Know Your Comrade by Solveig Singleton Solveig Singleton is director of information policy at the Cato Institute, and coeditor of the recent book Regulators' Revenge . And if you don't give the bank the information it wants, you could forfeit your account. The FDIC has already received thousands of comments from people outraged at this prospect.
People know the difference between being treated as a citizen and being treated as a suspect.
Imagine the anger and fear that recent immigrants, African Americans and Hispanics will feel, knowing their banks are recording information about their jobs and patterns of withdrawals and deposits. In response to critics, the FDIC is looking for alternatives. But this offers little comfort, since the agency has not backed down from the main idea of using the private sector as a tool of the police. Hunger for centralized information collection by the state means the ambitions of the government have exceeded its capabilities. Here's another way to look at it.