Tracing Cash

[thug@phantom.com (Murdering Thug)]

Bill Stewart writes:

> Nick MacDonald's note on bar codes on Canadian money, and speculation
> about banks tracking what bills they give you, is something they're probably
> not doing now, but could if they wanted; USA Today had an article a while
> back about proposals to do that with US money.  You really can't do a 
> perfect tracking job, but a large amount of cash comes from banks,
> gets spent at stores, and goes back to banks, and could easily enough
> be tracked it it were bar-coded and banks were forced (or paid) to 
> read it with bar-code scanners.  Maybe you'd only track 50%, or 80%,
> but that could have a major impact on privacy, and a major "improvement"
> in the government's ability to keep tabs on us.  It's really no tougher
> to print bar coded serial numbers than human-readable ones.
> 
> Sounds like it's a good time to get digicash out into the market,
> or stock up on rrolls of quarters :-)

There's a quick cure for those who are paranoid about spending bar coded
money; make sure the bills you spend at stores were not given to you by a
bank teller or ATM.  Since "getting change" (ie: converting $20 bills to
$10 bills at stores) is theoretically traceable if the store in question
processes a "making change" transaction by barscanning the input bills and
output bills and submitting the record of that transaction to some agency
or clearinghouse operated by the government (U.S. Treasury Dept?) or banks
(Federal Reserve).  Don't tell me this is not possible, because it is, try
purchasing a postal money order over $1500 at a U.S. Post office, and
you'll see that they ask for valid ID before completing the transaction. 
We're getting closer to a Big Brother electronically monitored economy
with each day.  Bar coding money is just one more step in that direction,
and certainly far more palateble to the American public than outlawing
cash alltogether, which is why I think the Treasury Dept. might do it soon.

Getting back to bar coded money, and how to avoid traceable transactions,
I can see an underground business of "money changers", people who act sort
of like cash shuffling agents. Here's how it would work: A person obtains
some cash at an ATM from his acount.  He'd like to spend the cash to buy
liquor, but doesn't want his bank to see any of his bills coming back in
the form of a deposit from a liquor store (such juicy info could be
re-sold by the bank to a insurance company clearinghouse/database).  So,
instead the person goes to a money changer.  The money changer takes the
cash from the customer and gives him some new cash, charging a small
transaction fee (1-5%?).  The money changer works by deposits the
customers bills into his own account, and withdrawing fresh bills from his
own account via ATM, the fresh bills are to be given to other customers of
the money changer.  Thus, there will exist two types of cash in such an
arrangement, "traceable" cash (cash withdrawn from a regular person's
account), and "untraceable" cash (cash withdrawn from a money changer's
account). The job of the money changer is to sell untraceable cash in
exchangefor traceable cash.  Such money changing businesses (if not made
illegal by laws) could operate accross the street from major banks, and
provide a valuable service (giving cash the anonymity it enjoys now).

BTW, cash can be traced even without bar codes, since serial numbers can
be read by OCR.  I'm assuming banks *already* scan all incoming cash
for serial numbers looking for money from unsolved bank heists, and
alerting the FBI/SS when a customer deposits such bills, so that the
FBI/SS can then interogate a chain of people leading up to the original
spender of the bill, much in the way the SS catches counterfeiters.



Thug