> Anti-money-laundering is a comparable field, as all the AML regulations and laws are ineffective at identifying money launderers, but they're wonderful for verifying (auditing and prosecuting) tax compliance.

As someone who’s implemented AML, KYC, and tax reporting functions in a bank. I think you would be very surprised at how shit they are for tax auditing at scale. Unless the tax man is specifically auditing you, and basically requesting all your transaction details, the reporting that banks do would only allow tax agencies to catch the most brazen and incompetent tax dodgers.

All of the tools however do make much harder to perform money laundering, forcing criminals to recruit and pay huge numbers of naive bank customers to allow criminals to launder money via their personal accounts, using them as money mules. Which then gets flagged and shutdown pretty quick by banks because the behaviour is generally pretty obvious.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) banks can’t/don’t coordinate on identified money mules or know launderers, so criminals just move on to other banks and repeat.

> Having the ability to identify who is watching or saying what on the internet would be immensely useful to the government

This sounds unconstitutional.