| I appreciate the intentions behind this bill, and I'm sure we'll find far more corruption than we ever expected through this bill. I'm reminded of the Patriot Act, and the ways the data collected were used (beneficially), and abused (for personal reasons) by people trusted with high-level clearance. How is access being limited and audited to the data collected by this new bill? I feel the same way about the government grant system relying on the DUNS system (run by a private company) for business registration. I also feel this way about credit agencies like Experian and Equifax being the trusted source of truth on creditworthiness for Fannie Mae loans, and collecting records on essentially all Americans (no consumer choice and limited opt-out) which inevitably gets leaked. The liability of Experian and Equifax should have been their entire businesses, not a few slaps on the wrist and the offer of credit monitoring for just a year. With all that in mind, I want to know--when this bill is implemented, how is this not inevitably going to result in abuses or harmful massive leaks? Or do you just assume that entities below a certain threshold of activity don't deserve privacy or some level of property obscurity to help people avoid criminal attention? The kind of info this bill is collecting could be easily be used by identity thieves. Sharing this info with foreign entities makes the problem worse. Civil forfeiture started off with good intentions, but in many places has a serious lack of recourse and oversight. There have been some reports that it's abused as a quick way for police departments to pad their budgets. Those doing the seizing don't even need to prove guilt of a person, since civil forfeiture is a dispute between police and property, not police and a suspected person. Sure, these policies let police cripple the more clever criminals that they had trouble bringing to justice, but it also gets used all the time in ways against people (I guess against property) that would reasonably argue innocence. |
There probably will be abuses and leaks—-I don’t think anyone should trust the government with population-wide data that is catastrophic if compromised. But on the ladder of OPM data and IRS tax records to e.g. potato registries, beneficial ownership data isn’t that sensitive. Many countries make it a matter of public record with few ill effects. (Counterpoint: Sweden makes tax records public record. The IRS being compromised would be a big deal.)
The church, charity and non-profit exemption is the hole of the bulldozer path that had to be left to protect private civic discourse. This will be abused by the wealthy and powerful. But as a result, there will be no comprehensive database of e.g. donors to prison reform or LGBT causes.