If you’ve seen the real harm that caused in the world by money laundering, you would be less inclined to condemn its prevention.
I’ve personally seen cases of money laundering where the money comes from sexual exploitation, human trafficking, modern day slavery, organ trafficking, high value thefts (petrol, or digits bank robberies), standard social engineering scams etc
These aren’t special one of events, this happens in small bank on every day ending in y. Most fincrime teams don’t have the energy to deal with normal people moving their cash, or even high net wealth people moving their cash. They’re too busy tracking down and cleaning up after some really nasty people.
> sexual exploitation, human trafficking, modern day slavery, organ trafficking, high value thefts (petrol, or digits bank robberies), standard social engineering scams etc
That kind of logic can be used to justify putting government cameras and microphones inside everyone's homes too.
Having laws requiring the state to get a warrant from a court to conduct a search, is not an extreme. Instituting warrantless mass-surveillance, like monitoring every transaction above a certain size, is the extreme.
You’re not wrong. There’s clearly a balance to be made, but financial institutions are good choke point for detecting and preventing a great number of different crimes. After all few engage in criminal behaviour just for fun, without the profit motive most serious crimes just wouldn’t be worth it.
I don’t advocate for wholesale financial surveillance, and I certainly think the rules advocated by FinCEN here are both naive and an overreach.
But I do think banks should have an obligation to detect, prevent and report financial crime, if only to make sure banks don’t become complicit. Providing financial services to criminals is incredibly lucrative, far more than providing services to ordinary consumers.
Giving government agents the ability to conduct warrantless dragnet surveillance on the population's private financial transactions is extremely dangerous, even if it is a tool government officials can use to combant malevolent criminal behavior.
This type of mass-surveillance concentrates power in the hands of the few, and gravely endangers both private property rights and political freedoms.
No one should have this power in a free society. Not you, not me, not the most trustworthy individual in society. And with all due respect to the countless men and women who honorably carry out their duty in law enforcement agencies, we don't even have law enforcement agencies with unblemished reputations, to be giving awesome illiberal powers to.
In the Silk Road case, two agents, from two different agencies, conspired to steal BTC, and they only got caught because of the mistakes they made due to the novelty of the financial technology. It's any one's guess how much corruption goes undetected.
Giving mass-surveillance powers to a select subsection of society is just asking for massive corruption and abuse.
Mass-surveillance makes government in general too powerful even ignoring employee-level corruption by those who administer the surveillance programs.
The government should not have so much information on the populace that it could enforce any conceivable law. There should be widespread use of privacy-enhancing technologies, like end-to-end encrypted communication, cash and cryptocurrency, so that some laws are hard to enforce, and the government's ability to micromanage people's lives is inherently limited. Absent that, dystopia is only one bad election away. Non-political checks on government powers, like widespread use of cash and its electronic corollaries, are an important institution of a free society, as a failsafe in case of a failure of the political system.
I’ve personally seen cases of money laundering where the money comes from sexual exploitation, human trafficking, modern day slavery, organ trafficking, high value thefts (petrol, or digits bank robberies), standard social engineering scams etc
These aren’t special one of events, this happens in small bank on every day ending in y. Most fincrime teams don’t have the energy to deal with normal people moving their cash, or even high net wealth people moving their cash. They’re too busy tracking down and cleaning up after some really nasty people.