Big Brother Wants to Look in Your Bank Account: The U.S. Government is Constructing a System to Track All Financial Transactions in Real-Time – Ostensibly to Catch Criminals. Does That Leave You With the Warm Fuzzies – or Scare You Out of Your Wits? | Imagining the Internet

The prediction, in brief:

In the near future, all of these government databases will be interfaced by way of AI/MPP technology … The pure power of such a “database of databases” terrifies critics.

Predictor: Kimery, Anthony L.

Prediction, in context:

In a 1993 article for Wired magazine, Anthony Kimery, an editor at American Banker Newsletters, outlines the U.S. government’s efforts to keep a handle on private financial transactions. Kimery writes about the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – FinCEN:”FinCEN’s AI [Artificial Intelligence] capabilities currently exploit the Financial Database for proactive targeting of criminal activity. The system automatically monitors the entire FDB database, constantly identifying suspicious financial activity in supercomputer-aided, rapid-response time. In addition to the FDB, FinCEN is applying AI to the Criminal Referral Forms that must be filed with FinCEN whenever banks, examiners, and regulators uncover financial activities they suspect are illegal. In the near future, all of these government databases will be interfaced by way of AI/MPP [Artificial Intelligence/Massive Parallel Processing] technology … The pure power of such a ‘database of databases’ terrifies critics. Though FinCEN and other authorities discount the potential for abuse, tell that to the CIA. Its charter forbids it from engaging in domestic surveillance; nonetheless, it spied on Americans for seven consecutive presidential administrations (it says it finally ceased its internal spying in the mid- 1970s).”

Date of prediction: January 1, 1993

Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues

Subtopic: Privacy/Surveillance

Name of publication: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: Big Brother Wants to Look in Your Bank Account: The U.S. Government is Constructing a System to Track All Financial Transactions in Real-Time – Ostensibly to Catch Criminals. Does That Leave You With the Warm Fuzzies – or Scare You Out of Your Wits?

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.06/big.brother_pr.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney