News Analysis In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision that police officers had acted illegally in collecting months of cell phone data from a private company, without a warrant, to track the movements of a robbery suspect.  The Court majority opinion stated that “in light of the deeply revealing nature of…

News Analysis Slowly but steadily, our money is taking on a new role; in addition to its traditional function as a medium of exchange and store of value, money is increasingly becoming a means of surveillance and control. Financial privacy has become one of the biggest casualties in the world’s relentless march to a digital…

Republican legislators took steps this week to revoke the power the government has granted itself to access Americans’ personal bank accounts without a search warrant. Through existing laws such as the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), “We basically deputized banks as law enforcement agencies, mandating them to collect information on their customers and report that information…

The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in a fractured opinion on Feb. 28 that the IRS imposed an excessive fine on a businessman for failing to report foreign bank accounts, reducing the financial penalty from $2.72 million to $50,000. The decision came after the U.S. House of Representatives, now controlled by Republicans, voted in January to…

The Supreme Court turned away an appeal on Jan. 23 over a $2.1 million penalty the IRS assessed against a grandmother whose family fled Nazi persecution, for failing to report a foreign bank account. The decision came as the U.S. House of Representatives, now controlled by Republicans, voted earlier this month to repeal a congressional…

When you open a bank account, do you surrender all rights to your privacy and personal data? Today, the answer is yes. The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (BSA) and subsequent amendments mandated that your bank must inform the federal government about any customer’s transactions that they consider suspicious, however broadly defined that may be,…

When you open a bank account, do you surrender all rights to your privacy and personal data? Today, the answer is yes. The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (BSA) and subsequent amendments mandated that your bank must inform the federal government about any customer’s transactions that they consider suspicious, however broadly defined that may be,…

The Supreme Court agreed on June 21 to hear an appeal from a Romanian-American businessman who was fined $50,000 for failing to file tax forms on time, but whose penalty ballooned to $2.72 million when an appeals court ruled the fine should be imposed based on the number of bank accounts he held, instead of…