Ron Paul Dear Colleague on Know Your Customer that Not Every Citizen is a Crook
Ron Paul Dear Colleague on Know Your Customer that Not Every Citizen is a Crook
January 26, 1999
(J. Bradley Jansen was Ron Paul’s legislative staffer for these issues at the time)
Not every citizen is a crook
January 26, 1999
Dear Colleague,
Well-known for his stance on respect for privacy, then Pres. Richard Nixon had Congress pass the misnamed “Bank Secrecy Act” in 1970 which effectively deputized bank tellers as law enforcement agents against their own customers–whether they were suspected of committing a crime on not. The constitutionality was challenged in 1974 (California Bankers Assn. V. Shultz 416 U.S. 21) with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas writing:
“First, as to the recordkeeping requirements, their announced purpose is that they will have ‘a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory investigations or proceedings,’. . .It would be highly useful to governmental espionage to have like reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware and retail stores, all our drugstores. These records too might be ‘useful’ in criminal investigations.
“One’s reading habits furnish telltale clues to those who are bent on bending us to one point of view. What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals. A mandatory recording of all telephone conversations would be better than the recording of checks under the Bank Secrecy Act, if Big Brother is to have his way. The records of checks – now available to the investigators – are highly useful. In a sense a person is defined by the checks he writes. By examining them the agents get to know his doctors, lawyers, creditors, political allies, social connections, religious affiliation, educational interests, the papers and magazines he reads, and so on ad infinitum. These are all tied to one’s social security number; and now that we have the data banks, these other items will enrich that storehouse and make it possible for a bureaucrat – by pushing one button – to get in an instant the names of the 190 million Americans who are subversives or potential and likely candidates.
“It is, I submit, sheer nonsense to agree with the Secretary that all bank records of every citizen
‘have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory investigations or proceedings.’ That is unadulterated nonsense unless we are to assume that every citizen is a crook, an assumption I cannot make,” Justice Douglas concluded.
He was right then, and the situation is worse now. We need to pass the Know Your Customer Sunset Act, the Bank Secrecy Sunset Act, the FinCEN Public Accountability Act, and the Freedom and Privacy Restoration Act, HR 220. Please email or call Bradley Jansen at 5-2831.
Respectfully,
Ron Paul