House Committee Reveals Massive Dragnet of Financial Surveillance Program

U.S. Treasury and FBI Targeted Americans for Political Beliefs

​The House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government issued a report on Wednesday revealing secretive efforts between federal agencies and U.S. private financial institutions that “show a pattern of financial surveillance aimed at millions of Americans who hold conservative viewpoints or simply express their Second Amendment rights.”
 
At the heart of this conspiracy is the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the FBI, which oversaw secret investigations with the help of the largest U.S. banks and financial institutions. They did not lack for resources. Law enforcement and private financial institutions shared customers’ confidential information through a web portal that connects the federal government to 650 companies that comprise two-thirds of the U.S. domestic product and 35 million employees.
 
This dragnet investigation grew out of the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot in the U.S. Capitol, but it quickly widened to target the financial transactions of anyone suspiciously MAGA or conservative. Last year we reported on how the Bank of America volunteered the personal information of any customer who used an ATM card in the Washington, D.C., area around the time of the riot.
 
In this newly revealed effort, the FBI asked financial services companies to sweep their database to look for digital transactions with keywords like “MAGA” and “Trump.”
 
FinCEN also advised companies how to use Merchant Category Codes (MCC) to search through transactions to detect potential “extremists.” Keywords attached to suspicious transactions included recreational stores Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shop, and Dick’s Sporting Goods. The committee observed: “Americans doing nothing other than shopping or exercising their Second Amendment rights were being tracked by financial institutions and federal law enforcement.”
 
FinCEN also targeted conservative organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom or the Eagle Forum for being demonized by a left-leaning organization, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, as “hate groups.” The committee report added: “FinCEN’s incursion into the crowdfunding space represents a trend in the wrong direction and a threat to American civil liberties.”
 
One doesn’t have to condone the breaching of the Capitol and attacks on Capitol police to see the threat of a dragnet approach that lacked even a nod to the concept of individualized probable cause. What was done by the federal government to millions of ordinary American conservatives could also be done to millions of liberals for using terms like “racial justice” in the aftermath of the riots that occurred after the murder of George Floyd.
 
These dragnets are general warrants, exactly the kind of sweeping, indiscriminate violations of privacy that prompted this nation’s founders to enact the Fourth Amendment. If government agencies cannot satisfy the low hurdle of probable cause in an application for a warrant, they are apt to be making things up or employing scare tactics.
 
If left uncorrected, financial dragnets like these will support a default rule in which every citizen is automatically a suspect, especially if the government doesn’t like your politics.