How Boosting Your Privacy Will Make America More Secure

Excerpt In the era of big data, big tech, and big government, privacy is getting smaller. Our phones know more about us than our families do, while emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tools are making it easier than ever for hostile actors to harvest information. Criminals are eagerly adopting AI to boost their ability to find fraud victims or cyber vulnerabilities. As we enter a world of AI-amplified surveillance, the window for designing a meaningful solution to re-enable privacy is rapidly narrowing. Reinvigorating privacy starts with fixing our outdated system of identification. Weak identity controls provide fertile ground for criminals, facilitating money laundering, sanctions evasion, and state-sanctioned hacking. In 2024, the Treasury Department reported that more than $200 billion in identity-related suspicious transactions went through the banking system in a single year. Drug cartels, human traffickers, and fraudsters are among the known beneficiaries, moving vast sums through the financial system without revealing the entities behind the money. How can the government follow the money and catch the criminal, but still protect privacy? Common solutions miss the mark. Consumer protection and data privacy laws have proliferated globally, yet citizens are less protected from identity theft, surveillance, and fraud than ever before. The problem is that criminals, companies, and governments all have strong incentives to collect information, while many have a vested interest in maintaining the loopholes that allow them to do so. Josh Birenbaum is deputy director of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on economic security, illicit finance, corruption, and financial secrecy. Amit Sharma is the managing director for Digital Identity at Fragomen and was the founder and CEO of FinClusive, a provider of modernized financial crimes compliance (FCC) and identity solutions for a new era of financial services. Amit is also a board advisor to the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.