Some civil liberties types are whining about this issue:
It isn’t illegal to withdraw money from the bank, nor to compensate someone in recognition of past harms, nor to be the victim of a blackmail scheme. So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government? The alarming aspect of this case is the fact that an American is ultimately being prosecuted for the crime of evading federal government surveillance.
That has implications for all of us.
By way of background, financial institutions are required to report all transactions of $10,000 or more to the federal government. This is meant to make it harder to commit racketeering, tax fraud, drug crimes, and other serious offenses. Hastert began paying off the person he allegedly wronged years before by withdrawing large amounts of cash. But once he realized that this was generating activity reports, he allegedly started making more withdrawals, each one less than $10,000, to avoid drawing attention to the fact that he was paying someone for his silence.
Again, the payments weren’t illegal. But as it turns out, structuring financial transactions “to evade currency transaction reporting requirements” is a violation of federal law.
To see why that is unjust, it helps to set aside Hastert’s case and consider a more sympathetic figure. Imagine that a documentary filmmaker like Laura Poitras, whose films are critical of government surveillance, is buying a used video camera for $12,000. Vaguely knowing that a report to the federal government is generated for withdrawals of $10,000 or more, she thinks to herself, “What with my films criticizing NSA surveillance, I don’t want to invite any extra scrutiny—out of an abundance of caution, or maybe even paranoia, I’m gonna take out $9,000 today and $3,000 tomorrow. The last thing I need is to give someone a pretext to hassle me.”*
That would be illegal, even though in this hypothetical she has committed no crime and is motivated, like many people, by a simple aversion to being monitored.
I don’t much like the $10,000 reporting requirement: as I see it, behavior that lots of people engage in every day for perfectly legal reasons shouldn’t trigger surveillance. And it is certainly perverse to set a threshold for government scrutiny, only to make it a criminal offense to purposely avoid triggering that threshold.
Au contraire, the government needs to do much more of this. For instance, we know that speeding laws are an excellent way to stop illegal activity near the Mexican border. Cops can pull over suspicious looking cars, and check for evidence of drug smuggling, or illegal aliens.
There’s just one problem. Many smugglers will “structure” their speed to avoid detection by the police. No red-blooded Texan is going to drive 55 mph on a highway. Remember that the goal of speed limit laws it to allow the police to pull over anyone they wish to. But what if someone evades the intent of these laws by driving 54 mph?
I suggest allowing police to pull over anyone who seems to be obeying the law for suspicious reasons. For instance, it should be a crime to structure your speed at just under the speed limit in an area where people traditionally drive much faster than the speed limit.
Some civil libertarians will inevitably complain that you’d then be breaking the law whether you speed or not. That’s right, but how else are we going to catch the bad guys?
PS. Thank God for the New York Times. They have reported that presidential candidate Marco Rubio has been pulled over 4 times in the past 18 years for traffic violations, including not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. And to think that he was being seriously considered as a contender for the White House.
Sarcasm aside, this does raise a serious issue. I’m very concerned about drivers who come to a total, complete, unequivocal stop at stop signs. We all know that no normal person actually comes to complete stops at stop signs unless they are terrified of being ticketed by the police. But why would they be so frightened of the police? What do they have to hide? Which leads me to a second modest proposal . . .