If Money Is Speech, CBDCs Should Be Tools for Freedom

“These are new First Amendment waters we’re sailing in,” Benjamin Barr, a lawyer at Barr & Klein PLLC specializing in free speech rights, told CoinDesk over email. It isn’t necessarily an easy fight, he noted. For decades, privacy advocates have fought to scale back or dismantle the Bank Secrecy Act and other anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules, which establish broad mandates to surveil even everyday citizens nominally to prevent crime, on privacy grounds and have failed.