This chapter introduces methods for analyzing blockchain networks through clustering and centrality. It covers behavioral, topological, and heuristic-based clustering approaches for identifying related addresses and entities. Common heuristics such as multi-input, change, and transition (for Bitcoin) and deposit or airdrop (for Ethereum) are explained. You will examine coin mixing techniques like CoinJoin, TumbleBit, and Tornado Cash, comparing their privacy goals and regulatory implications. The chapter then presents centrality measures—traditional and blockchain and specific variants like Mint and Entropic Centrality—to identify key actors and transaction flows. It concludes by showing how clustering, mixing, and centrality analysis reveal systemic participants, trace illicit behavior, and assess structural risks in DeFi networks.

Chapter 3 analyzes Social Security legislation from the 1980s through 2009, adding various criminal justice system-involved restrictions on benefit receipt in both the retirement and disability insurance programs. It examines the phenomena of American mass incarceration and the collateral consequences of system-involvement on social security benefit receipts. This includes the damaging impacts on Black and Latino/a families and communities from these benefit restrictions owing to the racially disparate consequences of overcriminalization and mass incarceration from the 1980s to the 2000s. It explores policy justifications for these restrictions, including rationales for a law suspending Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance benefits to incarcerated beneficiaries and the consistency of those rationales with core principles of the Act’s social insurance programs. It also analyzes another provision, permanently excluding consideration of impairments arising in connection with commission of felonies in the Social Security Disability Insurance disability evaluation process. It explores arbitrary and vague/overbroad aspects of this law as well as its racially disparate potential application to Black/Brown Social Security Disability Insurance claimants not only because of racialized policing and mass incarceration but also the racially disproportionate imposition of disabling impairment-producing injuries from police misconduct. It concludes by offering arguments for repeal or reform of these two criminal justice system-based social security benefit-restricting laws.

Chapter 2 explores contemporary racial inequity facing elderly Social Security beneficiaries. It includes an examination of structural discrimination in the labor market and in many other core aspects of American life (i.e., housing, education, credit/banking, health care), contributing to disparately lower levels of social security-based earnings upon which benefit levels are based and to greater financial precarity in retirement. It concludes by providing recommendations of potential remedies and mitigations for the disproportionately significantly lower and often below-poverty-line benefit levels received by elderly Black and Brown social security program beneficiaries and the major threats of additional inequities from regressive benefit cuts owing to impending social security trust fund insolvency in 2032–33.

Chapter 6 analyzes racial inequity in health care assessments and treatment leading to further inequity in Social Security Act disability decision-making, by examining the practice by medical and health care professionals, including the Social Security Act’s internal and retained physicians, of “race-norming” or “race correction.” This involves the insertion of race into medical clinical-decision support tools and diagnostic algorithms that adjust or correct their outputs on the basis of a patient’s race or ethnicity predicated on fallacious principles of biological race. Race-normed or corrected outputs often understate the severity of Black and other minority patients’ conditions or require greater demonstration of illness to receive treatment for a range of severe and sometimes life-threatening conditions. As a result, they also inequitably, illegally, and unconstitutionally raise the bar on the demonstration of disabling impairment severity for Black claimants and other claimants of color subject to race-norming. This chapter ends with recommendations for eradicating race-norming in Social Security Act adjudication including strengthening a recent, albeit insufficient, 2022 internal Social Security Act guideline precluding use of a race-normed kidney function (eGFR) clinical-decision support-tool in disability adjudications and expanding that guideline to commonly race-normed tools in other areas, such as pulmonary function tests, and all other race-normed tools and algorithms.

The Color of Social Security traces the myriad ways and interconnected social systems in which racism has been embedded into American social security programs. Drawing on American history, Jon C. Dubin exposes institutionalized processes undermining racially equitable receipt of retirement and disability benefits. Examples include the 1935 Social Security Act, which excluded Black agricultural and domestic workers in order to protect the postbellum Southern racial economic and political order; the 1972 Supplemental Security Income program’s exclusion of persons of color in the US territories, with genesis in 125 years of racialized colonial domination; 1980s criminal justice system restrictions; systemic racial bias in disability decisions in the 1990s; disability eligibility obstacles from “race-norming” in the 2000s; and the misevaluation of Black claimants with sickle cell disease under Social Security Administration regulations since 2015. While exploring these histories, Dubin offers concrete solutions to address racial inequity and create a more equitable future.

Chapter 4 focuses principally on inequity in the Social Security Act’s means-tested Supplemental Security Income program, providing cash benefits for low-income adults and children with disabilities and low-income elderly persons. It explores the 1972 statutory exclusion from the Supplemental Security Income program of residents from the principal US territories (i.e., Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa), which are overwhelmingly Latino/a, Brown, Black, mixed-race, and/or Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and other Pacific Islander. This chapter includes a critical evaluation of the application of equal protection doctrine in the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in U.S. v. Vaello Madero. This chapter also examines the lingering shadow of the overtly racist yet not overruled Insular Cases decided in the early twentieth century hovering over this controversy – a series of cases launching and reinforcing a separate and unequal regime of rights and benefits for territory residents through the construct of indefinite “unincorporated” territory status based on assumptions even conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch has characterized as grounded in “ugly racial stereotypes,” “bigotry,” and the “theories of social Darwinists.” It concludes, arguing for Congressional reversal of the Supplemental Security Income territorial exclusion and chronicles a recent, albeit narrowly unsuccessful, legislative attempt after Vaelllo-Madero to do so.

Chapter 1 specifically examines racial inequity in the Social Security Old Age/Retirement Insurance program and focuses largely on the original 1935 Social Security Act’s exclusion of disproportionately Black agricultural and domestic workers from coverage. It directly challenges and critiques the Social Security Administration’s public historian’s relatively recent conclusion that race played no meaningful role in the social insurance program exclusion’s adoption and resulting impacts on African Americans and similarly situated persons of color. It also explores, in less depth, discrimination facilitated through local administration of the means-tested welfare programs, and contemporaneous and intertwined racially infused legislative history of the respective means-tested and social insurance old age programs enacted in Titles I and II of the 1935 Act. It includes analysis of the influence of southern legislators’ efforts to preserve the postbellum plantation and sharecropping system’s exploitation of Black farmworkers on each program’s design. It also examines this statutory exclusion through the lens of equal protection doctrine to inform further the inquiry into the salience of race in the exclusion’s enactment.

The Color of Social Security traces the myriad ways and interconnected social systems in which racism has been embedded into American social security programs. Drawing on American history, Jon C. Dubin exposes institutionalized processes undermining racially equitable receipt of retirement and disability benefits. Examples include the 1935 Social Security Act, which excluded Black agricultural and domestic workers in order to protect the postbellum Southern racial economic and political order; the 1972 Supplemental Security Income program’s exclusion of persons of color in the US territories, with genesis in 125 years of racialized colonial domination; 1980s criminal justice system restrictions; systemic racial bias in disability decisions in the 1990s; disability eligibility obstacles from “race-norming” in the 2000s; and the misevaluation of Black claimants with sickle cell disease under Social Security Administration regulations since 2015. While exploring these histories, Dubin offers concrete solutions to address racial inequity and create a more equitable future.