No, this is perfectly normal behaviour from a bank. Technically if a bank wanted to refuse a law enforcement request for information, they could and the LEO would need to go get a court order. In practice, banks don’t really ever refuse these types of requests. There’s two ways this typically happens.
An investigating officer send an email to the bank saying “is x your customer. If yes please send us this data we want”. Banks will happily just comply, no judicial oversight. Even worse, they’ll typically send the request to a bunch of different banks and include details about the crime they’re accusing you of, which has some rather chilling privacy implications.
The bank flags something you did as either suspicious, or as triggering some mandatory reporting process. They’ll do their own investigation and if they think you’ve commit some sort of fraud they’ll just hand over all the data to law enforcement and ask them to investigate.
Banks provide so much data to law enforcement that they typically have direct network connections set up to the file transfer services of various agencies. I’m definitely not saying this is a good thing, but it’s just very typical of how banks operate. Part of it is due to how our banking system operates, which is sort of on a “easy to defraud, easy to get caught” basis.
You think this was happening for people on the far left? I’d like to see evidence of that. It’s bad enough we have some of these rules and laws but when they are unevenly applied it’s another level of injustice.
If law enforcement had bothered to investigate those crimes, the banks would have happily shared any data that was requested. What’s not clear to me from the reporting is whether the feds asked for this data, or whether BoA just took the initiative to do some snitching. If they did that would certainly be out of the ordinary. But what is totally ordinary is banks, telcos, other large companies just handing over as much data as law enforcement wants without any form of judicial oversight.
Are there ANY uncucked banks out there? I was just about to open an account with these fuckers and now that's not happening. ARGH!
No, this is perfectly normal behaviour from a bank. Technically if a bank wanted to refuse a law enforcement request for information, they could and the LEO would need to go get a court order. In practice, banks don’t really ever refuse these types of requests. There’s two ways this typically happens.
An investigating officer send an email to the bank saying “is x your customer. If yes please send us this data we want”. Banks will happily just comply, no judicial oversight. Even worse, they’ll typically send the request to a bunch of different banks and include details about the crime they’re accusing you of, which has some rather chilling privacy implications.
The bank flags something you did as either suspicious, or as triggering some mandatory reporting process. They’ll do their own investigation and if they think you’ve commit some sort of fraud they’ll just hand over all the data to law enforcement and ask them to investigate.
Banks provide so much data to law enforcement that they typically have direct network connections set up to the file transfer services of various agencies. I’m definitely not saying this is a good thing, but it’s just very typical of how banks operate. Part of it is due to how our banking system operates, which is sort of on a “easy to defraud, easy to get caught” basis.
You think this was happening for people on the far left? I’d like to see evidence of that. It’s bad enough we have some of these rules and laws but when they are unevenly applied it’s another level of injustice.
If law enforcement had bothered to investigate those crimes, the banks would have happily shared any data that was requested. What’s not clear to me from the reporting is whether the feds asked for this data, or whether BoA just took the initiative to do some snitching. If they did that would certainly be out of the ordinary. But what is totally ordinary is banks, telcos, other large companies just handing over as much data as law enforcement wants without any form of judicial oversight.