Almost no news has been reported about the government’s new powers to look at your finances.  That’s because it was signed on a Saturday at the same time that Hussein’s capture was announced.  The only reporting seems to be from the San Antonio Current article With a Whisper, Not A Bang:

By signing the bill on the day of Hussein’s capture, Bush effectively consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote. Consequently, while most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe their financial records, even if the feds don’t suspect their involvement in crime or terrorism.

The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies tucked away these new executive powers in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, a legislative behemoth that funds all the intelligence activities of the federal government. The Act included a simple, yet insidious, redefinition of “financial institution,” which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business “whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters.”

The fact that I couldn’t find this on any of the news services made me do a little more research than usual.  I found the text of the bill, H.R. 2417, and an announcement that it was signed.  But even that doesn’t make clear what happened because the text of the bill refers to the United States Code.  The new meaning of financial institution is finally made clear there.

On and on…  it seems the article is correct, but perhaps not as sweeping as it sounds.  That’s because only the smaller institutions were added; the big ones were already there.  At least from what I can tell from that legal morass.