🚀 go-pugleaf

How would you like a Federal Agent knocking on your door and you having to
explain that you got the extra $100 dollars from selling something personal?
It's the big boys that is pushing dirty money to the laundry, not us small
guys.
Tell Washington to back out of our lives and out of our bank accounts.

U.S. GOVERNMENT PLAN TO SPY ON BANK CUSTOMERS REVEALED; MARCH 8 IS DEADLINE
TO STOP IT
by Phyllis Schlafly

The Clinton Administration's stealth plan to monitor everyone's personal
bank account has hit a bump in the road. With the public
comment score now standing at 51,000 -to-18 against the controversial Know
Your Customer (KYC) regulation, the once-friendly FDIC (Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation) is rethinking its plan to require every bank to
computerize a financial profile on every customer (including the source of
all funds) and report "inconsistent" deposits and withdrawals to the federal
Gestapo.

Here is how Know Your Customer is projected to function. Each bank is
required to determine the identity of all its customers, determine each
customer's sources of funds; determine each customer's normal and expected
bank transactions; monitor the activity of each account, looking for
deposits and withdrawals that are inconsistent with the expected pattern of
financial transactions.

The bank will then make up a profile of all your financial transactions on a
database. The bank will maintain a computer record of the
amounts you normally deposit each month and the sources of the money (e.g.,
your weekly paycheck, your Social Security, your stock dividends) and the
amounts you normally withdraw each month (e.g., rent or mortgage, automobile
payment, food, utilities, credit card payment, cash for pocket money).

If you deviate significantly from this pattern (such as by earning some
extra money or buying or selling a car), the KYC spies in your local bank
will forward your "suspicious" transactions to a huge database in Detroit
called the Suspicious Activity Reporting System, which is administered by
FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) and shared with a dozen other
agencies.

The KYC regulation was simultaneously announced by the Federal Reserve
System, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Comptroller of the
Currency as well as the FDIC, but those other agencies have not revealed how
many negative comments they have received.

About 93 percent of the critical comments received by the FDIC came from
individuals, not banks. Isn't that interesting. The large
number from individuals proves the new power of the Internet to alert the
grassroots to Clinton's privacy invading maneuvers.

The small number of complaints from bankers reflects the fact that the
American Bankers Association originally endorsed KYC and may have helped to
draft it. The big banks are only too happy to use a federal regulation as
"cover" for computerizing nosy details about their customers that are so
valuable for marketing purposes. Under current federal law, a bank may sell
or transfer any information it acquires about its customers to a third
party, such as a direct marketer or another financial institution, without
notifying the customer. Your bank can disclose your account balances,
certificate of deposit maturity dates and balances, and information about
checks written or deposited into your account.

Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) has introduced S.187, the Financial Information
Privacy Act, to require banks to tell their customers what data it sells or
shares, to whom and for what purposes, and to give its customers the right
to "opt out." That's good as far as it goes, but we also need legislation to
stop the banks from giving such information to the government.

Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) has introduced the American Financial Institutions
Privacy Act to block implementation of the Know Your
Customer regulations. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) has introduced the Financial
Privacy Protection Package to do likewise, and also to
sunset the Bank Secrecy Act that has encouraged such overreaching
regulations, and also to allow Americans to see their
own FinCEN files (similar to laws that allow us to see our own FBI and
credit bureau files).

The stakes for Americans are clearly defined in a timely new book called The
End of Money and the Struggle for Financial Privacy by Richard W. Rahn,
Ph.D., nationally known economist and now a senior fellow with the
Seattle-based Discovery Institute. Describing how the new technologies are
making rapid and dramatic changes in our lifestyle, he poses the question of
whether this will bring us more freedom or less. The answer depends on
whether or not we permit Big Government to conspire with Big Business to
monitor not only all our financial transactions, but also our ordinary daily
activities. The Big Government advocates are trying to claim that individual
control over technological innovation is suspect and a threat to law
enforcement.

The major excuse for the Clinton Administration's assault on our financial
privacy is "money laundering," most of which comes from
the illegal drug trade. But attempts to stop drug use by chasing money
launderers have been a costly and spectacular failure, they
catch only a few small dealers rather than drug kingpins, and they are a
gross invasion of the privacy of law-abiding Americans.

The threat of terrorism is another Clinton excuse for anti-privacy
regulations, but there is no evidence that any significant terrorist was
ever deterred by the money laundering cops. The billions of dollars wasted
in pursuing money laundering has merely increased the power of the
politicians to monitor our lives and increased the number of busybody
bureaucrats with a vested interest in retaining useless jobs.

Hitler and Stalin gave us the model of how tyranny maintains itself. Pass so
many laws that everyone is a potential criminal, and then law enforcement
can be arbitrary, selective, and very political. That's why the Clinton
Administration has pushed the creation of hundreds of new federal crimes by

legislation and thousands more by federal regulations. Any act of dishonesty
in which a mailed item, a telephone call, or a bank deposit plays a role has
now become a federal crime.

We simply don't trust the Clinton Administration to have the kind of
information about our personal lives that the KYC regulation would provide.
You have until March 8 to email your complaint to comments@fdic.gov , or fax
it to (202) 898-3838.

http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/18019.html

PLEASE CLICK ON THIS LINK AND VOTE, Please!!!
http://www.defendyourprivacy.com

_________________________________________________
Links to the FDIC's Know Your Customer proposed regulation:

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (includes link to Know Your Customer
Statistics - a summary of the comments received on the Know Your Customer
proposal.)
http://www.fdic.gov/banknews/know.html

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation - Notice of proposed rulemaking.
http://www.fdic.gov/lawsregs/fedr/98knocus.txt

Department of the Treasury - Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
http://www.occ.treas.gov/ftp/release/98%2D120a.txt

Department of the Treasury - Office of Thrift Supervision
http://www.ots.treas.gov/docs/73062.html

Federal Reserve System
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=1998_register&doci
d=98-32332
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