By Martin Armstrong

A Congressional investigation committee released an extremely concerning report this week entitled: “FINANCIAL SURVEILLANCE IN THE UNITED STATES: HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WEAPONIZED THE BANK SECRECY ACT TO SPY ON AMERICANS” that details how the US government has been monitoring American citizens through bank transactions, with an emphasis on citizens who have expressed conservative viewpoints.

“Financial data can tell a person’s story, including one’s “religion, ideology, opinions, and interests” as well as one’s “political leanings, locations, and more,”’ the report begins. This investigation began after a whistleblower who happens to be a retired FBI agent alerted Congress that the Bank of America (BoA) voluntarily provided the Biden Administration information on customers who used a credit or debit card in Washington, D.C., around the January 6 protests. The new report has revealed that federal agencies have been working “hand-in-glove with financial institutions, obtaining virtually unchecked access to private financial data and testing out new methods and new technology to continue the financial surveillance of American citizens.”

As I’ve said countless times, “money laundering” is ALWAYS the excuse for why the government must track and monitor our financial transactions. The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) E-Filing System is a system for financial institutions to file reports required by the BSA electronically. By law, the BSA requires businesses to keep records and file reports to help prevent and detect money laundering. This is how the Biden Administration is attempting to disregard privacy and weaponize financial institutions.

US intelligence agencies searched through records for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA” to target Americans who they believed may hold “extremist” views. The agencies searched for Americans who purchased religious texts, such as the Bible, and also labeled them extremists. Anyone expressing disdain for the COVID lockdowns, vaccines, open borders, or the deep state were placed on a watchlist. Again, the BSA was used as a premise to pull transactions placed by the individuals on this list.

As explained by the investigative committee:

“With narrow exception, federal law does not permit law enforcement to inquire into financial institutions’ customer information without some form of legal process.9  The FBI circumvents this process by tipping off financial institutions to “suspicious” individuals and encouraging these institutions to file a SAR—which does not require any legal process—and thereby provide federal law enforcement with access to confidential and highly sensitive information.10 In doing so, the FBI gets around the requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), which, per the Treasury Department, specifies that “it is . . . a bank’s responsibility” to “file a SAR whenever it identifies ‘a suspicious transaction relevant to a possible violation of law or regulation’”11 While at least one financial institution requested legal process from the FBI for information it was seeking,12 all too often the FBI appeared to receive no pushback. In sum, by providing financial institutions with lists of people that it views as generally “suspicious” on the front end, the FBI has turned this framework on its head and contravened the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause.”

Under this premise, anyone who held a viewpoint that opposed the Biden Administration was considered a “suspicious” individual who required monitoring. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network created a database to carefully watch potential dissenters. Over 14,000 government employees accessed the FinCEN database last year and conducted over 3 million searches without a warrant. In fact, over 15% of FBI investigations during 2023 has some link to this database. It is estimated that 4.6 million SARs and 20.8 million Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) were filed in the last year.

The committee noted that the government is incorporating AI to quickly search the web for “suspicious” Americans:

“As the Committee and Select Subcommittee have discussed in other reports, the growth and expansion of AI present major risks to Americans’ civil liberties.211 For example, the Committee and Select Subcommittee uncovered AI being used to censor “alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election . . . .”212 Those concerns are not hypothetical. Some AI systems developed by Big Tech companies have been programmed with biases; for example, Google’s Gemini AI program praised liberal views while refusing to do the same for conservative views, despite claiming to be “objective” and “neutral.” With financial institutions seemingly adopting AI solutions to monitor Americans’ transactions, a similarly biased AI program could result in the systematic flagging or censoring of transactions that the AI is trained to view as “suspicious.”

This is extremely troubling and goes beyond government overreach and violated numerous Constitutional protections. The government effectively transformed banking institutions into spy agencies, and anyone who could potentially hold a view that did not fit the Biden-Harris agenda has been treated as potential terrorist. It is completely insane that someone could be seen as an extremist for purchasing a religious text or purchasing a firearm. This is discriminatory, predatory behavior that puts millions of lives at risk. Think of governments in the past who have rounded up names of dissenters based on religion or ideology. They claim they are merely observing us, but the goal is to silence us.

The committee said their investigation has just begun as they will not allow the government’s abuse of financial data to go unchecked. Furthermore, they are concerned that these warrantless searches can lead to widespread debanking practices where the government can easily block any dissenter from participating in society by crippling them financially. This is yet another reason why governments want to push banks to create CBDC so that they can punish citizens with a simple click of a button.

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The battle to stop the surgical and chemical ‘transitioning’ of gender-confused minors is a personal one for Elon Musk, whose own son has fallen victim to the same ‘woke mind virus.’

Tech mogul and presidential adviser Elon Musk declared on Thursday that “justice will be served” against physicians involved in the surgical and chemical “transitioning” of gender-confused children, reiterating that the incoming Trump administration will have at least one influential voice dedicated to pursuing the matter.

Musk made the statement in response to a comment by therapist and Just Therapy founder James Esses, who called for ensuring “that those in positions of power who were responsible for sterilizing and mutilating children are not able to disappear off into the sunset and pretend that they never had anything to do with it.”

The Tesla, SpaceX, and X/Twitter chief also declared that “Puberty blockers are a horrific crime against children and those who push them are criminals.”

The battle is a personal one for Musk, who this summer opened up about the “evil” of “child mutilation and sterilization” and how he “was essentially tricked into signing documents, for one of my older boys, Xavier […] before I had really any understanding of what was going on, and we had COVID going on and there was a lot of confusion.”

“I was told, you know, Xavier might commit suicide if you don’t,” he said. “So, I lost my son, essentially. They call it ‘dead naming’ for a reason. So my son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus.”

During the 2024 campaign, returning President Donald Trump attacked Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for the transgender agenda, vowed to sign an executive order “instructing every federal agency to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age,” and said he wants to “make it a felony for any medical professional to perform surgery on a minor without parental consent.”

That last comment has left uncertainty as to whether Trump would be content to allow harmful underage “transitions” as long as parents approve. Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, has given mixed signals on the subject, both criticizing the rush to subject prepubescent children to irreversible procedures but also using LGBT lobby language such as gender “assigned at birth” and leaving the door open to “transitioning” minors after they’ve reached puberty.

Musk’s prominence in the Trump team, as co-lead of the non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory group, offers conservatives and pro-family advocates reassurance that at least one major figure with the president’s ear will passionately argue against such tendencies, should they arise.