While the data collected by governments was intended to capture Anti Money Laundering and terrorists, it is providing many other results, including the recent debacle with Elliott Spitzer.

globeandmail.com: Anti-laundering software casts wide net to catch big fish

The software looks for subtle patterns that indicate odd activity, and when a transaction is  flagged, a human evaluates the findings. More often than not, the anomaly is explained and  dismissed. For example, someone whose banking consists of bi-weekly deposits may suddenly  show an influx of $15,000 that turns out to be profit from the sale of a car.

But when investigators do find something — like chunks of money transferred from the account of a state governor into the account of a shell corporation — they flag the information and forward it to the authorities. In the United States, the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement  Network looks at almost five million suspicious activity reports a year. In this country, The  Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada in 2007 investigated 193 cases  involving close to $10-billion in financial transactions.