It's a civil law suit against Girls Do Porn.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/she-was-18-and-tricked-into-do...

Sesta/Fosta potentially make Pornhub/Paypal liable.

Pornhub is Canadian, not American (their HQ is Montreal). Of course PayPal is American and Pornhub has plenty of dealings with the US, so your point stands.

> Pornhub is Canadian, not American (their HQ is Montreal).

That doesn't necessarily make them, or their principals, immune to US civil or criminal sanctions.

I know, I said as much in my last sentence. I just meant it was less impactful on them than it is on PayPal. There is still some impact of course.

And, believe it or not, it is. Patriot Act helpfully provides mechanism for various LEOs to send requests to all FI in US to search for accounts they indicate. Add to that BSA and various KYC requirements that ends up sending data about suspicious customers to FinCEN and you have an easy way to identify undesirables.

And the list grows longer every day.

Banks form an important part of it as KYC is designed to cut down on Money Laundering. Globally KYC/AML rules have gotten much stricter in recent years. If criminals can't access their money it ought to curb some of the incentives.

It can of course curb illegal activity, as all surveillance laws tend to do, but at enormous cost to privacy, the ability to escape unjust laws, and the ability of persecuted minorities to protect themselves from tyrannical majorities.

That idea behind the rules mostly just annoys legitimate users and only curbs an insignificant amount of criminal activity because alternatives exist (and have always existed). It's somewhat like piracy warnings on digital media; piracy will ignore it but people that consume the content legally still have to sit through the nonsense.

>It's somewhat like piracy warnings on digital media; [pirates] will ignore it but people that consume the content legally still have to sit through the nonsense.

Not quite correct: the pirates actually have or enjoy a superior product; they don't have to "ignore" anything. The legal product has annoying anti-piracy warnings that legal purchasers are forced to sit through, while the pirated versions don't have these warnings at all, so the people who use these versions enjoy a better viewing experience.

On top of that, the format is superior. Legal viewers are restricted to DVDs (very low quality), Blu-Rays (high-quality, but inconvenient and bulky physical format), or streaming (varying quality, subject to problems due to transmission path), while pirates get to have a simple digital file on their computer which is whatever quality they want (i.e. they can choose to download a lower or higher-resolution/bitrate version) which is now local so it can't be suddenly restricted by studio executives who want to make it exclusively available on their streaming service, and it won't be unavailable because your internet connection is slow or down.