Alrighty- someone explain to me why I am wrong to instinctively oppose this:
The Bush administration is developing a plan to give the government access to possibly hundreds of millions of international banking records in an effort to trace and deter terrorist financing, even as many bankers say they already feel besieged by government antiterrorism rules that they consider overly burdensome.
The initiative, as conceived by a working group within the Treasury Department, would vastly expand the government’s database of financial transactions by gaining access to logs of international wire transfers into and out of American banks. Such overseas transactions were used by the Sept. 11 hijackers to wire more than $130,000, officials said, and are still believed to be vulnerable to terrorist financiers.
Government officials said in interviews that the effort, which grew out of a brief, little-noticed provision in the intelligence reform bill passed by Congress in December, would give them the tools to track leads on specific suspects and, more broadly, to analyze patterns in terrorist financing and other financial crimes. They said they were mindful of privacy concerns that such a system is likely to provoke and wanted to include safeguards to prevent misuse of what would amount to an enormous cache of financial records.
The provision authorized the Treasury Department to pursue regulations requiring financial institutions to turn over “certain cross-border electronic transmittals of funds” that may be needed in combating money laundering and terrorist financing.
Again, instinctively, this frightens the living daylights out of me. I can’t tolerate any more expansion of government powers- even in the fight against ‘terrorism.’ I have had enough. We need to reign the damn government back in.
Part of me is wondering if this is just an extreme proposal that is being floated to halt the rollbacks in the original Patriot Act. You know the deal- mom/dad is thinking about cutting your allowance, so you pre-emptively ask for an outlandish increase. She/he turns it down and decides the current allowance is enough.
Avedon
You’re not wrong. This is outrageous.
Kimmitt
Why, it is almost as though they were unserious about facing the terrorist threat, using it instead as a rhetorical hammer to pound through the antidemocratic changes they had in mind the whole time.