I'm always gobsmacked at the level of ... jawdropping "Let them eat cake!" self-delusion displayed by some wealthy people.

"This hasn't affected me, so it mustn't affect anyone!"

The grinding day-to-day slogging, through the mud of irrelevant and useless regulatory burden experienced by the "lesser" classes of civilization (and anyone actually trying to run a small business) is just astonishing.

Basically, many people just "stop". They can't navigate it, and know they'll never defeat it. So they just cease to try.

> This is just factually untrue. AML policies unjustly affect millions of Americans.

If it's that clearly untrue, presumably you can document this?

And I'll note that even if you can, it doesn't necessarily contradict what you're replying to, which was, "This will affect the typical user of the financial system precisely zero times during their lives."

With 330 million residents, millions of people could have KYC/AML problems and patio11 still could be right. I've never had a problem like that, and have only heard one person ever mention it. And he was an Australian trying to open a US bank account to get around certain Australian import taxes, so I suspect he was somebody who should have been having problems.

While I appreciate the problems that you're describing, I'm dubious that it violates the 4th amendment. In particular look at the Private Search Exemption. Which says that the 4th amendment does NOT apply to searches done by private parties. And if a private party has voluntarily done the search and reported it to the government, the government may redo the search without a warrant, but can't exceed what the private party said.

This applies here because both KYC and AML procedures are set up and carried out by private banks. Which makes it a private search, that fits squarely in the exemption.

In turn this begs the question of whether the government can encourage through intentionally vague regulation behavior that they cannot directly ask for. But given the courts we have, I suspect they will avoid answering this question.

Furthermore it is hardly the worst violation of the 4th that is common. I'm personally most incensed about civil forfeiture. Through the workaround of suing your stuff instead of you, all Constitutional protections are voided. The result is essentially legalized robbery by the government, carried out by the very law enforcement departments that directly profit from the proceeds. Given that the courts have repeatedly OKed this, why would you expect them to object to KYC and AML?

I agree with your broader point but I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court case is about a technicality involving foreign bank account reporting, basically whether a failure to file that you had 5 foreign bank accounts is 5 counts or 1 count of FBAR violations. Unless there’s another pending case I haven’t heard of?