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Don't these people ever learn?  abuse@flash.net

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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_re
gister&doci
d=98-32332
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