{"id":1725332,"date":"2022-11-05T06:01:03","date_gmt":"2022-11-05T10:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1725332"},"modified":"2022-11-06T18:23:27","modified_gmt":"2022-11-06T23:23:27","slug":"how-government-makes-your-bank-spy-on-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/how-government-makes-your-bank-spy-on-you\/","title":{"rendered":"How Government Makes Your Bank Spy on You"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fhow-government-makes-your-bank-spy-on-you%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1725332&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>When you open a bank account, do you surrender all rights to your privacy and personal data?<\/p>\n<p>Today, the answer is yes. The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (BSA) and subsequent amendments mandated that your bank must inform the federal government about any customer\u2019s transactions that they consider suspicious, however broadly defined that may be, in the form of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs).<\/p>\n<p>How often do <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theepochtimes.com\/t-banks\">banks<\/a> think their customers are doing something suspicious? According to the U.S. Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, there were approximately 20 million bank reports of suspicious activity in 2019.<\/p>\n<p>An August report by the Cato Institute titled \u201cGovernment Surveillance Doesn\u2019t Stop at Your Bank\u2019s Door\u201d states that this reporting requirement doesn\u2019t just apply to banks but also to currency exchanges, payments companies, broker-dealers, casinos, pawnbrokers, travel agencies, and car dealerships.<\/p>\n<p>All of this would seem to be illegal under the U.S. Constitution; the Fourth Amendment, for example, prohibits \u201cunreasonable search and seizure\u201d by our government and establishes the requirement for the government to obtain a warrant and show \u201cprobable cause\u201d of a crime. But according to Jennifer Schulp, co-author of the Cato report, one reason that government surveillance-by-proxy has been allowed by U.S. courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, is something called the \u201cThird Party Doctrine.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Schulp told The Epoch Times that the Third Party Doctrine is a legal principle that \u201cessentially removed the expectation of privacy that an individual has from information that they share with a third party, including their banks. So under current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the information that you give to your bank is no longer private.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Given that it is nearly impossible to function without a bank account in America today, this effectively blurs the line between public and private surveillance. When the Third Party Doctrine was adopted in the 1960s and 1970s, the courts began to allow government to conduct warrantless searches in the interest of preventing crime.<\/p>\n<p>The Cato report points out that \u201cwhile the government\u2019s interest in stopping crime is certainly an important one, the Constitution\u2019s Fourth Amendment already balances that interest with an individual\u2019s interest in privacy by requiring the government to obtain a warrant to access a person\u2019s documents and information.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Another reason the Supreme Court allowed the Bank Secrecy Act to stand was that the law as originally written was more narrowly tailored, and only required reporting of transactions over $10,000. Taking inflation into account, this would be about $75,000 today. The limits of the BSA were never adjusted up for inflation, casting a much wider net today than when the law was passed.<\/p>\n<h3>How Extensive Is Government Surveillance?<\/h3>\n<p>Since being signed off on by the Supreme Court, the law has since been expanded to include many more types of transactions and institutions. But the fact that, according to the law, banks do not tell customers that they\u2019re being surveilled, means that there are few challenges for courts to take up in order to reconsider their verdict.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBanks are not allowed to let individuals know that this type of report is being filed on them,\u201d Schulp said. \u201cSo to the extent that individual citizens might have objections to their information being shared with the government in a Suspicious Activity Report, they have no way of knowing that that\u2019s happening to them, and thus can\u2019t really bring the legal challenge themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Even at the time of the BSA\u2019s original passage, some justices expressed concerns that the constitution was being violated. Justice Thurgood Marshall, for example, stated that \u201cby compelling an otherwise unwilling bank to photocopy the checks of its customers, the government has as much of a hand in seizing those checks as if it had forced a private person to break into the customer\u2019s home or office and photocopy the checks there.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This issue is now being raised again today not only about bank surveillance but also about tech surveillance and even tech censorship. The question is: If the government is barred from warrantless searches, can it get around this simply by getting private corporations to search Americans\u2019 data on its behalf? Likewise, if the government is barred from censoring Americans\u2019 speech, can it just get private tech companies to do this instead?<\/p>\n<p>The extent of bank surveillance has made headlines this year, in three cases in particular. The first was a New York Post report that Bank of America had data-mined its customers\u2019 accounts to see which customers had made purchases or traveled to Washington, D.C., around the time of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol. The names of customers who had done so, or who had recently bought a firearm, were handed over to the FBI for investigation. One customer was reportedly questioned by the FBI as a result, but no charges were filed.<\/p>\n<p>The second case regards a decision by credit card companies\u2014Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, in particular\u2014to begin tracking their customers\u2019 purchases at gun shops. The CEO of Amalgamated Bank, a progressive bank that had lobbied heavily for the tracking of gun sales, stated that \u201cwhere there may be gun sales that are intended for black markets or we see patterns of gun purchases made in multiple gun shops \u2026 we can provide that information to authorities to investigate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Gun rights advocates were quick to criticize this action.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019ve created this merchant category code that if you go into a gun store and you purchase anything from that gun store, and it looks like it may be something outside the norm, then that information could be turned over to the U.S. Treasury\u2019s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network,\u201d Mark Oliva, public affairs director for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told The Epoch Times. \u201cWhat we\u2019re talking about with this is a heavy-handed approach that\u2019s going to put people who are exercising their Second Amendment rights onto a government watchlist, simply for exercising that right.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The third case occurred in February, when Canadian banks data-mined the private accounts of truckers protesting pandemic regulations, as well as those who had donated in support of protesters via crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe and GiveSendGo. Under orders from the Canadian government, banks froze the accounts of targeted customers, blocking them from accessing their own money or making credit card payments.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat Third Party Doctrine has come under criticism a lot over the years, by current Supreme Court justices from very different schools of thought,\u201d Schulp said. \u201cJustice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Sonia Sotomayor have indicated that the Third Party Doctrine needs to be revisited. So I think it\u2019s something that the current court might look at differently than the court did in the 1970s.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"author_wrapper\">\n<div class=\"one_author_block round\">\n<div class=\"top_row\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theepochtimes.com\/author-kevin-stocklin\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Kevin-Stocklin.jpg\" alt=\"Kevin Stocklin\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Follow<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Kevin Stocklin is a writer, film producer, and former investment banker. He wrote and produced &#8220;We All Fall Down: The American Mortgage Crisis,&#8221; a 2008 documentary on the collapse of the U.S. mortgage finance system.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you open a bank account, do you surrender all rights to your privacy and personal data?Today, the answer is yes. The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (BSA) and subsequent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1725342,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[547],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1725332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bongino-report"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1725332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1725342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1725332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1725332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1725332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}