On one hand, this seems almost like a Spinal Tap sort of situation. If you want to make it illegal to evade the reporting requirements by withdrawing $8,000 repeatedly, then write the law to require reporting $8,000, or whatever amount you're after.<p>On the other hand, the law is written such that it only applies to people who are aware of the law and intended to circumvent reporting. It seems like an easy case that withdrawing $1.7 million in increments under $10,000 is intentional, and that the guy who was Speaker of the House at the time that the law was updated by Congress would know that the law exists.<p>As is often the case, it seems like a bad person violating a bad law and it's hard to get worked up over either.
Imagine you have a series S=[[datetime1,amount1], [datetime2,amount], ..., [datetimek,amountk]] of withdrawals in which the amounts are lower than 10 000 dollars. From there, it should be possible to define the predicate function isCrime(S)=yes/no for any such S. The way in which they wrote their so-called law, however, makes it obviously impossible to implement such isCrime() predicate function unambiguously. In other words, what we can learn from this, is that there exists a set of people who are pretentious enough that they insist that they can write laws, but who are obviously too stupid to do that properly. They are also dangerous because these people use violence in order to impose their stupidity onto others.
This strikes me as a congressional case of the XY problem (<a href="http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem" rel="nofollow">http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem</a>)<p>Somewhere, long ago, people were committing crimes involving large amounts of money, but law enforcement couldn't stop it. So they instituted financial reporting requirements for banks, to help identify crooks. But people can easily structure their transactions to avoid the reporting requirements.<p>So now you make it a crime to do that. Regardless of whether there was an underlying crime in the first place.<p>Oh, and then when the FBI investigates, you can commit a third crime (lying to the FBI) without having committed the first crime or second crime.
The "lying to FBI" charge is arguably the more important problem with this story.<p>See <a href="https://popehat.com/2015/05/29/dennis-hastert-and-federal-prosecutorial-power/" rel="nofollow">https://popehat.com/2015/05/29/dennis-hastert-and-federal-pr...</a>
<i>The government has the burden to prove that the defendant knew about the reporting requirement and intended to evade it... this is quite unlike many of the regulatory crimes that can ensnare the unsophisticated.</i><p>So this is a situation where ignorance of the law <i>does</i> excuse violating it?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat</a>
I enjoy contemplating the nuts and bolts of these laws with respect to what exactly would be allowed and what would not.<p>For example, if I were to withdraw $15k every friday and re-deposit it every monday under the guise that I want it available for gambling over the weekend, that would raise a flag, but it's easily explainable. Would it be considered "structuring" if I did this for a while just to establish a pattern, or is it only structuring if you're trying to <i>avoid</i> triggering a report?<p>If the $15k occasionally didn't show up on monday, would I then need to come up with another explanation (e.g. "I lost")? Would it fly if I were actually paying this to a friend by way of intentionally losing to him in a private card room?
This is why, if you ever want to extort money from someone, you have your lawyer talk to their lawyer first. I'm sure they could have set up an LLC for the extortionist/victim to perform "market research" or something.
Is paying hush money illegal? This is essentially how no-competes and NDAs work sometimes. An employer offers you some amount of your salary on exit, and asks you to sign a document agreeing not to disclose things you learned there.<p>Further, while I am aware that transactions above 10K are flagged, so what? If you have paid taxes on the money, you can do what you want with it. IANAL but I think you can withdraw any amount, it is just flagged and reported by the teller.
My biggest gripe with this law has to do with the fact that the limit hasn't changed in at least 22 years. I remember learning about this law when I worked as a bank teller one summer. $10K isn't what it used to be.
This situation itself is pretty straightforward, Hastert was clearly structuring, and, odds are, the person he sent the money to didn't pay taxes on the money he got from Hastert, which itself is a crime, and finally, he lied about it to the FBI, also a crime. So, three clear crimes here, one of which committed by a third party.<p>So many things in life are "grey" - this one is pretty straightforward, and Hastert would have known that what he was doing was wrong. The news coming out today strongly suggests that he had a good incentive to commit these crimes to hide evidence of even greater wrongdoing.
So the offense is, essentially, not arranging your affairs in a way so as to leave them open to easy scrutiny by the state. With decades of precedent allowing such laws how can strong cryptography possibly be permissible?
This problem should be tackled at the root. The reporting law (report transactions >10K is antiquated). The federal government can set up other ways of finding "interesting" transaction patterns that have nothing to do with a specific threshold that continually lowers in real value due to inflation.<p>Drop the 10K reporting requirement and there is no need a structuring law except as a way to "get" people that they can not "get" in another way.
I run a business and regularly withdraw > $10k per month as salary. The bank reports these routine transactions to the government every month? And if I decide in the future that things aren't going so well and need to cut my pay down to $9k or so, I might get charged with structuring, despite the fact that I am not using the money in any illegal way?
This case is why I believe it's pointless to try to protect your privacy: even if you just withdraw < $10,000 to avoid notice, you've committed a crime. But, if you withdraw more than $10k all the time (then deposit it back in) you haven't committed a crime and that $10k you needed for hush money gets lost in the noise.
From the unfortunately dead post of TEMPLEOS_DEV<p><i>They don't have to. Structuring transactions to avoid reporting laws is also a crime. Periodic withdrawals of $9,999 won't save you.</i>
That's what you get when you elect socialists, statists. They will decided what you can do with your own money. Why does any government asshole get to decide how, what, how much you withdrawl from your own money.<p>You leftists better fucking wake up. You are the cause of this.
Let's examine this law via the perspective of speed limits.<p>In the US, most interstate highway systems have a speed limit of 70 miles/hour (around 112-113 km/hour). If you go over 70 mph and run into a police officer having a bad day, you'll get a ticket.<p>Say you're on a particular stretch of interstate which is populated by officers with a reputation of consistently coming after drivers traveling even 1 mph over the limit (eg 71 mph).<p>So, to err on the side of caution, you limit your driving to between 65 and 69 mph.<p>You're driving along at 65-69 mph thinking all is well in the world, when the flashing lights appear behind you. You pull over, the officer comes up, and The Question comes out: "Is there a problem officer?"<p>The officer looks you over and asks "Do you know how fast you were going?"<p>You get a puzzled look on your face. "Well, I couldn't have been speeding. I know you guys are pretty strict about speeding around here, so I set the cruise control right at 67 mph."<p>"So you know that speeding around here will get you a ticket, and you intentionally kept your speed below the speed limit?"<p>"Yes sir."<p>"Well, I'll need you to step out of the car please."<p>"Um sure, but why?"<p>"We have an anti-evasion law around here which makes it illegal for you to knowingly and intentionally go below the speed limit in order to avoid the possibility of going over and getting a ticket. The penalty is 30 days in jail vs the $100 speeding ticket. Since you admitted to intentionally going under the speed limit, I'm placing you under arrest."<p>Insanity, I tell you.