Operation Choke Point
[Operation
Choke Point: the stop-and-frisk
tactic of the financial industry
Trying to protect consumers from
fraud, regulators might be
discriminating against low-income
Americans and lenders by Jana
Kasperkevic] "You’ve heard of
stop-and-frisk for criminals. How
about stop-and-frisk for banks?
There's a persistent problem in the
US financial system: bad money flows
through its veins like poison –
money launderers, fraudsters, con
artists, drug traffickers all rely
on the easy electronic movement of
the American dollar. Regulators have
tried to stop it in various ways: by
forcing banks to financially
strip-search every transaction, by
tracking dollars and euros and yen
and rubles until the trail leads
them to criminals.
This tends to be a lot of work. Why
can't there be something more
predictive? Something a little less
Columbo and a little more Minority
Report?
It may now exist. To catch
fraudsters, US financial regulators
have launched their own version of
stop-and-frisk program called
"Operation Choke Point". The
regulators frisk the bank by sending
a subpoena for all the financial
information on their clients that
could potentially be up to no good.
If the government finds something
suspicious, it investigates further.
There is just one problem: just like
stop-and-frisk, critics say the
Operation Choke Point indirectly
discriminates against the poor and
against minorities..." Full text:
Operation Choke Point: the
stop-and-frisk tactic of the
financial industry
