The biggest folly is to expect the government to be reasonable after it launches crazy surveillance schemes
[Click to Tweet]Federal agencies have long kept an eye on suspicious purchases by Americans considered potential troublemakers. Flash back 50 years, and the feds likely tracked buyers of The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), a book chockful of bad advice that caused boneheaded hippie bomb makers to blow themselves up.

But the federal surveillance net has vastly increased since the 1970s. Nowadays, the feds are flagging people who purchase Bibles and “other media containing extremist views,” according to a report by the House Judiciary Committee.

Technology is propelling new threats to freedom. A March 2024 report by the House Judiciary Committee noted that “the decline of cash and the rise of digital payments and e-commerce platforms….As a result, these financial institutions often act as arms of federal law enforcement as they work in coordination with federal law enforcement to identify what transactions and other information is ‘suspicious’ enough to be reported.” Greater computer resources make it vastly cheaper to store dirt on practically any private citizen.

The January 6 protests

After the January 6 Capitol clash in 2021, the Biden administration targeted average Americans as if they were would-be terrorists. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) bloated its definitions of “suspicious behavior,” warning banks to track  “‘extremism’ indicators that include ‘transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,’ or ‘the purchase of books (including religious texts),’” the House Judiciary Committee announced in a January report. As Fox News reported, FinCEN “distributed materials to financial institutions that outlined ‘typologies’ of ‘various persons of interest’ and provided the banks with ‘suggested search terms and Merchant Category Codes for identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement.’”

If you bought a gun or ammo since 2021, Team Biden bureaucrats may have automatically classified you as a “potential active shooter.” Or maybe your purchases triggered “Lone Actor/Homegrown Violent Extremism Indicators.” Are people who majored in theater in college but never got starring roles more likely to be classified as “lone actors?” The feds also warn of “Lone Wolves.” How does a “Lone Actor” become a “Lone Wolve?” [sic] Is this only a problem during full moons, or what?

FinCEN encouraged banks to use terms such as “TRUMP” and “MAGA” for “identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement,” according to the House Judiciary Committee. Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) complained: “This kind of pervasive financial surveillance … raises serious doubts about FinCEN’s respect for fundamental civil liberties.” The House Committee is therefore demanding information on “federal law enforcement’s mass accumulation and use of Americans’ private information without legal process; FinCEN’s protocols, if any, to safeguard Americans’ privacy and constitutional rights in the receipt and use of such information.”

Defining “extremism”

Much of the absurdity begins with entitling bureaucrats to arbitrarily define “extremism.” In Washington, anyone who doesn’t worship government is considered an extremist. Why else would the official list of potential alarm signals include people who shopped at Cabela’s or Dick’s Sporting Goods? The Treasury Department formally admitted in February that FinCEN “began shortly after January 6” to track suspicious activity that “included terms such as ‘antifa,’ ‘MAGA,’ ‘Trump,’ ‘Biden,’ ‘Kamala,’ ‘Schumer,’ and ‘Pelosi.’”

Jordan’s committee learned that FBI officials “made contact with and provided Bank of America with specific search query terms, indicating that it was ‘interested in all financial relationships’ of BoA customers transacting in Washington D.C. and customers who had made ‘ANY historical purchase’ of a firearm, or who had purchased a hotel, Airbnb, or airline travel within a given date range.” Buy a gun, go to Washington 10 years later, get a federal dossier for the rest of your life! Jordan complained that the federal government “urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.”

As a March 2024 follow-up report from the House Judiciary Committee noted, FinCEN carried out similar meetings with Barclays, Charles Schwab, HSBC, Paypal, Western Union, Wells Fargo, Citibank, JPMorgan, and Chase “geared toward discussing options for financial institutions to share customer information voluntarily with federal law enforcement outside of normal legal processes.”

The FBI shared one report with financial institutions that asserted that Americans “who expressed opposition to firearm regulations, open borders, COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the ‘deep state’ may be potential domestic terrorists.” Federal agencies used that report “to commandeer financial institutions’ databases and ask the financial institutions to conduct sweeping searches of individuals not suspected of committing any crimes. Federal law enforcement agencies warned that “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views,” could be evidence of “Homegrown Violent Extremism.” The committee declared that the evidence from federal agencies “show a pattern of financial surveillance aimed at millions of Americans who hold conservative viewpoints or simply exercise their Second Amendment rights.”

The House Judiciary Committee is also probing the FBI’s role in vacuuming up information on private citizens beyond targeting banks. Rep. Jordan complained that the FBI “prepared an official report that broadly characterized certain political beliefs as indicative of domestic violent extremism.” Will Team Biden seek to make scoffing at politicians a federal offense? Jordan is seeking sworn testimony about the FBI’s “mass accumulation and use of Americans’ private information without legal process.”

Financial surveillance

The latest revelations are another leap toward total financial surveillance. Prudent citizens should react to this news as if they saw a convicted burglar prowling outside their house taking too many photographs. Federal financial agencies have a record of secretly conspiring to cripple or destroy individuals or industries they despise. Federal regulations confer vast discretion to bureaucrats which they have not hesitated to abuse in the past.

During the Obama administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Justice Department launched Operation Choke Point, supposedly to “choke” illegal businesses’ access to financial services. But the target list was stretched to include attempts to destroy financial access for porn stars, coin dealers, online tobacco companies, and other targets.

Federal threats swayed banks to blindside thousands of their business customers. Cigar sellers and manufacturers were clobbered as collateral victims. A Daily Beast story headlined “The Banks’ War on Porn” reported that “hundreds of current and former porn stars” received “curt letters of account termination without further explanation” from their banks. A top FDIC official insisted that the agency’s letters to Congress on the crackdown “always mention pornography when discussing payday lenders and other industries, in an effort to convey a ‘good picture regarding the unsavory nature of the businesses at issue,’” according to a 2014 congressional report.

For some federal regulators and prosecutors, guns were even worse than smut. The FDIC notified banks to “‘prohibit’ payment processing for firearms merchants” and described “loans to firearms dealers as ‘undesirable,’” according to the congressional report. Banks were advised by one private regulatory compliance service: “Arms and Ammunition Dealers are identified as higher risk businesses because they have a higher risk of being associated with terrorism and terrorist acts.” The National Rifle Association complained that banks were “refusing to do business with legitimate law-abiding companies in the firearm industry … without regard to the specific company’s credit, criminal or financial history.” Hundreds of firearms and ammo companies saw their bank accounts frozen or terminated. Representative Sean Duffy (R-WI) complained that federal officials were “weaponizing government to meet their ideological beliefs.” Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) declared, “Unelected bureaucrats at the Department of Justice, the FDIC and other agencies set out to kill legal businesses by starving them of access to financial institutions.”

Emails from FDIC officials showed they were “scheming to influence banks’ decisions on who to do business … [to ensure] banks ‘get the message’ about the businesses the regulators don’t like, and pressuring banks to cut credit or close those accounts, effectively discouraging entire industries,” according to an analysis published by the Daily Signal. Former FDIC chief William Isaac declared: “Operating without legal authority and guided by a political agenda, unelected officials at the DOJ are discouraging banks from providing basic banking services — deposit accounts, payments processing services, and payroll accounts — to lawful businesses simply because they don’t like them. Bankers are being cowed into submission by an oppressive regulatory regime.” American Bankers Association president Frank Keating complained: “The government is compelling banks to deny service to unpopular but perfectly legal industries by threatening penalties.” Operation Choke Point was terminated by the Trump administration, but legions of laws and regulations that could permit federal agencies to deny due process to politically disfavored businesses remain on the books.

Canada exemplifies how quickly a democracy can exploit financial tools to become authoritarian. The Canadian government used emergency decrees to freeze the bank accounts of anyone suspected of being tied to COVID “Freedom Convoy” protests in 2022. Politicians used financial levers to seek to cripple any opposition from truckers or anyone else. A Canadian court later ruled that the Trudeau regime had illegally abused emergency powers, but that did not repair the damage the decrees inflicted.

An American kleptocracy

The latest revelations bolster suspicions that the United States is becoming a kleptocracy.  Ten million dollars in wire transfers arrive in Biden family bank accounts from squirrely foreigners, and nobody is permitted to raise an eyebrow. Busloads of members of Congress have gotten rich from crooked insider trading in the stock market. Federal investigators ignore those scandals and instead hound hapless individuals suspected of buying too many boxes of .22 ammo for target practice. While FinCEN fretted about sales of Goretex camouflage vests, the feds slow-walked investigations of alleged bribes (including gold bars) received by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ).

U.S. money-laundering regulations are designed to shroud crimes by American politicians. Federal agencies require banks to take far more precautions when handling financial transactions involving “politically exposed persons” — which includes almost all foreign politicians, their family members, friends, associates, and anyone else likely to take the money and run. But as a 2020 federal regulatory notice declared, federal banking agencies “do not interpret the term ‘politically exposed persons’ to include U.S. public officials.”

At the same time that federal agencies are acting as if they have a divine right to know how every citizen spends every dollar, don’t expect Uncle Sam to come clean on where your tax dollars go. Are you concerned about the $100 billion in U.S. government money that has been sent to the Ukraine government? Don’t worry — Congress decided there is no need to audit your tax dollars after they are forwarded to Kyiv. Are you concerned whether your tax payments are financing Deep State surveillance operations targeting yourself, your neighbors, and even your in-laws? Congress signed off on dropping an Iron Curtain around the budgets of federal intelligence agencies long ago. The only thing that citizens are entitled to is a rote assertion that any government expenditures are “for your own good.”

The biggest folly is to expect the government to be reasonable after it launches crazy surveillance schemes. Will we ever we learn how far Team Biden has gone in playing Trivial Pursuit by stockpiling vast amounts of data on American citizens? Citizens cannot submit to endless illicit intrusions without forfeiting their right to any remaining privacy.

This article was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.