Judiciary Committee: FBI Using Banks to Surveil Bank Accounts Without Warrants
“…as a condition of participating in the modern economy, Americans are forced to disclose details of their private lives to a financial industry that has been too eager to pass this information along to federal law enforcement.”
A report from the House Judiciary Committee and Government Weaponization Subcommittee exposed the FBI for abusing the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) to spy on Americans’ bank accounts without a warrant.
“Documents show that federal law enforcement increasingly works 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,” according to the report.
𝐍𝐄𝐖 𝐑𝐄𝐏𝐎𝐑𝐓: 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐆𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐖𝐞𝐚𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐒𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐲 𝐀𝐜𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐩𝐲 𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐬
Think your finances are private? Think again.https://t.co/lXWqUB5iPZ pic.twitter.com/MdG3fZTR7j
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) December 6, 2024
The BSA requires financial institutions to file Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) if they witness any transactions that raise red flags, such as cash transactions exceeding $10,000.
However, the law prohibits federal law enforcement from asking about a bank’s customer information without a legal process.
“All Americans should be disturbed by how their financial data is collected, made accessible to, and searched by federal and state officials, including law enforcement and regulatory agencies,” the committees added. “With the rise in e-commerce and the widespread adoption of cash alternatives like credit cards or peer-to-peer payment services, the future leaves very little financial activity beyond the purview of modern financial institutions or the government’s prying eyes.”
Here’s a mic drop (emphasis mine): “This is because, as a condition of participating in the modern economy, Americans are forced to disclose details of their private lives to a financial industry that has been too eager to pass this information along to federal law enforcement.”
Yup. Our financial institutions had no problem cooperating with the FBI. It seems a few even helped formulate ideas to spy on us.
Documents reviewed by the committee showed that the FBI has been cutting corners:
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. 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’” While at least one financial institution requested legal process from the FBI for information it was seeking, 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.
The documents also confirmed that the FBI worked with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) after January 6, 2021, encouraged these institutions “scour their data and file SARs on hundreds of Americans, if not more,” without probable cause.
An email from a whistleblower showed one institution chose to do even more for the FBI to “address domestic terrorism.” Oh, look. It involved the unconstitutional Patriot Act:
That financial institution encouraged FinCEN to use SARs as the basis for issuing Patriot Act 314(a) requests, which allows FinCEN “to canvas the nation’s financial institutions for potential lead information” from “more than 37,000 points of contact at more than 16,000 financial institutions to locate accounts and transactions of persons that may be involved in terrorism or money laundering.”
But the spying didn’t stop after 2021. It’s still going.
How about these 2023 stats:
- Banks filed 4.6 million SARs and 20.8 million Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) with FinCEN (government can access both of those)
- 25,000 authorized users can access this information at the local, state, and federal level without a warrant with the FinCEN Query
- 3,362,735 searches of the filings in the FinCEN Query program by officials
- 27,000 officials have access to BSA data through the Agency Integrated Access (AIA) program that allows certain federal agencies to download the data onto their own systems.
- “472 federal, state, and local law enforcement, regulatory, and national security agencies have access to BSA reports . . . .”
The institutions and FinCEN have been working together to develop new ways to spy on Americans with the Bank Secrecy Act Advisory Group (BSAAG). The new plans include requiring “Americans to have a digital identification to access financial services, testing artificial intelligence to surveil Americans’ financial activity, and working towards even closer coordination between financial institutions and federal law enforcement.”
“As promoted by the BSAAG, this surveillance will be catalyzed by even greater government entanglement with financial institutions as they begin to integrate new technology to more effectively track their customers’ financial habits,” concluded the committees. “Absent renewed safeguards, the federal government and financial institutions will continue to siphon off Americans’ sensitive financial data, place it into the hands of bureaucrats, and erode any remaining semblance of financial privacy in the United States.”
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) December 9, 2024
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The Justice Department spied on two House members and several congressional staffers (Kash Patel) in a leak investigation without telling the courts, the agency’s inspector general found in a sweeping investigation released Tuesday.
“a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee — and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct” — Liz Cheney
Out of the mouths of babes …
This sort of intrusion is but one reason why crypto, cash, previous metals are rising in popularity far more broadly than before and part of the reason why the totalitarian minded bureaucracy demonize these alternatives to digital banking.
Its much worse than this as I believe the exec branch has “de-banking” power w/out any due process for suspected terrorists and MAGA wrong thinkers alike.
Operation Chokepoint. Asset seizure. Where do you think we are… Canada or something. Remember Biden shutdown Covid dissent to aid Justina Castreau with the truckers.
Does anyone know whether phone app payment services like Venmo and its brothers are susceptible to similar spying practices? Any recommendations?
I understand that Bitcoin (with it’s permanent block chain record of transactions) makes it difficult to prevent LEO from being able to see what someone is spending their money on.
Yes, Venmo is, as is Paypal. Several years back they sprung that on everyone, pointing out that the gov’t required them to do all these things to be a legitimate payment processor. That’s when you suddenly had to link actual bank account info to your Paypal account.
Venmo is a PayPal creature, which is a more basic reason not to trust it. I much prefer Zelle, which I’m sure suffers under the same federal disclosure requirements, but at least to my knowledge isn’t evil on its own. Plus, it isn’t so rapacious about taking a cut of every transaction directly from the consumer, but relies on its bank partners as its funding source.
So, what are the chances we can get rid of SARs? I mean with Republicans in control of both houses and the White House starting in January, it should be a slam dunk, right?
Right?
Wrong!
Thanks for the first laugh of the day.
Any bank that goes along with this should be sued out of existence by its customers. There is no excuse for cooperating without a warrant
First, you gotta say their names.
I know Bank of America has been a prime offender in this regard. Bank of America volunteered(!) to match records of firearms purchases by its customers against the list of people that the feds had geofenced to J6. They have always been right in the Vanguard of institutions that are salivating to be stooges for the government.
I believe Chase Bank is another prime offender, although I don’t have any specific instances at the moment to support that (not posting from my computer right now).
Discover Card is another quisling. I know for a fact that they denied service to any crowdfunding service that maintained a defense fund for Kyle Rittenhouse, under a bogusly created “policy.”
I no longer do business with any of these companies, though I have used them all in the past. But unless they get identified loudly in the public square, how are people going to know they are sleeping with the enemy?
You have to be a bit circumspect to overcome the surveillance. You have to cash check in various amounts. Let’s say 2-3k a couple of times over 6 weeks. Then 5k. Buy some gold and silver. Protect yourself.
That’s called “structuring” and it’s itself an offense. That’s what got Elliot Spitzer. Which was ironic since he was the one who forced banks to start reporting it in the first place.
Are you downvoting the message or the messenger? This is the honest truth. it’s illegal to “structure” even though you’re not doing anything illegal with the money. Like the old man in NJ(?) who got indicted for having boxloads of “glassine bags” even though he ran a clock parts business, not a drug lab. It’s another one of government’s predicate crimes, stupid crimes, Minority Opinion crimes.
The so-called laws it is meant to skirt are completely un-Constitutional.
Think about what it means that acting in ways to not draw attention to yourself is considered a crime.
Yep. As I said, this was Spitzer’s bright idea, and it ended up bringing him down.
It’s not structuring. I’m talking about taking money from your own account. If you cash a check for 10k it automatically gets a SAR. If you cash checks totaling 10k in a 30 day period it will generate a SAR. That’s why the spread. Now let’s talk about the fact that I’m taking money out of my own accounts for my own purposes. The Feds are asking banks to generate a SAR just because I like to keep cash on hand. The true purpose of these SAR’s is to identify people who may like to pay cash for items they don’t want tracked. Like precious metals, guns and ammo transactions. The Feds want to eliminate transactions they can’t track.
As if the fact that it’s your money matters at all to the fedguv.
https://incode.com/blog/understanding-structuring-in-money-laundering/
Sure it’s unconstitutional. Ask the people in the DC Gulag how well that incantation opens doors anymore.
Spritzer should’ve hung out with Epstein instead.
He probably did.
When I was younger I used to think that previous generations were naive or paranoid for not trusting doctors or banks, and hiding their money in a mattress.
After the past 4+ years, I now get it.
This kind of stuff has been known for a very long time. Go try and take out $10,000 in cash from your bank account. YOUR MONEY!! The bank ILLEGALLY interrogates on what you “need the cash for”, as if they are giving you THEIR money. Try and wire money to someone or some company. The bank asks you what the purchase is for, as if that is any of their friggin business.
Things have been like this for many years and it has all been connected to GOVERNMENT requirements and is all in total and direct violation of the 4th amendment. But our despicable and useless judiciary has let all this go on. It is pathetic and criminal, by all involved. I am willing to give the banks some measure of leeway in that they are forced to do this by the government and the Fed’s regulations, but I don’t think any have ever tried to fight this – not seriously, at least.
Then we can get into the total insanity of the “laws” concerning “civil asset forfeiture” … where they are declaring the objects to be guilty (so the owner is not charged with anything and has no real recourse).
We have allowed stuff like this to go on for DECADES. There is no more obvious and direct violations of the Constitution, but it all goes on.
“The bank ILLEGALLY interrogates on what you “need the cash for”, as if they are giving you THEIR money.”
My local barefoot evangelist of constitutionalism, a lecturer for the CSPOA, has a standard procedure for frustrating this interrogation.
“Can I ask what you need the cash for sir?”
“Pursuing my hobby,”
“What’s your hobby?”
“Spending money.”
Civil asset forfeiture is NOT unconstitutional or illegal. It ought to be, but it isn’t. It hasn’t gone on for “decades”, it’s gone on for the entire time the US has existed. It went on at the time the constitution was adopted, the founders were aware of it and had no problem with it. It’s one of the flaws in the constitution that ought to be fixed, but as of now it hasn’t been.
“…such as cash transactions exceeding $10,000.”
but $10,000 today is what $1,000 was about 15 years ago,
considering inflation
Our financial institutions had no problem cooperating with the FBI.
They had no problem being gov’t agents in all but name.
Banks are so heavily regulated by the federal gov’t they are de facto gov’t agents. Someone needs to start treating them that way and knock some heads together.
Reforming the FBI will be one of the greatest contributions Trump makes for our Democracy.
Redefine “democracy” from a “consensus of individuals” to a “consensus of institutions”
Joe Rogan Experience #2237 – Mike Benz
26:35
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJhQpvlkLA&t=1600s
He made this exact same point on Tucker, one of his best long-form interviews.