Spy games.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Follow-Up - USA PATRIOT Act

The USA PATRIOT Act, approved by Congress in response to the 9/11 attacks, authorized regulations requiring banks to report transactions larger than a value determined by the Treasury Department. The goal, according to the bill's authors, was to track terrorists' financial activities, much as the BankSecrecy Act of 1970 allowed the government to catch crooks by perusing bank records.

But as John Berlau explained in "Show Us Your Money" (November 2003), the 1970 law did not generate many arrests. Instead it gave the government easy access to large volumes of personal information, leading to data mining of limited value. Despite this experience, Berlau observed, "Few politicians, even among those who have criticized other parts of the PATRIOT Act, are willing to challenge the proposition that businesses should be deputized to spy on their customers."

Opposition to such surveillance seems to be growing in the wake of recent revelations. Last year leaks by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed that many of the Internet's largest service providers had agreed to provide customer data to the NSA. Snowden also revealed the existence of an NSA database that includes information about virtually every telephone call in the United States, including the number called and...