No. There is a big difference to "they already know" and/or they "could trivially find out". Even if the latter may be true, the former is not. The government does not have direct access to personal bank account ledgers.
"They already know" is a red herring; there is no "they". "Government" as a single entity has no brain, so the best you can do is ask about individual actors. So let's talk instead about a person: Merrick Garland.[1]
Pretend for a moment that Merrick receives a piece of memo from a subordinate that incriminates you in some form of bank fraud. Of course Merrick personally doesn't know anything about your bank account. Nobody has both the information and a brain big enough to store it. Hell, I have to check my own bank account regularly because I keep forgetting exactly how much is in there and it's my own money!
If something came across Merrick's desk and it convinced _him_ that it was worthwhile to investigate, do you really expect other than delays waiting for signed papers before he got the information he wanted? Do you really think there's a difference to Merrick whether he gets that information in 60 seconds by logging into your bank "as you" and looking at it, or whether he waits a few days and gets hand delivered a piece of paper by a bank's legal team?
[1] U.S. Attorney General and current chief law enforcement officer for the nation
Yes it matters, because there will be a court involved in this process as opposed to if the government “owned” your bank account nothing would stop it from knowing exactly what was in there at all times.
I'm sorry, but courts have lost most of their credibility in recent years. There was an HN thread recently[1] about a person arrested and extradited from one state to another without what appears to be any oversight. Pretending the courts are magic isn't actually very helpful here. If any single person in power wanted this information, they could have it. If any single person not in power wanted this information, they would have to work really hard to get it.
No one is pretending anything. It's still an extra step that adds transparency even if it is not a huge barrier. But in reality, that is a lot larger barrier than just direct access 24/7.
> because there will be a court involved in this process as opposed to if the government “owned” your bank account nothing would stop it from knowing exactly what was in there at all times
There's some decentralization within the government also, if one branch wants something from another it (ideally) has to go the courts route too, it's not that every federal employee can just access any government records on a person, (at least in theory). If there's someone powerful enough taking interest in you to override that, I doubt a private bank is going to be a major obstacle.
I mean courts themselves are technically part of that system too. I am as cynical as the next person regarding government overreach, but I see little protection from a multi-national banking entity entangled with the government for decades in all sorts of ways.
If it was as 'easy' to start a bank as an ISP in the 90s, I could see it.
> "Government" as a single entity has no brain, so the best you can do is ask about individual actors.
I don't think the Fed is "government" in the 4th amendment sense that it can just get information about you without a warrant, is it?
In an unrelated law, this is the reason child abuse reports from ISPs go to a private company called NCMEC. It's so law enforcement won't have automatically have access to private data in the reports without legal process.
Anyone who has worked in data knows this difference instinctively.
There’s a massive difference between the data being theoretically available somewhere in your organization and “trivially” accessible vs actually being able to run a query (let alone the work to actually run the query).
With that said the unbanked crisis is severe and there are big societal benefits to insuring everyone has a checking and savings account. There’s no reason robust safeguards can’t be built into the law establishing the Bank of the United States (Third time is the charm!).
You don't need a federal bank to solve that problem. A simple regulation would suffice requiring private banks to service these customers in some fashion.
That's the entire purpose of a bank. The point of a bank is that the customers think they're putting their money in a box, but it's actually loaned out to businesses.
If you don't do this, the money supply gets a lot smaller.
