At 10:29 AM -0500 on 12/7/00, Trei, Peter wrote:

Green carders, yes. Visiting foreigners who are not working, not neccesarily. Tourists certainly not.

How about if James Higginsbottom opens an account in the London branch of Citibank? Does he need a US SSN to do so? (I don't think so). Can he use the account in the US (I suspect he can).

I think we're wandering off into the weeds a bit here. The London branch of Citibank, is, of course, a bank in the UK, subject to all banking laws there. Our friend above uses his UK account in the US almost certainly at an ATM machine, like I do from my US bank in the UK, and/or credit card, and no other way. You can certainly get a dollar-denominated bank account in London from Citibank, London is the currency capital of the world, but, and on no real data here, I doubt you could write ACH cleared and routed checks through it. NACHA is trying to do this better, but, in general, you need a correspondent relationship, and/or account, or something, at a bank here in order to write checks on that UK account. My original point, possibly taken too literally at the outset here, is that in most jurisdictions it is more or less impossible to get a US bank account without a social security number, especially if you're a US citizen. Duncan Frissell popped up here on cypherpunks with pointers to the odd bank in South Dakota or somewhere, 4 or 5 years ago, where you could get a bank account without a SSN. It was exceptional in its example, and I would doubt it possible even now. I am not, of course, a banking lawyer, but I certainly hang out with enough of those folks these days, I've certainly had enough of this stuff shoved into my head over the years, and, I expect that to get a bank account without a Social Security number in most states of the US, you probably need to prove that you are indeed a foreign national, *and* provide a valid passport as proof of same, and that, frankly, the passport number would be used *somewhere* as a proxy for SSN where possible. There ain't no free lunch as far as identity and book-entry settlement goes, anymore, folks, even in "tax-haven" jurisdictions, as we're now seeing. Modern nation-states have bound up so much of their regulatory and tax structure into book entry settlement, that it is very hard, more probably impossible, to get a bank account in this country without being completely, positively, whatever that means, identified -- biometrically identified, if it were cheap enough, and certainly with a state-issued identification number. To paraphrase Doug Barnes, "and then you go to jail" is the penultimate error-handling step in book-entry settlement. That means that the nation-state gets in your face, and gets your number, end of story. That is a central fact of financial operations won't change until something proves cheaper that book-entry settlement. Which, of course, lots of people on cypherpunks, and elsewhere, are busy working on. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'