Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government; the justifications are really meaningless.

Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance.

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avianlyric 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance.

As someone who’s implemented AML, KYC, and tax reporting functions in a bank. I think you would be very surprised at how shit they are for tax auditing at scale. Unless the tax man is specifically auditing you, and basically requesting all your transaction details, the reporting that banks do would only allow tax agencies to catch the most brazen and incompetent tax dodgers.

All of the tools however do make much harder to perform money laundering, forcing criminals to recruit and pay huge numbers of naive bank customers to allow criminals to launder money via their personal accounts, using them as money mules. Which then gets flagged and shutdown pretty quick by banks because the behaviour is generally pretty obvious.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) banks can’t/don’t coordinate on identified money mules or know launderers, so criminals just move on to other banks and repeat.

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nickff 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Criminals don't have to "recruit and pay huge numbers of naive bank customers"; in my jurisdiction, they just walk into a casino with a few hundred thousand dollars, exchange for chips, pretend to gamble for an hour, then exchange the chips for cash, and walk out with a nice receipt. There're more complex schemes involving real estate and other mediums too.

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avianlyric 2 days ago | parent [-]

That’s cute, but it doesn’t really scale. Organised crime groups aren’t interested in laundering a few $100k at a go. They’re moving and laundering millions, you can’t put that through a casino without it being very obvious.

There is a huge international criminal industry that exists to find and hire money mules, and launder eye watering amounts of cash. Where I worked, we broadly assumed that the police weren’t interested in fraud or money laundering unless it was measured in 10s of millions. We reported everything, of course, but we only got call backs for really big schemes.

If you’re just committing fraud measured in $100ks, the odd of anyone bothering to investigate, and attempt to bring criminal charges, was basically zero.

	▲	nickff 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The 'small-scale' 100k-1MM per participant per day per casino laundering can add up to 'real money' quite fast. The larger-scale money laundering in my area is a but more complicated, involving import/export schemes, real estate transactions, and property developments. I'm not in a mega-city, so I assume these schemes are taking place at a larger scale in those. I have only ever heard of very basic and stupid schemes (which didn't provide any tax revenue to my goverment) being detected or prosecuted.

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strbean 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) banks can’t/don’t coordinate on identified money mules or know launderers, so criminals just move on to other banks and repeat.

Or criminals just get a bank like HSBC to do the money laundering for them.

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al_borland 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government

This sounds unconstitutional.