Withdraw $200 from an ATM and You Might Just Be a Target of Federal Financial Surveillance

​If you are walking the streets of Laredo, Texas, and you withdraw $200 from your account at an ATM, under a new rule your personal identifying information will soon be dispatched to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the U.S. Treasury Department.
 
The same would happen if you withdrew $200 in 30 zip codes in El Paso, or in Cameron, Hildalgo, Maverick, or Webb counties in Texas, or San Diego and Imperial counties in California.
 
In all, this new regulation announced by the U.S. Treasury Department will require banks to report Americans for the supremely suspicious act of withdrawing $200. These consumers will then become the targets of Currency Transaction Reports along the U.S.-Mexican border.
 
The impetus, says the agency, is “deep concern with the significant risk to the U.S. financial system of the cartels, drug traffickers, and other criminal actors along the Southwest border.” But $200 sounds like a measly threshold for coyotes who charge illegal immigrants thousands to cross the border, and drug cartels that often make deals with barrels of cash. A $200 withdrawal certainly doesn’t sound like a risk to the U.S. financial system – or a likely indication of criminal activity.
 
But it is no surprise that the bureaucracy is taking advantage of President Trump’s reasonable designation of international drug cartels as terrorist organizations. FinCEN has long been at the center of efforts to make financial surveillance of Americans comprehensive.
 
This is the same agency that worked with the FBI to encourage financial institutions across the country to scour their data and file Suspicious Activity Reports without any clear criminal nexus. Suspicious activities that could have made an American a surveillance target under that now-discontinued program included merely shopping at certain stores, like Dick’s Sporting Good or a Bass Pro Shop. Perhaps the feds also included as a basis for surveillance laughing at Jeff Foxworthy jokes – on the theory that if you are buying Dick’s camo shorts, you just might be a redneck.
 
But this is not a joke. More than one million Americans will soon be unable to withdraw a very modest sum of money without being subjected to the same reporting requirements and surveillance risk under the Bank Secrecy Act as those who make $10,000 cash withdrawals in the rest of the country. The larger issue is why any American should be subjected to warrantless surveillance based on withdrawing a dime of his or her own hard-earned money. The basic concept is hard to square with the Fourth Amendment.
 
This is a dispiriting sign that the financial surveillance of the American people continues and even increases unabated. Nicholas Anthony of CATO, who broke this story, noted that Americans were upset when the previous administration lobbied Congress for the authority to surveil bank accounts with just $600 in activity. While that law never passed, Treasury’s new rule now subjects one million Americans living in a wide swath of the country to surveillance at just a third of that amount.
 
Perhaps the best withdrawal would be a revocation of this new rule.

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