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Institute for Justice updates
Fourth Amendment
Federal Court Halts Ruinous Financial Surveillance For Texas Money Services Businesses
Following our preliminary injunction against a new financial surveillance rule in California in April, a San Antonio federal court ordered the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to stop enforcing a financial surveillance rule in Texas that threatened ten small money services businesses and intruded on the financial privacy of their customers—all for making ordinary cash transactions.
“This is a tremendous relief, since the rule threatened to make my business simply unprofitable,” said IJ client Arnoldo Gonzalez, Jr. “My customers are honest, hardworking people who exchange modest amounts of cash. This requirement intruded on their privacy with no apparent benefit to law enforcement.”
Do you own your money? To most people, the question might seem silly. If it’s your money, of course you own it. If you don’t, who does? But ask a lawyer for the federal government, and you may get a different answer. “Money,” the government recently asserted in a brief in one of IJ’s cases, “is not necessarily ‘property’ for constitutional purposes.”
Jacksonville food truck operators have won a critical legal victory in their challenge to rules that have made it difficult to operate in most of the city. In a ruling from the bench yesterday, the Onslow County Superior Court granted plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction against the signage restrictions that Jacksonville, NC, only imposes on food trucks. The ruling comes as part of a years-long legal effort by IJ on behalf of two food truck owners and a property owner who wants to host food trucks.
Constitutional rights protect everyone, even people we might not be terribly fond of. This week we discuss two defendants who perhaps don’t deserve a lot of sympathy but nevertheless had their rights vindicated in ways that protect those rights more broadly.
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