it saved by not prosecuting a single banker in the financial disaster of the recent past to fund a project that will allow the federal government to monitor all the financial activity of all Americans all the time.

Cheers!

...no one went to jail. On the other hand, if the petty cash drawer at Occupy turns up short a few bucks, you can bet the Feds will be on it in an instant.

If this is as bad as it sounds, then it's worse than I ever dreamed.

then go on to the Koch $.*.(kers and Shelly the ho from Vegas. Then go to Murdoch and Trump.

For God's sake, we didn't have "no-knock" search warrants until 1973 (thanks, Nixon), but anyone who has grown up since then doesn't know anything else. Or SWAT teams. Or the assumption that the federal government knows the contents of all our most private communications. And the contents of our bank accounts.

We're like the proverbial frog in the pot of slowly heating water.

There has to be some legally justified reason for credit reporting agencies to be able to knock off a point on your rating just because someone checked it. I think it is a profit incentive unwittingly paid by all Americans, to cover the costs of being spied on by their financial services.

A check of one's financial records should require a fraction of a penny of electricity, a fraction of a penny of maintenance, and a few packets of data sent and received.

But if a check of one's records automatically updates your entire body of records and forwards ALL of it to Fort Meade, off the financial books, well, someone has to pay for that much larger and more frequent data transfer and updating.

I think we have been paying the costs of being spied on, for a very long time. To keep us "free."

of assisting law enforcement.

It's the "Financial Crimes Enforcement Network" database.

And not everyone goes into it--only people who do stuff like $50,000 cash transactions at banks. It's designed to prevent money laundering.

I distinctly recall the Bush Administration demanding that banks regularly report on cash transactions below the Bank Security Act-mandated $10,000.

That demand was probably rolled into the secret provisions of the PATRIOT Act, Title III, or if they didn't get it that way, they simply found another way to do it, perhaps by lowering the threshold of suspicious activity reports until all Americans were suspect.

Whatever the case, the fact that it is being discussed at all, and the way the White House is presenting it has my spider-sense tingling. They're trying to get us to sign the papers on the lemon for which we have already paid.

Edit: I should add that the justification for all of this, international money laundering in support of terrorism, is horse-shit. John Ashcroft forbade the FBI from investigating al-Qaeda's finances, almost certainly because some of their peanut butter is in Republican chocolate.

$10,000 disclosure threshold, that's a federal crime.

For instance, if you're depositing $19,000 and break it up into two $9500 deposits, that would almost certainly draw a SAR.

But, in any event, the FBI already has every single piece of data in that database.

The FBI certainly does have all that data. Now they're retroactively justifying how they used it.

financing of terrorist activities.

As I mentioned above, investigating al-Qaeda's money laundering was declared off-limits by AG John Ashcroft. He very deliberately tried to gag Sibel Edmonds' disclosures on al-Q's use of money laundering and the narcotics trade, and I think it's safe to guess that there were few to no prosecutions by the Bush Administration in those areas.

If the law wasn't used for that, the entire premise of the project is false.

All we really know is that they demanded the tools to look at us harder while they deliberately didn't look at the terrorists.

That spells out in plain language whom the Bush Administration considered to be their real enemy, and upon whom they directed their own spying efforts.

None of us knows what's really in the Patriot Act because there is a public version and a secret version, and the secret section can and probably does revise the text of the public version. It can and quite likely was also altered by executive order, Presidential signing statements, callous violation of the laws, secret "national security" legislation, and the simple choice of what to prosecute and what to ignore--now that we're all guilty of something, and documented, enforcement of the law is a quite arbitrary affair. Insisting that what you can see in print is what is really going on is a bad, bad idea that didn't work at all in the Bush years and still does not to a large degree.

You may detect an element of insistence that goes beyond the statements in the paragraph above. All I can say beyond that is that I encourage you to keep looking into this... and eventually, you shall see.

It seems to me that you really want to believe that your government is working in your best interests, but your life experience by now should be telling you otherwise.

None of this stuff ever goes away. It just keeps getting expanded.

I have is the government's potential to abuse that power. I would be against giving them this power. It doesn't matter if it is a Democrat or Republican.

Cars, mortgages, healthcare, etc.

The honest individuals will likely be subject to the scrutiny rather than any concerted 'anti-terror' effort.

The # of people who use hard cash--not checks, hard cash--to pay for automobiles costing over $10,000 is vanishingly small.

I've done it, and so have about half a dozen other members of my family. The biggest reason I did it was the psychological reward of holding the cash I'd saved over the years.

I've read the rest of the thread and I can't wait to hear the hand-waving that you come up with.

looking at a database it already owns and that is accessible to the FBI without a warrant.

that can be looked at as "expanding warrantless access to one of thousands of databases designed to gather information about people whose rights against warrantless searches and information-gathering were supposed to be guaranteed". At the least, this deserves a full public and Congressional debate.

By your logic, if an agency that could search from house to house at will already existed, there would be no trouble with having every agency do it.

transactions. Created to track records that all banks have had to give to the government since 1970.

99% of the shock is from people learning about the existence of SARs, FinCen, and the Bank Secresy Act for the first time.

But, it doesn't stop the usual "Obama is a dictator" bedwetting.

containing personal information without legislative or judicial consultation. Explain to me where the check and balance is on that.

law enforcement agencies, right?

It's a bit late to complain about privacy when the people who could use that information against you already own it.

I would be much more comfortable with the NSA having information on me than the FBI.

http://www.fincen.gov/law_enforcement/les/

Access to Global Network of Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs)
As the FIU for the United States, FinCEN is part of a global network of more than 100 FIUs, known as the Egmont Group. Through this network, FinCEN can facilitate information exchange on law enforcement investigations that have an international component.

•These FIUs were created to collect information on suspicious or unusual financial activity, to analyze that data, and to make it available to appropriate authorities.
•Law Enforcement agencies can submit requests to FinCEN for information from its global partners that can significantly expand their knowledge of financial activities and reduce delays often associated with international investigative efforts.
•FinCEN's staff has developed in-depth knowledge of FIU partner countries, and established relationships with FIU personnel that can be shared/utilized to enhance investigative efforts.

Luckily others are also.
Peace, Mojo

We used to have something called the Fourth Amendment.

We let every private business and marketing association do the same thing, why not the government?

That's what they need to go after, and it all starts with the banks. God only knows how much tax money is being stolen by off book wages, probably enough to fund free universal health care and social security.

I'm in the bank every day making deposits, yesterday while I was there a guy came in and withdrew more than 8000 dollars. It's to pay his "employees" who "work" for his construction company, I know this because I saw the decals on his 50K F-350 truck he drove to the bank. Why else would a person need that amount of cash?

I see this 1-2 times a week and when I say something about this practice to a teller they just smile, everyone knows what is going on.

The irony is that when I DEPOSIT 10K or more in cash I have to fill out a federal form and provide personal info but you can withdraw 10K for no reason and there are no reporting requirements.

Ask the elderly and others who squirrel it away in their houses because of an innate distrust of banks, not wanting to finance the next lending bubble with their money, thoughts of a rainy day, or any one of a thousand other reasons.

Just because you cannot think of a reason does not mean that one does not exist.

to employees.

It's to prevent money laundering, hence the tracing of large cash deposits rather than withdrawals.

What else would we expect from this administration by now, but more corporate-authoritarian invasions of privacy?