Podcast Episode: How Private is Your Bank Account?

Deeplinks 2022-01-19

Summary:

Podcast Episode 108

Your friends, your medical concerns, your political ideology— financial transactions tell the story of your life in intimate details. But U.S. law has failed to protect  this sensitive data from prying eyes.  Join EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they talk to Marta Belcher, one of the leading lawyers working on issues of financial censorship and financial privacy, as they help you understand why we need better protections for our financial lives—and the important role courts must play in getting things right. 

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When the Supreme Court considered the issue of financial privacy under the Bank Secrecy Act in the 1970s, we were living in a really different time. Online shopping, Apple Pay, and tools like PayPal and Venmo didn’t exist yet. But even as our financial lives have become increasingly complex, digital, and detailed, the Supreme Court hasn’t revisited its approach to our rights. Instead it has allowed this information to be handed over by default to the government, ensnaring hundreds of millions of nonsuspect people instead of just carefully targeting a few suspects . Marta thinks it’s time to revisit this situation.   

Marta offers a deep dive into financial surveillance and censorship. In this episode, you’ll learn about: 

  • The concept of the third party doctrine, a court-created idea that law enforcement doesn’t need to get a warrant to access metadata shared with third parties (such as companies that manage communications and banking services);
  • How financial surveillance can have a chilling effect on activist communities, including pro-democracy activists fighting against authoritarian regimes in Hong Kong and elsewhere;
  • How the Bank Secrecy Act means that your bank services are sharing sensitive banking details on customers with the government by default, without any request from law enforcement to prompt it;
  • Why the Bank Secrecy Act as it’s currently interpreted violates the Fourth Amendment; 
  • The potential role of blockchain technologies to import some of the privacy-protective features of cash into the digital world;
  • How one recent case missed an opportunity to better protect the data of cryptocurrency users;
  • How financial surveillance is a precursor to financial censorship, in which banking services are restricted for people who haven’t violated the law. 

Belcher serves as general counsel of Protocol Labs, chair of the Filecoin Foundation, and special counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She was previously an attorney focusing on blockchain and emerging technologies at Ropes & Gray in San Francisco.  She has spoken about blockchain law around the world, including presenting during the World Economic Forum, testifying before the New York State Senate,  speaking in the European Parliament, and testifying before the United States Congress. You can find Marta on Twitter @MartaBelcher.

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email podcast@eff.org. You can find a copy of this episode on the Internet Archive.

Below, you’ll find legal resources—including links to important case

Link:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/who-peering-your-bank-account

From feeds:

Fair Use Tracker » Deeplinks
CLS / ROC » Deeplinks

Tags:

blockchain speech free financial commentary censorship to the podcast internet: how fix

Authors:

rainey Reitman

Date tagged:

01/19/2022, 00:33

Date published:

01/18/2022, 04:41