4 ms·

This strikes me as a congressional case of the XY problem (http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem) Somewhere, long ago, peop

This strikes me as a congressional case of the XY problem (http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem) Somewhere, long ago, people were committing crimes involving large amounts of money, but law enforcement couldn't stop it. So they instituted financial reporting requirements for banks, to help identify crooks. But people can easily structure their transactions to avoid the reporting requirements. So now you make it a crime to do that. Regardless of whether there was an underlying crime in the first place. Oh, and then when the FBI investigates, you can commit a third crime (lying to the FBI) without having committed the first crime or second crime.

nzealand 11y ago
The police can lie to you. Yet you can not lie to the police. You can refuse to talk to them however.
- meddlepal 11y ago
  Yes you can and in the process you piss off the prosecutor who for all intent and purpose might as well be the police. Now you actively have the law working against you
MCRed 11y ago
That's a charitable view of it. A less charitable view is that this is the early stages of currency controls. If we simply limited people from moving money around, like they did in the USSR or Warsaw Pact countries, and are currently doing in countries like Venezuela and Argentina, then people would know the jig is up and the dollar would crash. Here they are using the pretext of "fighting crime" to violate our rights (demanding information without a warrant violates the 4th and every instance of it is illegal under USC 18-242).... with the long term effect that regular people start to internalize the idea that you can't just take your money out of a bank, and trying to do it slowly is "structuring" and a crime. Structuring is the very definition of a thought crime.. and people have internalized it already!

nzealand 11y ago

The police can lie to you. Yet you can not lie to the police. You can refuse to talk to them however.

meddlepal 11y ago
Yes you can and in the process you piss off the prosecutor who for all intent and purpose might as well be the police. Now you actively have the law working against you

MCRed 11y ago

That's a charitable view of it. A less charitable view is that this is the early stages of currency controls. If we simply limited people from moving money around, like they did in the USSR or Warsaw Pact countries, and are currently doing in countries like Venezuela and Argentina, then people would know the jig is up and the dollar would crash. Here they are using the pretext of "fighting crime" to violate our rights (demanding information without a warrant violates the 4th and every instance of it is illegal under USC 18-242).... with the long term effect that regular people start to internalize the idea that you can't just take your money out of a bank, and trying to do it slowly is "structuring" and a crime. Structuring is the very definition of a thought crime.. and people have internalized it already!