris Wylie, a brave young man who was able to unravel many of the CA threads.

But the film’s attention is often drawn back to Kaiser, who had worked first on U.S. political campaigns and then on Brexit for CA. She had been drawn to the company by smooth-talking CEO Nix, who begged: “Let me get you drunk and steal all of your secrets.”

But was she a real whistleblower? Or was she trying to cover her tracks? How could someone who’d worked on the Obama campaign switch to Trump? Was she a victim of Cambridge Analytica, or one of its villains?

British political analyst Paul Hilder manages to get her to come to the U.K. to testify before a parliamentary inquiry. There is high drama as her part in the story unfolds.

Kaiser appears in various guises, which vary from idealistically naive to stupid, from knowing to manipulative. It’s almost impossible to know which. But hearing about her revelation as to why she made the choices she did… well, it’s an eye-opener.

brit

Both she and Wylie have complex stories in this tale, where not everything seems to be as it is, reflecting our new world, where truth is increasingly hard to determine.

Other characters come and go in this story. Zuckerburg makes an appearance in Congress and we learn of the casual relationship Facebook had to its complicity in these political earthquakes. Although, if you’re reading TechCrunch, then you probably know at least part of this story.

Created for Netflix by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, these Egyptian-Americans made “The Square,” about the Egyptian revolution of 2011. To them, the way Cambridge Analytica applied its methods to online campaigning was just as much a revolution as Egyptians toppling a dictator from Cario’s iconic Tahrir Square.

For them, the huge irony is that “psyops,” or psychological operations, used on Muslim populations in Iraq and Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks ended up being used to influence Western elections.

Cadwalladr stands head and shoulders above all as a bastion of dogged journalism, even as she is attacked from all quarters, and still is to this day.

What you won’t find out from this film is what happens next. For many, questions remain on the table: What will happen now that Facebook is entering cryptocurrency? Will that mean it could be used for dark election campaigning? Will people be paid for their votes next time, not just in Likes? Kaiser has a bitcoin logo on the back of her phone. Is that connected? The film doesn’t comment.

But it certainly unfolds like a slow-motion car crash, where democracy is the car and you’re inside it.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/the-great-hack-netflix-doc-unpacks-cambridge-analytica-trump-brexit-and-democracys-death/

UK deep tech VC IQ Capital launches new $125M growth fund, closes third VC fund at $175M

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IQ Capital, a U.K.-based deep tech fund that has invested in startups such as Paragraf, Senseye and Funderbeam, has launched a new $125 million Growth Opportunities Fund and closed its third venture fund, IQ Capital Fund III, at $175 million. This brings the total new capital to be invested to more than $300 million. National Grid Partners have joined British Patient Capital and a number of other global institutions as an investor in IQ Capital Fund III.

The move is part of a wider shift in VC investing across Europe toward so-called deep tech (AI, biotech, blockchain, etc.).For instance, Adara Ventures, a Spanish VC firm, recently closed its third fund with commitments in excess of €65 million to back European early-stage deep tech startups.

IQ says the $125 million fund will provide later-stage capital to the best-performing companies in their existing portfolio. The first to benefit from this is Privitar, a startup in data privacy engineering that IQ Capital funded from seed stage as part of its $40 million Series B funding round announced last month.

Alongside the launch of the new fund, IQ Capital has reached the final closing for its third venture fund at $175 million, which focuses on investing into companies at seed and Series A stage. In the last year, IQ Capital has invested in 12 companies, including Causalens, Concirrus and Iotic. Previous Fund II startups include Thought Machine, Fluidic Analytics, Paragraf and Speechmatics.

Max Bautin, co-founder and partner at IQ Capital, said in a statement: “The partners, Ed Stacey, Kerry Baldwin, and I, have been investing in deep-tech for over 20 years, and during this time we’ve seen investment in the sector grow from tens of millions p.a. to $1.75 billion deployed across Europe in 2018 alone. Half of this capital was invested into UK start-ups, reinforcing the UK as a leader in Europe, with well-established technology ecosystems formed in Cambridge, Bristol, Oxford, and London.

“IQ Capital has grown its funds under management over 10x in the last five years, following exits to Google, Apple, and Facebook, and a double-dragon to Oracle . The investment team has tripled in size over the same period with recent joiners Rick Hao, Daniel Carew and Marek Chalupnik. IQ Capital is now firmly established as the leading deep tech investor in the UK.”

Lisa Lambert, founder and president of National Grid Partners said: “IQ Capital…is positioned as the go-to deep-tech fund in the EU, and the team has a proven ability to connect with founders through all stages, from seed to exit.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/uk-deeptech-vc-iq-capital-launches-new-125m-growth-fund-closes-third-vc-fund-at-175m/

Bitcoin’s Death Cross Looms as Strategist Eyes $2,800 Level

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  • Moving-average indicators of price momentum look bearish
  • 2013 downturn provides ominous signals to technical analysts

The tea leaves don’t bode well for Bitcoin.

Traders who look for future price direction in chart patterns are finding more indicators suggesting the world’s largest digital currency may have further to fall.

Bitcoin’s 50-day moving average has dropped to the closest proximity to its 200-day moving average in nine months. Crossing below that level — something it hasn’t done since 2015 — signals fresh weakness to come for technical traders who would dub such a move a "death cross." Another moving-average indicator of momentum has already turned bearish.

While many cryptocurrency investors don’t follow technical analysis, the digital-coin universe is drawing interest from professional traders who pay growing attention to the indicators, after the token vaulted to a record in December.

“There’s been a definitive shift over the past couple of months after the bubble activity at the end of 2017,” said Paul Day, a technical analyst and head of futures and options at Market Securities Dubai Ltd.

The strategist studied the virtual currency’s 2013 tumble for clues on how it may act this time round. His conclusion? Gear up for a 76 percent tumble from late February highs, which would take Bitcoin to a paltry $2,800, if the downtrend is repeated. Bitcoin fell 2.2 percent to $8,120 at 11:17 a.m. in London, according to Bitstamp prices.

Regardless, Bitcoin investors had better make peace with volatility, which is often tied to regulatory and security risks.

For an update on U.S. regulatory enforcement, please click here.

When the currency’s 50-day moving average last hovered below the longer measure, during the first 10 months 2015, its performance was lackluster. It fell 5.2 percent in that period, and then rallied 43 percent through year-end from the day it broke back above the resistance level.

It has remained above that line ever since 2015 and racked up three successive annual gains in the process.

“There is an element of charting and technical analysis being used in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies trading, considering the professional bodies now entering the market,” said Daire Ferguson at Irish currency platform AvaTrade Ltd, adding that regulatory policies would bind the fortunes of digital tokens.

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-16/bitcoin-s-death-cross-looms-as-strategist-eyes-2-800-level