EconoWeirdness

Exposing the madness wehind current economic thought

Sunday, March 17, 2013

U.S. plans to let spy agencies scour Americans' finances

The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a new massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.

Currently, intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and the NSA, have to make case-by-case requests for information to FinCEN. The Treasury plan would give spy agencies the ability to analyze more raw financial data than they have ever had before.

Privacy watchdogs expressed concern about the plan. A move like the FinCEN proposal "raises concerns as to whether people could find their information in a file as a potential terrorist suspect without having the appropriate predicate for that and find themselves potentially falsely accused," said Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel for the Rule of Law Program at the Constitution Project, a non-profit watchdog group.

Draconian measures like this new proposal, combined with the Global War on Cash and the damaging effects on the economy of overreaching Acts like FATCA, could result into more people feeling into crypto-currencies such as bitcoin and litecoin.