Requiring a warrant is an extremely low bar to pass. Yet somehow law enforcement has been moving away from even that cursory glance since 9/11. We keep seeing these arguments about how burdensome warrants are, but judges routinely rubber stamp every warrant request that comes across their desk.
The reality is that this has nothing to do with “warrant Vs. no-warrant” that’s just the headline, when crimes are suspected warrants are trivial to get. The fight really being had here is “warrant Vs. routine monitoring.”
That’s what law enforcement want from this: If you know someone that knows someone that might have committed a crime, they want to invade your privacy “just in case.” As I said, if you were directly tied to it a warrant is easy, they want to expand the scope of monitoring.
Banks Seek Government Help to Track Money Laundering
Industry, anticorruption groups support creating a Treasury-run database of corporations and their owners
Efforts to overhaul U.S. anti-money-laundering laws are gathering steam, as large banks, anticorruption groups and law-enforcement authorities coalesce around the idea of creating a national database of corporations and their true owners.
.. The financial industry’s support for the plan, which would require new and existing corporations to register with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, could be pivotal.
.. Treasury in 2016 issued a long-awaited rule mandating banks to identify the true owners of companies they take on as clients. It also urged Congress to create a national database of those owners, a step that proponents said would stymie the creation of shell companies by bad actors.
.. Instead of just applying to suspected money-laundering or terrorism-financing activity, the measure would include a long list of criminal activities, including food-stamp fraud, the smuggling of counterfeit goods and environmental crimes.
.. “What you don’t want is a situation where the [government] is able to get private and sensitive information without having to go through that normal process,” she added, citing requests for a warrant or court order.