-Caveat Lector- .............................................................. >From the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed] Note: We store 100's of related "New Paradigms Posts" at: http://www.msen.com/~lloyd/oldprojects/recentmail.html From: "Lloyd Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Beware FINCEN Date: Saturday, February 24, 2001 2:12 PM http://www.newnetizen.com/various/fincen.htm Site Sections: Current News Archives Freedom Links Thoughts No to NWO Forum Pictures ebooks Flash Intro Specific Info on: IRS Global Elite Federal Reserve Illuminati FEMA FBI/Federal Presidential Bilderberg Media Cover-Ups Social Security Truth Site links: Mathaba.net Truth Radio CentrExNews Yowusa News Spotlight.org GiveMeLiberty.org Vote-Fraud.org Build Freedom Services: Link to us! Contact Info Additional Site Info Info Request Questions? (FAQ) Mailing List About Search Recommend Take our Survey Sponsors: Ignifuge Amazon Now Private Visa Click our Banner Big Booster PayPal Beware of FINCEN The following is excerpted from Dr. W. G. Hill's "Banking in Silence" Third Edition for 1997 (UK: Scope International, pp. 93-95). "Increasingly, computers are used to not only collect data about you, but more importantly to analyze it with the hope that you will be caught doing something that has recently been reclassified as illegal behavior. The only reason that any information about your private affairs has been collected in the first place is for this express purpose of creating a new class of criminals. New government police forces have been created to track down and bankrupt these individuals who have done nothing more than invest their own money according to their own best interests. In the US, this quasi-secretive sleuthing operation is known as FINCEN, which stands for the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. In the eyes of FINCEN, if you have money you automatically guilty until proven innocent. "Since its launch in April of 1990 with a low key champagne reception at the US Treasury Department, FINCEN has become the most effective financial investigation unit in the world. It is a state of the art computer snooping agency and is so effective that when Russian president Boris Yeltsin needed to locate stolen communist party funds, he asked FINCEN for help. FINCEN was established by top IRS agent Brian Bruh a few years before his retirement in October of 1993. In 1991, FINCEN wrote classified reports on 6000 individuals. In 1992, this number had climbed to 12,000 and by 1993, it had escalated further to a total of 20,000 individuals. "To date, the agency can boast more than 40,000 confidential snoops as well as 715 long term investigations known as Strategic Analytical Reports. These reports invaded the privacy of more than 16,000 other individuals and entities. Few concerned ever knew that their financial affairs were being the Pentagon and the CIA. The CIA? Yes, Brian Bruh refuses to discuss his agency's association with the CIA, but he does not deny that there is one. His own background includes time at the Pentagon in addition to his many years with the IRS. "When facing the public, Brian Bruh claims that FINCEN is all about mapping the digital trails of dirty money. He lists examples of how the agency has unearthed profits from drug sales, stolen Savings and Loans money, hidden political slush funds or the financing conduits of terrorists. He does not mention that in reality what FINCEN does is far simpler. It involves all of us, not just terrorists, drug dealers and crooked politicians. It systematically collates and analyzes public databases on a day to day basis. It is the only US federal unit devoted solely to this kind of work. The reason it is so secretive about its operations is that if the public knew what FINCEN was up to, the public wouldn't stand for it. FINCEN breaches civil liberties on a day to day basis. In the eyes of Brian Bruh and FINCEN you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet, invading privacy and peeking into the personal affairs of each and every one of us is necessary to catch criminals, so the excu! se goes. "A list of the 40,000 or so 'criminals' that FINCEN has netted, shows that less than ten per cent of them are bad buys in the moral sense of the word. The vast majority, or some 35,000 people, were merely trying to keep a bit of their own money away from the grabbing hands of the taxman. They didn't succeed. Many more are undoubtedly soon to follow. If you ever find yourself that target of a FINCEN investigation, your chances of outwitting the agency are almost nonexistent. To being with, you will not even be aware of the increased attention pointed in your direction. Furthermore, you will also be pitted against the following forces: *The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) *The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) *The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) *The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) *The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) *The Secret Service *Customs Agents *Postal Inspectors "Each of these government agencies is pooled together by FINCEN, which acts as coordinator for the attack on your privacy. According to senior intelligence officers, these investigative units can access the resources of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. The latter is important, as the National Security Agency routinely intercepts all data on electronic currency movements into and out of the country. This data then makes its way to FINCEN. "The implications of having this massive amount of data at the disposal of one government is staggering. Peter Djinis is the director of the Treasury Department's Office of Financial Enforcement and one of the few Treasury officials close to FINCEN's activities. Testifying before Congress about FINCEN, he said, 'It's the first ever government wide, multi-source intelligence and analytical network brought together under one roof to combat financial crimes.' In his view if you help your neighbor repair the leak on his roof and then let him do you a favor in return without declaring the value of his transaction as income, you have committed a financial crime. "As would be expected, bureaucrats love FINCEN. A senior official in the General Accounting Office (GAO) claims that it is absolutely necessary. His audit of the agency avoided the host of emerging concerns about privacy, civil rights and the appropriate role of the CIA and other spies spying on their own citizens. FINCEN will not reveal how it works or what it is capable of doing. The few examples that have surfaced have all been very routine run-of-the-mill jobs that utilize only a fraction of FINCEN's computer power. One concerns a so-called money launderer called John and was reported by Anthony L. Kimery, covering financial industry regulatory affairs as an editor at American Banker Newsletters. Here, with the kind permission of the publishers, is his report verbatim (Hill, Scope, pp. 93-95)." HOW TO BUST A JOHN "There wasn't much to go on. The police salvaged the slip of paper that a small-time East Coast criminal tried to eat before arrested but on it they found scribbled only a telephone number and what appeared to be the name "John." This frustrated the police. They had anticipated more incriminating information on the man they believed was the supplier not only to the dealer they had just busted but also to dozens of other street corner crack peddlers. With two slim leads, the police weren't technically equipped to do much more than antiquated detective work that probably wouldn't yield evidence they could use to indict John. So they turned to FINCEN for the digital sleuthing they needed. "Less than 45 minutes after receiving the official police request for help, FINCEN had retrieved enough evidence of criminal wrongdoing from government databases that the district attorney prosecuting the case was able to seek indictments against John on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. The local police were impressed. The whiz kids at FINCEN to pull them out of the electronic-sleuthing quicksand. The case of John is a good example of one of their less complex assignments, and it illustrates the adeptness with which the government can collate existing financial data. "Seated at a computer terminal inside FINCEN's command post, a FINCEN analyst began the hunt. He started by querying a database of business phone numbers. He scored a hit with the number of a local restaurant. Next he entered the Currency and Banking Database (CBDB), an IRS database accessed through the Currency and Banking Retrieval System. CBDB contains roughly 50 million Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs), which document all [cash] financial transactions of more than US$10,000. By law these transactions must be filed by banks, S & Ls, credit unions, securities brokers, casinos and other individuals and businesses engaged in the exchange of large sums of money. "The analyst narrowed his quest by searching for CTRs filed for transactions deemed suspicious. Financial institutions must still file a CTR, or IRS Form 4789, if a transaction under US$10,000 is considered suspicious under the terms of an extensive federal government list. There was a hit. A series of 'suspicious' CTRs existed in the restaurant's zip code. Punching up images of the identified CTRs on his terminal, the FINCEN analyst noted that the transactions were made by a person whose first name was John. The CTRs were suspicious all right. They were submitted for a series of transactions each in the amount of US$9500, just below the CTR threshold of US$10,000. This was hard evidence that John structured the deposits to avoid filing a Form 4789, and that is a federal crime. "Selecting one of the CRTs for an expanded review, the analyst got John's full name, social security number, date of birth, home address, drivers' license number and other statistics, including bank account numbers. Plunging back into the IRS database, the analyst broadened his search for all CTRs filed on behalf of the suspect, including non-suspicious CTRs. Only 20 reports deemed suspicious popped up on the screen, but more than 150 CTRs were filed in all. A review of the non-suspicious ones revealed that on several, John listed his occupation as the owner or manager of the restaurant identified by the telephone number on the slip of paper taken from the arrested criminal. The connection between the name and the phone number originally given to FINCEN was secured. "The FINCEN analyst then tapped commercial and government databases and turned up business information on the restaurant showing that John had reported an expected revenue for his eatery of substantially less than the money he had been depositing, as indicated by the CTRs. Fishing in a database of local tax assessment records, the analyst discovered that John owned other properties and businesses. With the names of these other companies, the analyst went back into the CTR database and found that suspicious transaction reports were filed on several of them as well. "As routine as such assignments as this case may be, the chumminess between FINCEN and the intelligence community raises serious questions about the privacy and security of the financial records of citizens John and Jane Doe, considering the intelligence community's historic penchant for illegal spying on non-criminals. Given the ease with which the government can now tap into an individual's or business's financial records on a whim, these questions have received far too little scrutiny (Hill, Scope Int., pp. 95-96)." BEWARE OF OPERATION GATEWAY "It started in July 1993 on a hot and dusty summer day in Texas. Since then, Operation Gateway has spread throughout every American state. In the process, lives have been wrecked and families torn apart. Recently, this menace has moved into other western countries as well. Gateway is inherently prone to abuse and provides, in the words of one banking professional, a 'disturbing indication of the direction in which the government is moving.' "Gateway gives state and local law enforcement officials direct access to massive federal Financial Database, a huge mountain of personal financial details known in federal agent speak as the FDB. All of what the enormous FDB contains can rightly be classified as sensitive information. It contains, among other things, all of the records that have been filed by financial institutions under various acts that have been instituted over the last 26 years. In case your're worried, here's the partial list: *Currency Transactions Reports (CTRs) *Suspicious Transaction Reports *International Transportation of Currency or Monetary Instruments Reports *Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts Reports "Operation Gateway is soon to be expanded so that it can allow for direct access. In other words, every local trooper or sheriff's hoodlum will be able to tap into this database. From the massive, FDB, state governments can download hardcopies of documents principally containing information on deposits, withdrawals and the movement of large sums of currency. All Americans are in the base as well as a large number of foreigners. The FDB has nothing to do whatsoever with the war on drugs or catching criminals. Beware Operation Gateway. It is Big Brother's electronic eye that watches you and keeps tabs on every move you make. "FINCEN state coordinators will handle the log-ons. They think they're the only ones smart enough to surf the electronic waves. In their eyes, the 50,000 federal agents and 500,000 police officers (NOTE: Clinton added 100,000 more police officers before he left office) would otherwise wreck the sensitive circuits. Under Gateway, results from all queries are written into a master audit file that is automatically compared against other requests and databases to track whether the subject of the inquiry is of interest to another agency or has popped up in a record somewhere else. If you think this is bad, hold your horses. Your worst 1984 nightmares have only just begun (Hill, Scope, 96-97). http://www.newnetizen.com/various/fincen.htm Forwarded for info and discussion from the New Paradigms Discussion List, not necessarily endorsed by: *********************************** Lloyd Miller, Research Director for A-albionic Research a ruling class/conspiracy research resource for the entire political-ideological spectrum. **FREE RARE BOOK SEARCH: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ** Explore Our Archive: <http://a-albionic.com/a-albionic.html> <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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