Few Americans pay attention to the Bush administration’s effort to better monitor terrorist communications. In short, federal authorities want to indirectly void the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which requires a warrant signed by a judge before they can search a person’s home and other personal information. This seems harmless to most law abiding citizens, so why is this opposed by many in the U.S. Congress? The answer is that most people have skeletons in their closet, as New York Governor Eliot Spitzer recently demonstrated. Congressmen know that the U.S. government wants to learn every detail about everyone’s private life through the growth of massive computer databases and new search technology that allows “data mining.”
Prior to the “war on terror,” the “war on drugs” was the excuse to gradually errode the U.S. Bill of Rights. Since drug lords do business in cash, a database called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) was established to monitor cash transactions in the USA.[1] Banks must submit a report on persons who make a cash transaction of $10,000 or more. Drug lords learned of this, so they limited transactions to less than $10,000. As a result, laws were passed that require banks to also report “suspicious” or multiple cash transactions below $10,000. Since money was often laundered through casinos and money transfer companies like Western Union, they are required to submit reports to FinCEN too.
数据挖掘实验室
Structuring
This data provided federal agents with leads to possible criminal activity, but they were often unable to link cash transactions to a specific crime. As a result, a vague law prohibiting “structuring” was enacted, in which it became illegal to structure transactions to avoid the $10,000 reporting requirement. This little understood law is a favorite tool of law enforcement because few Americans know that depositing or withdrawing a few thousand dollars in cash a few times a year may land them in prison. Once such activity is detected, federal agents demand an explanation, while threatening to imprison the suspects for “structuring.” As a result, thousands of uncooperative or unconvincing Americans have been imprisoned for nothing more than suspicious cash transactions.
