These government and para-government organisations are not subject to the data protection laws that commercial actors are. They maintain profiles on billions of people without any of the imperative to delete that data, to make citizens aware that that data is being collected, to modify that data if it's inaccurate. Then of course they all share information between one another.

One of the results commercially of AML laws is that anywhere between 30% and 65% of declined transactions globally are in fact legitimate. A question that is rarely asked is ‘how effective is anti-money-laundering legislation?