[smtddr]

>>I expect most us agree that banks _should_ be held accountable for the legitimacy of their customers behaviour.

I don't think most people have this expectation.

Banks to be accountable for customers breaking law? What's an example of this? If I open a bank account in a different country, under an LLC, to illegally avoid paying taxes or to receive kickbacks it's up to the bank to figure that out? I do not expect banks to be responsible for their customers unless something outrageous happens, like a non-corp account suddenly reaching a billion USD balance. And this is ___much___ easier to automate for banks too and will produce almost no false alarms. If Joe-The-Plumber's account is suddenly more than Donald Trump's net worth... something is going on.

Conversely, with Facebook/Apple/Google you'd just get this[1] happening all the time. And have you ever had the joy of XboxLive's in-game audio and messaging? False alarms galore. Blowing up planes and burning down / shooting up schools was a common joke even when I was a kid in the '80s, not even to talk of today's youngsters. <--- And now if HN had terrorism-dection built in, will this comment of mine get flagged?

1. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/long-island-high-school-student-...

[pjc50]

Enough people have shot up schools that I think some sort of response to "I'm going to kill people at school" is warranted. A conviction may not be the best outcome, but I don't think it's entirely safe to ignore all of them.

[Houshalter]

I guarantee it will be 99.99% false positives. Until people learn to censor themselves.

But that's really irrelevant. The government shouldn't have the right to spy on people's private conversations, if they aren't suspects. Whether they occur in real life or on the internet is irrelevant. And people shouldn't live in fear of saying the wrong thing and being taken away, like they were in 1984.

[bruceboughton]

In the UK, there isn't a day that goes by without me muttering something about killing one of my colleagues.

Thankfully in the UK, I do not really have the means to do this so it is obviously interpreted as an exagerated expression of annoyance.

In the US, the possibility of every exagerated threat being an actual, actionable threat is much higher.

Censorship is not the answer.

[amirmc]

How about trying to understand and deal with the root-cause of people shooting up schools?

[pbhjpbhj]

You can do both.

[retube]

If a bank falls within the remit of the Fed or PRA then yes, KYC rules mean the bank is indeed supposed to figure this out.