Repeal the Bank Blab Everything Act

The war on drugs now the war on terror has become a war on banks, needlessly, causing great harm to the country. The intrusive nose of government only serves to have legitimate financial activity flee the US because a group of analysts at FinCen scrutinize every wee dime and can deduce future activity, which people want to keep secret for legitimate purposes.

There are plenty of ways government can monitor the aggregate movement of money in small and large value payment systems; and present a court of law a probable cause warrant to get details of particular financial activity; without having to watch everyone’s financial activity every second.

  

This 70’s relic of a law symbolizes the surrender of  people’s liberties to the right wing cause that government dictate citizen behavior conform to an obtuse concept of morality based on 17^th century religious ideals. How much of our payment infrastructure flees every day to unregulated, unsafe, and untaxed methods because of this constitutionally suspect practice? 

We cannot fulfill the dream of a cashless society without people initiating their transactions with anonymity. We see the routine avoidance of government detection methods for two reasons, movement of funds to and from underground payment hubs, and preventing people other than government from seeing financial activity. How many FinCen investigations turned up adulterers, closet drinkers, compulsive gamblers, small cash businesses, and other harmless souls not requiring investigation by the Federal Government? It’s odd, but I see no data on the investigation of false positives and yet that is a critical number to determine the effectiveness of any payment hub detection activity. More to the point, how many money launderers no longer use US banks?

If banks did not spend the money needed to comply to this ridiculous intrusive nanny requirement perhaps they could use those funds to bolster their current payment architectures and stop relying on other companies to perform what used to be one of their primary functions, efficient cost effective funds movement.

Next Blog: Welding a push payment architecture to a bum’s pocket