CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

That's pretty much how KYC works. The government can't just willy nilly demand papers of everyone going into the bank to open up an account due to the 4th amendment. So they just make the bank do it so it is a "private" act, and then for instance IRS is authorized to do warrantless seizure on the accounts which are now tied to names that were forced to be revealed under KYC laws.

> The third party doctrine also basically legalizes most types of search through people's "cloud data"

This isn't actually true (it varies by type of "cloud data", like content vs metadata, and the circuit you're in), and there are multiple recent carveouts (eg geofence warrants) that when the Supreme Court bothers to look at it again, suggests they don't feel it's as clear as it was decades ago. Congress can also just go ahead and any time make it clear they don't like it (see the Stored Communications Act).

It's also, just to be clear, an invented doctrine, and absolutely not in the constitution like the fourth amendment is. Don't cede the principle just because it has a name. Technical and social solutions are good, but we should not tolerate our government acting as it does.

The government doesn't need a warrant to access bank records, as per the US's banking laws. They just need an administrative subpoena, which doesn't have to be signed off by a judge.

This is not and example of the government sidestepping laws through a third party. You just don't like the existing laws, and would prefer to make certain things illegal that are presently legal.

There wouldn't be any identity linked for an anonymous bank account to 'access', were it not for the warrantless search of your papers required under KYC but done via private entity (sidestepping 4th amendment) to open an account. That part is done without even a subpoena.

That is, the US banking laws force private actors, under color of law, to systematically inspect the papers of those opening an account, which conveniently sidesteps the 4th amendment implication of the government searching the papers themselves at everyone opening an account at the bank. And then allows the government to act on the information of that forced search, even without a warrant.

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I'm referring to this:

>The government cannot have a third party take action on its behalf to do something that would be illegal for the government to do itself.

It is illegal for the government to violate the 4th amendment, whether or not a 'law' beyond what is written in the constitution is present.

Clearly the government would love to just take all your information directly when you open an account, as that would be even better for them, but due to the 4th amendment they can't do that. But just asking or without a warrant requiring the bank to act on it or reveal it is almost as easy, so they just sidestep that by just requiring via the law the bank to search your papers instead. It's effectively a government imposed search but carried out by a 3rd party.

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>This is just factually wrong. The Bank Secrecy Act specifically requires that banks to provide this info. The 4th amendment does not prohibit this. If a bank refused to provide this required information, the government would go in and get that information directly.

>Again, no law is being avoided. You just don't like the

This is not 'just factually wrong.' The bank is doing the search instead of the government. A blanket search of everyone, even without a subpeona, even without an individualized notice, even without any sort of event that would require reporting to the government under the BSA, even then they still are required to search the information even in the instances that it doesn't end up being required to be transmitted to the government. You're saying the portion of data the government collects might be 4A compliant, but that doesn't mean the private actor being forced to collect information that doesn't even get reported is 4A compliant if the government did it. You're just saying the subset of required KYC collected information that ends up transmitted to the government was 4A compliant, which isn't sufficient to establish the government could have collected all the information to begin with under the 4A as they have required the bank to do.

>the government would go in and get that information directly

A blanket sweep of everyone's information willy nilly by the government is not 4A compliant, that's why they've had the bank do it on their behalf.

> > Neither is there an expectation [...]

> Expectation is not law.

It is in this case.

Expectation of privacy is a legal test based literally on on what "normies would probably say". If, as a society, we're moving more and more of our private effects to the cloud, there is a point where there's an expectation of privacy from the government there, regardless of the shadiness of the company we trusted for it, and regardless of what's convenient for the government.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/expectation_of_privacy

Carpenter v. United States is a great example of this, where a thing once thought as obviously falling under the third party doctrine (cell tower location information) was put definitively within protection by the fourth amendment because of ongoing changes in how society used and considered cell phones.

And I forgot about this but just saw it referenced in the wikipedia article: it's notable that Gorsuch's dissent on the case argued for dropping the third party doctrine completely:

> There is another way. From the founding until the 1960s, the right to assert a Fourth Amendment claim didn’t depend on your ability to appeal to a judge’s personal sensibilities about the “reasonableness” of your expectations or privacy. It was tied to the law. The Fourth Amendment protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” True to those words and their original understanding, the traditional approach asked if a house, paper or effect was yours under law. No more was needed to trigger the Fourth Amendment....

> Under this more traditional approach, Fourth Amendment protections for your papers and effects do not automatically disappear just because you share them with third parties.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402