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by JumpCrisscross
2900 days ago
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> Could you help me understand why it's a problem that your account data would be in the hands of the police? I would be pretty pissed off if the NYPD compiled a database of my political donations without probable cause. > whatever the German equivalent to FinCEN FinCEN doesn’t have a comprehensive database of transactions. Banks, collectively, do. But for smaller non-suspicious transactions, FinCEN must reach out to banks to collect the data. Requesting political donations for lots of individuals without a warrant would be odd. |
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I share your sentiment, I wouldn't appreciate that either of course.
I find it hard to feel optimistic about privacy in America, and in a similar way, probable cause. Three short vignettes:
1) Living in Brooklyn a couple years back I was surprised one day to see a white van with ALPR cameras slowly cruising residential streets, followed by a squad car. There was clearly some arrangement where this private company was teaming up with NYPD to boot offenders' vehicles. Ostensibly the private company had access to some NYPD database [0]. The slippery slope there makes me exceedingly uncomfortable. If a referendum happened on that one, I missed it.
2) Fast forward to Jan 2017 - shortly before Obama left office, the NSA was given significantly increased authority to share the dragnet surveillance it hoovers up [1] [2].
3) In May 2018, as you may have heard, major US carriers were caught selling real-time customer location data to private companies [3] who resold it.
Meanwhile what you might hope would be prosecutors' fear of, well, prosecution for attempting to subvert the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine for e.g. parallel construction [4] seems quite undermined by prosecutorial immunity [5].
I don't claim to be a legal expert but I do find it truly scary to think about.
What else is going on we don't know?
[0] https://paylock.com/who-we-serve/
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveill...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/locationsmart-securus-location-d...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_immunity