Monday, December 5, 2022

‘Progressive’ Bank Developing ‘Department of Precrime’ ‘Snitchware’ on Gun Owners

Amalgamated Bank CEO Priscilla Sims Brown explains how her new role as a fortune-telling medium can dispatch state enforcers to whomever her cards predict needs looking into. (New York Times Events/YouTube)
Amalgamated Bank CEO Priscilla Sims Brown explains how her new role as a fortune-telling medium can dispatch state enforcers to whomever her cards predict needs looking into. (New York Times Events/YouTube)

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Banks are developing technology to identify potential mass shooters, according to a CEO backing the push to get credit-card companies to more closely track gun purchases,” Daily Business Review claims.  Or rather, Bloomberg News (!), which provided this propaganda piece, does.

“‘Detection scenarios’ are in the works that, if triggered, would prompt banks to file a Suspicious Activity Report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network,” the story elaborates, citing Amalgamated Bank Chief Executive Officer Priscilla Sims Brown.

Brown did not identify the psychic technology that will allow Amalgamated to reliably predict future probabilities accurately enough to justify reporting citizens to law enforcement for investigation — that is, to activate authorities to punish based on a belief in magic, just like the witch trials of old.  But we do know from past media statements the types of thresholds she envisions.

“Software would be able to detect, for example, if someone spent $1,000 at a firearm store, and on the same day, received a $1,000 deposit from someone who is not legally allowed to purchase firearms themselves,” she advocated, as quoted in my August Firearms News report.

“The software would know ‘prohibited person’ status? How?” I asked at the time. “Are banks now going to tap into NICS and perform after-the-fact ‘background checks? How is such data sharing with private parties authorized by law?”

Especially since we’re told, “The merchant code doesn’t go to the SKU [Stock Keeping Unit] level.” So now we see the plan is to create soothsaying algorithms and use those to go running to the authorities.

What could go wrong?

If we’re talking about stopping a mass shooter before he can act, time is of the essence. An immediate and forceful law enforcement deployment hardly seems a far-fetched police response, especially with high-profile embarrassments over inaction like Parkland and Uvalde giving all the incentive needed to not want to be the goats on another incident. What are they going to say if something happens on their watch and the banks are out there lamenting “We TOLD them” to the media?

But what happens when it turns out to be a “false positive”? After all, no less an “authority” than the State of California Department of Justice, with law enforcement visibility and a criminal record database greater and more specific than anything Amalgamated Bank is going to feed into its fortune teller machine just recently denied a sale to a longtime gun owner and concealed carry permit holder, and then a few days later, with his purchase still on hold, allowed his ammo purchase to go through.

And what happens if the police show up at a “detection scenario” subject’s house and, following the prime directive of making it home at the end of their shift above all else, open fire on and kill the poor guy, as happened recently in Austin? If it turns out to be an “Oops, our bad!” situation, will Amalgamated (and any bank using its software as a reporting “trigger”) share in the liability?

You know and I know (and the calculating minds behind this know) that impossible-to-achieve clairvoyance will end up preventing no mass shootings. The only ones who don’t know that are the willfully self-deluded useful idiots eager to lemming up for whatever abrogation of rights they’re being instructed to demand. Anyone disarmed (and without due process!) who is an actual danger will still be a danger if he’s not also separated from the potential victim pool. “Gun control” schemes don’t work and this one certainly won’t. And don’t forget, it’s the antis insisting to have it both ways by also claiming it’s easier to get a gun than it is a book or a vegetable.

For some reason, the IT term “GIGO” (Garbage In, Garbage Out) comes to mind. That and Priscilla Sims Brown sitting at her desk in a trance asking, “Magic 8 Ball: Should I report this purchase to the feds?” and then acting on its response.

The other thing that comes to mind is the dystopian Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report:

“In the year 2054 A.D. crime is virtually eliminated from Washington D.C. thanks to an elite law enforcing squad ‘Precrime’. They use three gifted humans (called ‘Pre-Cogs’) with special powers to see into the future and predict crimes beforehand.”

Since it’s unlikely Sims Brown has a trio of mutants isolated in a photon milk bath at corporate HQ, how Amalgamated justifies acting on its “snitchware” (yeah, it’s a real neologism) is unclear unless you compare what they’re doing to a real crime, which depriving citizens of rights without due process has heretofore been considered. They have the means and they’re creating the opportunity. All that’s left is to discern their motive.

As we saw in an August AmmoLand report:

“Amalgamated, majority owned by Workers United, ‘has aggressively carved out a position as the left’s private banker, leveraging deep connections with the Democratic establishment.’ Workers United, in turn, is a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate, which, per The Washington Free Beacon, ‘rakes in millions from Dem campaigns, liberal orgs.’ And the SEIU, in turn, has organized rallies and marched in solidarity with communists.”

So maybe it’s not really about “commonsense gun safety”?

That should be obvious when you further consider the only people this would affect are the “law-abiding” kind. This, of course, won’t slow a career criminal getting his guns the “traditional way,” that is, illegally, one bit. It will, however, provide the gun-grabbers with another “loophole” to exploit by demanding the end of private sales.

That this is now being embraced by the International Organization for Standardization dovetails “nicely” with dragging the U.S. into the global citizen disarmament campaign. Speaking as someone with no small amount of real-world ISO experience in my past career, nothing at the time suggested facilitating the subversion of unalienable rights was one of the goals.

We didn’t have the hindsight back then to foresee today’s rush to economic fascist woke “capitalist” rope-selling, but now it’s no surprise that it all boils down to enemies foreign and domestic. This further illustrates the remarkable and visionary foresight of the Founders when they passed the Bill of Rights in general and the Second Amendment in particular on to posterity.

Funny, who ended up being able to anticipate future probabilities…

Here’s Priscilla Sims Brown hawking her rights-swingling scam to the “sophisticated” urban provincials at The New York Times DealBook Conference:


About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.

David Codrea



from https://ift.tt/DQ2O6Gt
via IFTTT

No comments:

Post a Comment