How Private is Your Bank Account?

Financial transactions reveal so much about us: the causes we support, where we go, what we buy, who we spend time with. Somehow, the mass surveillance of financial transactions has been normalized in the United States, despite the fourth amendment protection in the constitution. But it doesn’t have to be that way, as explained by Marta Belcher, a lawyer and activist in the financial privacy world. 

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.

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email podcast@eff.org. Please visit the site page at https://eff.org/pod108 where you’ll find resources – including links to important legal cases and research discussed in the podcast and a full transcript of the audio. 

This podcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators:

Come Inside by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) Unported license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/59681 Ft: snowflake

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