The following is mirrored from its source at
http://archive.aclu.org/congress/l102301f.html.
© 2001, American Civil Liberties Union. Reprinted with permission of the
American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org).
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           How the USA-Patriot ACT Puts Financial Privacy At Risk

     Title III of the Uniting and Strengthening America By Providing
     Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act
     (H.R. 3162, the "USA PATRIOT Act") would continue the unfortunate
     trend of expanding government access to personal financial
     information rather than safeguarding it against intrusion. While
     there is a need to shut down the financial resources used to
     further acts of terrorism, this legislation goes beyond its stated
     goal of combating international terrorism and instead reaches into
     innocent customers' personal financial transactions.

     If the USA PATRIOT Act becomes law, financial institutions would
     monitor daily financial transactions even more closely and be
     required to share information with other federal agencies,
     including foreign intelligence agencies such as the CIA. In 1992,
     Congress amended the Bank Secrecy Act to authorize the Treasury
     Department to require "Suspicious Activity Reporting." In essence,
     this amendment gave the Treasury Department a blank check to
     require reporting of any "suspicious transaction relevant to a
     possible violation of law or regulation." Suspicious activity
     reports are not limited to anti-terrorist activities or even money
     laundering, but rather go to violations of any law or regulation.
     Section 351 of the bill extends immunity for such disclosures to
     specifically include contract law. This could mean that the
     privacy policies established under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
     would be trumped when companies disclose information they claim
     was merely relevant to a violation of law or regulation.

     Section 358 requires that, in addition to law enforcement,
     intelligence agencies such as the CIA would also receive
     suspicious activity reports. These reports are usually about
     wholly domestic transactions of people in the United States, and
     do not relate to foreign intelligence information. In addition,
     Section 358 would allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies
     to get easy access to individual credit reports in secret. There
     would be no judicial review and no notice to the person to whom
     the records relate. Through these provisions, the CIA would be put
     back in the business of spying on Americans, and law enforcement
     and intelligence agencies would have access to a range of personal
     financial information without ever showing good cause as to why
     such information is relevant to a particular investigation.

     When these personal financial information anti-privacy proposals
     are combined with other information-sharing provisions contained
     in the USA PATRIOT Act, highly personal and potentially damaging
     information will be transmitted to many federal agencies that
     could lead to adverse consequences far beyond the stated goal of
     the anti-terrorism bill.



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