>>The point is to raise the risk/cost of money laundering and to minimize its occurrence Of course, that's the point. But the means is totalitarian. >>otherwi

>>The point is to raise the risk/cost of money laundering and to minimize its occurrence Of course, that's the point. But the means is totalitarian. >>otherwise financial fraud becomes culturally normalized There are other ways to investigate and prosecute crime besides doing away with due process and protections against warrantless searches. Fraud leaves a massive evidence trail. In many jurisdictions the problem is law enforcement simply not starting a criminal case against those involved in blatant fraud, or taking years to file charges, giving the fraudster time to victimize countless parties before they finally face consequences. So there's no lack of information to use to prosecute those committing fraud without the total surveillance approach. >>For that, anti-money laundering agencies must pay attention to large transfers between anonymized business entities. Anything of significance about the operations of individuals and companies can be known by tracking transactions above $10,000. Requiring that these transactions be reported totally circumvents the traditional limits on government searches, which required a warrant issued by a judge. This is dragnet warrantless surveillance of trillions of dollars of transactions that creates information asymmetries the likes of which have never existed before. >>That's very different than total-awareness of every individual's financial holdings and small transactions. Most small transactions aggregate to larger ones. Having to explain the source of a large deposit to a bank requires providing evidence of the smaller transactions that formed the holding. It amounts to AML agencies and the banks they've deputized having near total knowledge of the financial history of every individual. An enormous amount of proprietary information can be gleened from this, which inevitably contributes to centralization of power, and I imagine, income inequality. >>Reducing the fungibility (i.e. by increasing the reporting and oversight requirements) of large transfers of money doesn't undermine its usefulness for anything other than money laundering. People have their money frozen for months at a time by banks, and have to comply with incredibly intrusive requests for private and hard to acquire information to get it unfrozen. People have their bank accounts closed without explanation because the bank identifies some aspect of their financial profile, like affiliation with a legal marijuana dispensary, as too risky for their AML program. Or because the source of their money, while legal, is perceived as high-risk by the bank. So money is not fungible. Revenue from one legal source is treated differently than revenue from another. And people can't just use cash. The AML drive has resulted in a situation where moving large amounts of cash is not safe, as billions of dollars in cash have been confiscated from individuals without even any charges being laid against them, through civil forfeiture and the principle that cash is "suspicious": http://time.com/4878195/civil-asset-forfeiture-jeff-sessions/ http://time.com/4878195/civil-asset-forfeiture-jeff-sessions...