When the Financial System Is Weaponized against Resistance, What’s the Path Forward?

This post is a collab between Lia Holland (Fight for the Future) and Elijah Baucom (Director of the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic).

In nine months, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has gone from decades of working with the federal government to share tips from confidential informants at hate groups, to being charged by the federal government for that same program and the banking practices surrounding it. 

Meanwhile, in December, the Attorney General issued a memo advertising the government’s intent to pursue nonprofit organizations that don’t ideologically align with the administration for tax crimes and terrorism. The Justice Department is going after the financial infrastructure underpinning social justice organizations, and many are likely to face imminent financial challenges similar to those traditionally marginalized people and informal activist collectives have endured for decades. Challenges that, regrettably, have been deprioritized by progressive leaders and FinTech innovators alike.

It is time to change that. For an accelerated view on what might be on the financial horizon for US-based nonprofits, it is crucial to listen to the communities with lived experience. Only with their expertise can we finally demand the sort of financial infrastructure that would increase marginalized groups’ resilience to bad-faith attacks like the SPLC is facing. Protections and innovations that center the most vulnerable provide the best value long-term: they always trickle up.

Turning a Lens on Mutual Aid 

The United States has historically failed to meet the basic human needs of many people who live here—whether those needs be around healthcare, disaster relief, or the housing, hunger, or incarceration crises. As holes in the social safety net widen, organizers, activists, and intergenerational volunteers continue to come together to help as much as they can and advocate in the interest of the communities they serve. This practice is known as mutual aid. 

The United States and the systems that uphold it are young, yet the concept of mutual aid, whether it be Su Su or hunger relief models, has been a part of human societies across centuries. This persistence points to the efficacy of such resource-sharing systems. 

Mutual aid efforts and the people they benefit vary widely. They could be people-powered wildfire and hurricane disaster relief that, as with Helene, moves faster than FEMA; bail funds accruing donations to bail out activists; a volunteer-run kitchen collecting food donations for people who are too scared of deportation to leave their homes; a network of global volunteers processing requests for funds to support abortion patients; or many other things. Generally, those who receive this support are those with the most acute need, who lack the resources to pursue other help.

One of the most common threads among mutual aid groups is the collection of monetary donations to power their work—as well as the distribution of funds in the form not only of reimbursements to volunteers, but also direct payments to a family displaced by a hurricane or a mother who needs childcare so she can get her abortion. The threats to life and liberty that mutual aid groups mitigate are quite serious, and yet the people engaged in this work largely are volunteers with limited technical know-how—including retirees, youth, and members of traditionally marginalized groups. Somehow, for the most part, these folks are managing to make it work despite the fact that financial technologies are at best insufficient, and at worst actively hostile to their efforts to help those in need.

Financial Infrastructure Gaps in Mutual Aid

Last year, Convocation Research & Design issued a crucial report on the landscape of financial tools available for mutual aid organizations. They found that many financial technology companies—like PayPal and Venmo—are poor solutions to distribute aid that moves at the speed of disaster and protects volunteers and recipients along the way. One of the greatest threats to mutual aid efforts is that the data FinTech collects on their efforts will be weaponized to punish the people they help, as well as the volunteers doing the helping. As legacy companies such as Home Depot get caught feeding data on customers directly into federal law enforcement systems, it’s not a stretch to think of financial apps doing the same. 

Moreover, Convocation’s analysis considered the frequent issue of mutual aid organizations having their accounts frozen or shut down based on the political leanings of shareholders at payment processing companies. This is called debanking—and it forces mutual aid organizations into an extrajudicial purgatory wherein they are guilty of some nebulous wrongdoing unless they can somehow prove to customer support that they are innocent. Nonvirtual transfers of funds and supplies are also fraught, either because they are slow, or support is being collected at a national or global scale, or the need is extremely urgent. Mutual aid, like many forms of financial transaction in this era, generally needs to move at the speed of the Internet.

Cryptocurrencies’ Abandonment of Freedom & Privacy for All

As cryptocurrencies surged to the global stage during the Biden administration, crypto evangelists often worked to ward off criticism from the left by pointing to the values with which the first cryptocurrencies were founded—values that champion privacy, access, and autonomy for all people. Unfortunately, Convocation found that while the tools that some cryptocurrency projects have built offer unparalleled privacy and censorship-resistance, they remain a walled garden by requiring a level of tech savvy too high for the average mutual aid recipient or volunteer to climb. And in today’s political environment, most projects in this arena have abandoned the idea of building with and for traditionally marginalized communities entirely.

This choice is both shortsighted for the crypto industry—as President Trump’s crypto dealings draw full-throated criticism from Democrats, who will inevitably crack down on the industry in the years to come—and a disappointment to the communities who advocated for decentralized tech like crypto based on the urgent need for alternatives to the surveillance-ridden financial regime of the post-9/11 era. 

What Urgently Needs to be Built

Fortunately, there are some at the forefront of decentralized, community-owned, or other alternative financial technologies that do value putting human rights at the center of their work. In the hopes of drawing attention to the urgent needs of mutual aid organizers, UC Berkeley’s Cybersecurity Clinic released a case study with findings for both mutual aid and fintech leadership.

To inform the case study, the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic conducted pro bono cybersecurity risk assessments with six mutual aid groups. These organizations represented a range of services within the human rights sector. Compiling the common issues observed across interviews, the Clinic wrote practical digital security recommendations for mutual aid groups. The case study also includes a section on key design takeaways for developers and technologists seeking to build mission-aligned financial platforms that meet the needs of mutual aid communities. 

What the Cybersecurity Clinic found in their assessments is not surprising—at every turn, today’s financial technologies try to trick mutual aid groups into consenting to hidden surveillance, and the threat of hacks and theft is particularly elevated for these often ad-hoc, volunteer run organizations. 

Alongside pages of practical security advice, the report calls for more adaptable and secure financial technologies that put control and transparency back in the hands of users, by design. A speed-read of the findings would leave nearly any reader with one thought: it shouldn’t be this difficult to keep people who are trying to build a better world safe.

About Elijah Baucom

Elijah is a transdisciplinary educator, mentor, cultural worker, and revolutionary technologist at the intersection of technology, humanity, decolonization, and political education. He is the Director of the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic (a pro-bono, public interest cybersecurity clinic), where he teaches and trains students how to consult with and support mission-driven social sector organizations and human rights defenders that are more susceptible to ideologically based attacks. In addition, Elijah is a founding member of Everyday Security, a revolutionary collective organization that provides leadership, training, strategies, and consulting to movement organizations, activists, and communities in the areas of cybersecurity, privacy, IT, solidarity economies, and political education.