In meeting 38 we will host Nick Anthony. Nick is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. During this meeting, Nick will discuss some of the reasons that financial privacy is so lacking in the United States. Among these reasons, Nick will highlight the Bank Secrecy Act, third-party doctrine, and Right to Financial Privacy Act.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s pronouncements heretofore regarding the constitutionality of the Bank Secrecy Act left us with the third-party doctrine, which enables the modern financial surveillance dragnet. Recent cases have made very modest dents in the armor of the third-party doctrine when it comes to government use of certain geolocation data. More needs to be done to apply Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless searches and seizures to financial data. Without the need to wait for the right case before the Supreme Court, Congress can amend the Bank Secrecy Act to import some of the principles for digital privacy that emerged in the Web 2.0 space to financial surveillance in the Web 3.0 space, such as data minimization (e.g., whether data collection is relevant, proportional, and necessary for the purposes of data processing), and ask the question of whether financial surveillance as currently practiced could survive a cost-benefit analysis on policy grounds, let alone withstand scrutiny from the perspective of constitutional rights.