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.
"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"?
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
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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