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How the federal government weaponized the bank secrecy act to spy on Americans

Published

7 months ago

7 minute read

Armstrong Economics 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.”

Surveilence

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.

Debanking

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.

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