Robert Hettinga says:
Is it possible to accurately estimate the cash transaction load of an economy? I bet that if we could, you'd see that the data from each transaction would cause the problem news servers have by several orders of magnitude. The information would get dumped pretty frequently. This is probably the same problem the NSA has now picking out signals to listen in on, but running down an audit trail is different, it's a historical process. Since you don't know whose transactions you need, you need to keep them all. True, this doesn't keep TLAs from trying trying to drink from a firehose, or more to the point, to free-dive to the bottom of the Marianas Trench (if they could keep all of the data), or high-dive into a wading pool (if they couldn't). Hmmm...
It is perfectly feasable to track all financial transactions in the U.S., down to the "quarter for a phone call" level, without eliminating all capacity to use the data or placing more than, say, another several percent burden on the cost of all transactions. I know how to architect such a system, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one. It would be a big job, but not an impossible one, especially not with modern computer systems. A several percent burden on the economy would be devistating, but from the point of view of the bureaucrats it probably isn't such a bad thing. I feel that it is inevitable that the folks in Washington will eventually come to the conclusion that such systems are needed -- the boys at FINCEN will start bawling for them, and the drug warriors will want them, and the rest of us are all just a bunch of folks who are upset that we couldn't go to woodstock because we had to do our trig homework... Perry