From: cdhart@laurie.net (Carolyn Hart)
Subject: SNET: [piml] [Fwd: March 11 column -- "Know Your Customer"]
Date: 9 Mar 1999 06:11:58 -0500
To: piml@egroups.com


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Vin Suprynowicz wrote:
> 
>     FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
>     FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED MARCH 11, 1999
>     THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
>     But failure is always an orphan
> 
>     In the classic Agatha Christie mystery "Murder on the Orient Express"
> the question, as usual, was "Who Done It." What was refreshing was that,
> for a change, virtually everyone done it.
> 
>   As usual, all the suspects had a motive for murdering the old reprobate
> (played by Richard Widmark in the 1974 film.) But as it turned out,
> virtually everyone aboard had taken a turn sticking some kind of sharp
> implement into the deceased's brisket before the night was through.
> 
>   Similarly, days before the official period for public comment on the
> Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's proposed "Know Your Customer"
> regulation was due to expire on March 8, the only remaining mystery was
> whether there was anyone left in the country who hadn't shoved a knife into
> the misbegotten thing.
> 
>   "LP launches new website to defeat FDIC's Know Your Customer proposal,"
> was the banner headline on the March edition of the national Libertarian
> Party's tabloid "LP News."
> 
>  "We've never talked about an issue that has produced this kind of reaction
> from radio talk show hosts -- or the American public," remarked George
> Getz, press secretary at the Washington headquarters of America's
> less-government party.
> 
>   "It's dead" the usually cautious Ted Wehking, executive vice president of
> the Nevada Bankers Association, told me on March 4.
> 
>   "They're just going to stake it and bury it at the crossroads?" I asked.
> 
>   "That thing has no breath in it whatsoever. That was so overreaching,
> they got something like 75,000 responses, more than they've any gotten to
> any other proposed regulation."
> 
>   As it turned out, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve called in a  favor
> over in the chambers of the U.S. Senate on Friday March 5, the senators
> voting 88-0 to formally ask the Clinton administration to take the poor
> little monster out behind the barn and shoot it, thus sparing the
> regulators the embarrassment of putting it out of its misery in public.
> (Though the vote was not binding, which couldn't possibly mean "Know Your
> Customer" will be back under a new name a few years down the road, do you
> think?)
> 
>   One of the last men aboard, Nevada Congressman Jim Gibbons had piled on
> the day before, writing a March 4 letter to Robert E. Feldman, executive
> secretary of the FDIC, declaiming "The proposed 'Know Your Customer' rule
> is an action that treads on very serious ground, the right to personal
> privacy. This particular rule seeks to undermine and destroy the right to
> information privacy of all individuals who happen to have a bank account.
> Moreover, once the federal government starts to invade information privacy
> how long will it be before bodily privacy, communications privacy, and
> territorial privacy are erased from  the citizens of the United States?"
> 
>   While it's nice to hear Congressman Gibbons finally come out so firmly
> against Breathalyzers, DEA body cavity searches, FBI wiretaps, and the
> federal income tax, a skeptic might ask whether Americans really have much
> "financial privacy" left to guard. Responding to Bill Clinton's 1995
> assertion that America remains the freest nation on earth, Canadian scholar
> and author Charles Adams, author of "For Good and Evil: The impact of Taxes
> on the Course of Civilization," told me in May of that year: "They should
> say 'used to be.' America of all the Western nations is the worst. No one
> else lets the government go through your bank records, no one else makes
> you file a form when you hire a baby-sitter, when you hire a sophomore to
> mow your lawn. ..."
> 
>   "The government does have a lot of access," responds Alan B. Rabkin,
> senior vice president and general counsel for Sierra West Bank in Reno,
> "but they have to follow certain procedures. They have to show cause."
> 
>   On the other hand, Rabkin explained last week, "Know Your Customer" would
> have required bankers to develop profiles of the "normal account activity"
> of their customers, reporting to the government any "out-of-the-ordinary"
> cash transactions which might even theoretically be evidence of drug
> dealing or any other kind of participation in the unregulated, "gray"
> economy.
> 
>   "It was just one more layer of things that we'd rather not be doing,"
> Rabkin explains.
> 
>   Curious. Earlier this winter, about the only national columnist writing
> on the "Know Your Customer" proposal -- even as Internet users were burning
> up the wires organizing opposition -- was Phyllis Schlafly of the Copley
> News Syndicate, who wrote in early February: "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 20,000-to-18
> against the controversial 'Know Your Customer' regulation, the
> once-friendly Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. 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' withdrawals
> to the federal gestapo. ..."
> 
>   But -- get this -- "About 93 percent of the critical comments received by
> the FDIC came from individuals, not banks. ... The small number of
> complaints from bankers reflects the fact that the American Bankers
> Association originally endorsed the regulation and may have helped to draft
> it. The big banks are only too happy to use federal regulation as a 'cover'
> for computerizing nosy details about their customers that are so valuable
> for marketing purposes."
> 
>   Yet now the whole thing was some kind of misunderstanding that the
> bankers never wanted, "one more layer of things that we'd rather not be
> doing"?
> 
>   Et tu, Brutus?
> 
> Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
> Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available at
> $21.95 plus $3 shipping ($6 UPS; $2 shipping each additional copy) through
> Mountain Media, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas, Nev. 89127. The 500-page trade
> paperback may also be ordered via web site
> http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html, or at 1-800-244-2224.
> 
> ***
> 
> Vin Suprynowicz,   vin@lvrj.com
> 
> The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. -- John
> Hay, 1872
> 
> The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not
> get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases
> to discriminate between good and evil.  He becomes a slave in body and
> soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don't adjust! Revolt
> against the reality! -- Mordechai Anielewicz, Warsaw, 1943
> 
> * * *

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