The Patriot Act’s New Goal: Individuals Who Dare to Use Crypto Privately – The Washington Normal

Privacy doesn’t equal crime. It equals freedom. And the U.S. Treasury’s new “mixer rule” proves the Patriot Act was never about safety—it was about control.

Public ledgers are already surveillance-ready. Now the U.S. Treasury, through FinCEN, wants to go further—proposing a sweeping “mixer rule” that would designate crypto mixing services as a “Primary Money Laundering Concern” under Section 311 of the Patriot Act. That label isn’t symbolic. It unlocks extraordinary powers that force banks and exchanges to flag, report, or outright ban activity like wallet rotation, transaction delays, or swaps—ordinary user behaviors suddenly redefined as criminal suspicion.

NEW: @theragetech reports the 🇺🇸 Treasury is moving to apply the PATRIOT Act to digital assets.

FinCEN Dir. Andrea Gacki confirmed plans to finalize the “mixer rule,” which would label common Bitcoin privacy practices as primary money laundering concerns: pic.twitter.com/nX9GlMw9zY

— Bitcoin News (@BitcoinNewsCom) September 12, 2025

The Patriot Act was sold to Americans in 2001 as a temporary measure to catch terrorists after 9/11. Two decades later, it’s been renewed and expanded at every opportunity. Instead of keeping us safe, it has become a Swiss army knife of surveillance—used to justify warrantless spying, mass data collection, and now the criminalization of privacy-enhancing tools. Every time, the pattern repeats: new threat, new powers, fewer rights.

Treasury’s recent proposal is just the latest example. Officials say it’s about countering terror finance. But the practical effect is to strip ordinary Americans of the ability to transact privately. They’ve already sanctioned Tornado Cash, Blender, and other open-source tools—not because the developers laundered money, but because criminals used them. By that logic, we should put AT&T on trial for phone calls made before a bank robbery, or the car manufacturer of the car used by the getaway driver.

Meanwhile, the real beneficiaries of the mixer rule are the compliance cartels—contractors and analytics firms like Chainalysis who grow rich by helping the state build financial blacklists. They are rewarded for feeding the surveillance machine, while the rest of us lose the very privacy that made crypto meaningful in the first place.

Monero, Zcash, and Zano, which is architected for privacy from the ground up, aren’t the losers here—they’re the targets. That alone proves their value. If tyrants hate something, it’s usually because it actually works. These projects offer what surveillance money never can: autonomy. And that is exactly why the Treasury wants them painted as dangerous.

Some will insist this is a good thing—that government blessing crypto equals progress. But what’s being blessed isn’t freedom. It’s surveillance money. When Washington tells you your “stable” coins are safe while simultaneously freezing wallets at the touch of a button, you’re not using crypto—you’re using a Central Bank Digital Currency with better marketing. Just ask Tether or Circle users whose assets have been frozen on mere allegations.

That’s why the emergence of privacy-focused tools matters now more than ever. Zano offers confidential assets, aliases, and fUSD—a private stable dollar—that let people transact without permission. So do Monero and other projects in the broader privacy movement. None are perfect. But they are proof that we don’t have to live in a panopticon unless we choose to.

The Treasury’s mixer rule isn’t about bad actors. It’s about criminalizing the very idea that you should be able to spend without asking permission. And if the past two decades of the Patriot Act taught us anything, it’s this: tyrants never give back the powers they seize. Which is exactly why it’s time to exit their system.

Cryptocurrency was intended to be:
✅Private
✅Decentralized currency
✅Facilitate fast peer-to-peer transactions
✅Secure

Now, most cryptocurrencies can be summed up as:
❌Completely transparent
❌Classified as “assets” instead of currencies
❌Slow transactions
❌Not secure… pic.twitter.com/IHXRazG8Wk

— Zano (@zano_project) September 18, 2025

Article posted with permission from Matt Agorist

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