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Comment by rmesters | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how this could work in practice. A Gov entity will have to connect to some bank APIs to streamline the monitoring? Most banks don't have APIs to connect to. It would pretty wild if the Gov had to ask people to share their bank passwords and then had to screen-scrape the data from their accounts to "establish a connection".

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Nothing so complicated. Compliance departments just start sending reports of all transactions greater than $600 on a monthly basis just like they do with SAR's and large cash value withdrawals.

I'm having difficulty seeing how this isn't a 4th Amendment violation, or something that'd have to be gated behind a legislative statute.

Make no mistake. The U.S. financial system is one of the greatest "soft power" projectors on the planet. It is most certainly not being utilized in a way that helps you.

Generally with this sort of thing it’s up to the bank to file reports to comply with the regulation. I don’t know the specifics for how the current $10k+ transaction reports work, but usually I think the government doesn’t bother trying to integrate with the myriad software systems out there, instead they just have an XML API of some sort that you can send machine readable versions of paper forms to.

I would think the law would require financial institutions to report cash flow in whatever format the gov't demanded

It could simply go the way of the Payment Services Directive (PSD) from Europe, which has spurred (and mandated) the development of open APIs at financial institutions.

Lots of fine details to work out there though.

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