IIRC it was triggered by Christian moralizers lobbying for rules and laws which were officially meant to protect against trafficking, but which were actually intended to pressure payment processors into cutting all sex workers out of their systems.

It was a pretty clever and creative bit of lobbying, if I remember. Right up there with the plot to make the F-35 program impossible to cancel by redistributing jobs to key congressional districts.

The B-1 was the original “put a piece in each congressional district” back in the Reagan era.

The issue for gambling and sex payment processors is that they are easy targets for politicians looking for votes: someone who hates them will vote for such a candidate and few will bother to come out in support. Those politicians become the regulators, so in exchange for chilling on some issue or another the payment processors agree to “crack down”

I can't find a source for this (or the B-1 claim) right now so I might be wrong, but I believe the Space Shuttle was done in a similar matter, with subcontractors in each of the 50 states to make it politically bullet proof.

It was widely reported at the time (and Rockwell was proud of their approach) because it was a novel and cynical idea. Even though Reagan had been elected people back then were still shocked by a cynical approach like that.

I was surprised by it. Literally every congressional district, not just every state.

I thought the plane was cool, but even as a teen I could see that it was pointless.

I believe there's some disagreement if the Space Shuttle was intentionally built that way (though the eventual reality came close, but it may have been as much pragmatism and the usual procedures of government bid contracts), but it is definitely a common criticism of how Nasa's current Space Launch System (SLS) was planned and is being built. (It's a criticism also heavily negatively used when comparing, for instance, SpaceX projects over the same timeframes, especially by the sorts of people that think today's Nasa should be more in the business of buying and "leasing" commercialized rockets and capsules rather than building its own.)

Or is it actually due to something like Operation Choke Point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point