Commissioner Peirce just gave a must-read speech offering one of the clearest defenses of financial privacy in the context of crypto and new technologies yet articulated. As she says: We should take concrete steps to protect people’s ability not only to communicate privately, but to transfer value privately, as they could have done with physical coins in the days in which the Fourth Amendment was crafted. Most fears of financial privacy and the technology that enables it flow from a genuine desire to protect this nation from enemies and criminals. Safeguarding our families, communities, and country from harm is extremely important, but curtailing financial privacy and impeding disintermediating technologies are the wrong approach. Denying people financial privacy—whether through sweeping surveillance programs or restrictions on privacy-protecting technologies—undermines the fabric and freedoms of our families, communities, and nation. The American people and their government should guard zealously people’s right to live private lives and to use technologies that enable them to do so. In the written speech there are pointers to deep analysis of the overbreadth of US financial surveillance laws, including a citation to a paper Coin Center published last year on dangerous ambiguities in the Bank Secrecy Act and how they could be abused to “mandate that every American who pays or is paid [] register with the Treasury Department and regularly report the details of her monetary transactions as if she were a bank or other financial institution.” Commissioner Peirce also cites two other federal laws, 6050I and Patriot Act Section 311, that are—in Coin Center’s opinion— already being abused to harm the legitimate privacy expectations of law-abiding Americans. Read the whole thing! Link in the next post.