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.
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:
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.”
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