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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

My point is that invading people's privacy on ownership is not a requirement for effective law enforcement against cartels. Cartels may well commit secondary crimes related to money laundering, but the things cartels do that we actually care about are not that and don't require extensive privacy invasion to police.

To use a silly example, we could also cut down on cartel activity (and many other serious crimes) if every internet connected device were required to stream room audio back to the government for keyword matching and surveillance. We don't do this because of principles, because of the risk of enabling other crimes, and because it would be a bad tradeoff-- a lot of invasion when we have less invasive tools available.

I'm arguing the same applies here.

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Financial enforcement is empirically one of our most effective tools to combat organized crime.

> We don't do this because of principles, because of the risk of enabling other crimes, and because it would be a bad tradeoff

Really the only reason we don't do this is because of the Constitution. The Constitution could prevent us from capturing beneficial ownership data from corporations, but indeed it does not. Of course one can make this argument in front of SCOTUS (and perhaps will some day) but there's a reason you're not making that argument now, which is that it's a bit silly on its face.

Corporations are fundamentally legal objects of the state, which is why they're registered at all. You can operate whatever business you want without incorporating (and without the legal affordances thereof) and then you don't need to disclose any information to anyone.

> Financial enforcement is empirically one of our most effective tools to combat organized crime.

I'd love to read more on this position.

> Really the only reason we don't do this is because of the Constitution.

While the US is better about privacy than many other places, most of the developed world still manages to not be a surveillance hellscape without strong constitutional protections. Besides, the constitution does very little directly to protect privacy because the framers failed to anticipate technological advancement and the size of the future bureaucratic state... we have what we have largely because of jurisprudence that has read the constitution rather expansively-- which it's done so for the same reason that nations without constitutional civil liberties still largely respect individual privacy: it's a human right which we implicitly recognize.

And to add, it’s worth noting that most of those places in the developed world that aren’t surveillance hellscapes do have national registries of business owner information.

> The Constitution could prevent us from capturing beneficial ownership data from corporations, but indeed it does not

It actually does, in numerous parts of it (the 9th Amendment comes to mind pretty easily).

This is a bad law, with the usual bad excuse to harm innocent Americans. Point me to all the situations where this would have helped, and now compare that to the amount of time and money spent complying. Then we can have a fair debate.

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