The Wall Street Journal is reporting that hundreds of U.S. government agencies have been tracking money transfers between the U.S. and at least 20 countries without any court oversight.
This is part of the Transaction Record Analysis Center, or TRAC. It was set up as part of a 2014 settlement with Western Union but was quietly expanded to include more than 600 law enforcement agencies.
The lead of TRAC told the WSJ that the program is used to catch drug cartels and money laundering criminals. He said: “We don’t broadcast it to the world, but we don’t run from or hide from it either.”
A spokesperson for the Arizona attorney general said this: “Courts have held that customers using money transmitter businesses do not have the same expectation of privacy as traditional banking customers.”
So if you use this service, keep that in mind.
