{"id":20302,"date":"2024-08-12T18:31:58","date_gmt":"2024-08-12T22:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=20302"},"modified":"2024-08-12T18:31:58","modified_gmt":"2024-08-12T22:31:58","slug":"buy-a-bible-become-a-terror-suspect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/08\/12\/buy-a-bible-become-a-terror-suspect\/","title":{"rendered":"Buy a Bible, Become a Terror Suspect"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Buy a Bible, Become a Terror Suspect<\/a><\/h1>\n
James Bovard, \"\"<\/a><\/time><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Americans are familiar with the Miranda warning that anything that arrestees say can be used against them in a court of law. But the Biden administration secretly created a new tripwire: Anything you purchase can be used against you. And if you didn\u2019t want to be categorized as a \u201clone wolf\u201d potential terrorist, you never should have bought that Bass Pro hat.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The biggest folly is to expect the government to be reasonable after it launches crazy surveillance schemes
\n[Click to Tweet]<\/a>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 <\/i>(1971), a book chockful of bad advice that caused boneheaded hippie bomb makers to blow themselves up.<\/p>\n

But the federal surveillance net has vastly increased since the 1970s. Nowadays, the feds are flagging people who purchase Bibles and \u201cother media containing extremist views,\u201d according to a report by the House Judiciary Committee.<\/p>\n

Technology is propelling new threats to freedom. A March 2024 report by the House Judiciary Committee noted that \u201cthe decline of cash and the rise of digital payments and e-commerce platforms\u2026.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 \u2018suspicious\u2019 enough to be reported.\u201d Greater computer resources make it vastly cheaper to store dirt on practically any private citizen.<\/p>\n

The January 6 protests<\/b><\/h2>\n

After the January 6 Capitol clash in 2021, the Biden administration targeted average Americans as if they were would-be terrorists. The Treasury Department\u2019s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) bloated its definitions of \u201csuspicious behavior,\u201d warning banks to track\u00a0 \u201c\u2018extremism\u2019 indicators that include \u2018transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,\u2019 or \u2018the purchase of books (including religious texts),\u2019\u201d the House Judiciary Committee announced in a January report. As Fox News reported, FinCEN \u201cdistributed materials to financial institutions that outlined \u2018typologies\u2019 of \u2018various persons of interest\u2019 and provided the banks with \u2018suggested search terms and Merchant Category Codes for identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

If you bought a gun or ammo since 2021, Team Biden bureaucrats may have automatically classified you as a \u201cpotential active shooter.\u201d Or maybe your purchases triggered \u201cLone Actor\/Homegrown Violent Extremism Indicators.\u201d Are people who majored in theater in college but never got starring roles more likely to be classified as \u201clone actors?\u201d The feds also warn of \u201cLone Wolves.\u201d How does a \u201cLone Actor\u201d become a \u201cLone Wolve?\u201d [sic] Is this only a problem during full moons, or what?<\/p>\n

FinCEN encouraged banks to use terms such as \u201cTRUMP\u201d and \u201cMAGA\u201d for \u201cidentifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement,\u201d according to the House Judiciary Committee. Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) complained: \u201cThis kind of pervasive financial surveillance \u2026 raises serious doubts about FinCEN\u2019s respect for fundamental civil liberties.\u201d The House Committee is therefore demanding information on \u201cfederal law enforcement\u2019s mass accumulation and use of Americans\u2019 private information without legal process; FinCEN\u2019s protocols, if any, to safeguard Americans\u2019 privacy and constitutional rights in the receipt and use of such information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Defining \u201cextremism\u201d<\/b><\/h2>\n

Much of the absurdity begins with entitling bureaucrats to arbitrarily define \u201cextremism.\u201d In Washington, anyone who doesn\u2019t worship government is considered an extremist. Why else would the official list of potential alarm signals include people who shopped at Cabela\u2019s or Dick\u2019s Sporting Goods? The Treasury Department formally admitted in February that FinCEN \u201cbegan shortly after January 6\u201d to track suspicious activity that \u201cincluded terms such as \u2018antifa,\u2019 \u2018MAGA,\u2019 \u2018Trump,\u2019 \u2018Biden,\u2019 \u2018Kamala,\u2019 \u2018Schumer,\u2019 and \u2018Pelosi.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Jordan\u2019s committee learned that FBI officials \u201cmade contact with and provided Bank of America with specific search query terms, indicating that it was \u2018interested in all financial relationships\u2019 of BoA customers transacting in Washington D.C. and customers who had made \u2018ANY historical purchase\u2019 of a firearm, or who had purchased a hotel, Airbnb, or airline travel within a given date range.\u201d 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 \u201curged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cgeared toward discussing options for financial institutions to share customer information voluntarily with federal law enforcement outside of normal legal processes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The FBI shared one report with financial institutions that asserted that Americans \u201cwho expressed opposition to firearm regulations, open borders, COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the \u2018deep state\u2019 may be potential domestic terrorists.\u201d<\/strong> Federal agencies used that report \u201cto commandeer financial institutions\u2019 databases and ask the financial institutions to conduct sweeping searches of individuals not suspected of committing any crimes. Federal law enforcement agencies warned that \u201cthe purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views,\u201d could be evidence of \u201cHomegrown Violent Extremism.\u201d The committee declared that the evidence from federal agencies \u201cshow a pattern of financial surveillance aimed at millions of Americans who hold conservative viewpoints or simply exercise their Second Amendment rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

The House Judiciary Committee is also probing the FBI\u2019s role in vacuuming up information on private citizens beyond targeting banks. Rep. Jordan complained that the FBI \u201cprepared an official report that broadly characterized certain political beliefs as indicative of domestic violent extremism.\u201d Will Team Biden seek to make scoffing at politicians a federal offense? Jordan is seeking sworn testimony about the FBI\u2019s \u201cmass accumulation and use of Americans\u2019 private information without legal process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Financial surveillance<\/b><\/h2>\n

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. F<\/strong>ederal 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.<\/p>\n

During the Obama administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Justice Department launched Operation Choke Point, supposedly to \u201cchoke\u201d illegal businesses\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Federal threats swayed banks to blindside thousands of their business customers. Cigar sellers and manufacturers were clobbered as collateral victims. A Daily Beast <\/i>story headlined \u201cThe Banks\u2019 War on Porn\u201d reported that \u201chundreds of current and former porn stars\u201d received \u201ccurt letters of account termination without further explanation\u201d from their banks. A top FDIC official insisted that the agency\u2019s letters to Congress on the crackdown \u201calways mention pornography when discussing payday lenders and other industries, in an effort to convey a \u2018good picture regarding the unsavory nature of the businesses at issue,\u2019\u201d according to a 2014 congressional report.<\/p>\n

For some federal regulators and prosecutors, guns were even worse than smut. The FDIC notified banks to \u201c\u2018prohibit\u2019 payment processing for firearms merchants\u201d and described \u201cloans to firearms dealers as \u2018undesirable,\u2019\u201d according to the congressional report. Banks were advised by one private regulatory compliance service: \u201cArms and Ammunition Dealers are identified as higher risk businesses because they have a higher risk of being associated with terrorism and terrorist acts.\u201d The National Rifle Association complained that banks were \u201crefusing to do business with legitimate law-abiding companies in the firearm industry \u2026 without regard to the specific company\u2019s credit, criminal or financial history.\u201d Hundreds of firearms and ammo companies saw their bank accounts frozen or terminated. Representative Sean Duffy (R-WI) complained that federal officials were \u201cweaponizing government to meet their ideological beliefs.\u201d Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) declared, \u201cUnelected 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emails from FDIC officials showed they were \u201cscheming to influence banks\u2019 decisions on who to do business \u2026 [to ensure] banks \u2018get the message\u2019 about the businesses the regulators don\u2019t like, and pressuring banks to cut credit or close those accounts, effectively discouraging entire industries,\u201d according to an analysis published by the Daily Signal. Former FDIC chief William Isaac declared: \u201cOperating without legal authority and guided by a political agenda, unelected officials at the DOJ are discouraging banks from providing basic banking services \u2014 deposit accounts, payments processing services, and payroll accounts \u2014 to lawful businesses simply because they don\u2019t like them. Bankers are being cowed into submission by an oppressive regulatory regime.\u201d American Bankers Association president Frank Keating complained: \u201cThe government is compelling banks to deny service to unpopular but perfectly legal industries by threatening penalties.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Canada exemplifies how quickly a democracy can exploit financial tools to become authoritarian. T<\/strong>he Canadian government used emergency decrees to freeze the bank accounts of anyone suspected of being tied to COVID \u201cFreedom Convoy\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

An American kleptocracy<\/b><\/h2>\n

The latest revelations bolster suspicions that the United States is becoming a kleptocracy.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpolitically exposed persons\u201d \u2014 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 \u201cdo not interpret the term \u2018politically exposed persons\u2019 to include U.S. public officials.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t expect Uncle Sam to come clean on where your tax dollars go.<\/strong> Are you concerned about the $100 billion in U.S. government money that has been sent to the Ukraine government? Don\u2019t worry \u2014 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 \u201cfor your own good.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was originally published in the July 2024 issue of<\/em> Future of Freedom<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buy a Bible, Become a Terror Suspect James Bovard, August 12, 2024 Americans are familiar with the Miranda warning that anything that arrestees say can be used against them in a court of law. But the Biden administration secretly created a new tripwire: Anything you purchase can be used against you. And if you didn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3625,2124,2983,15,476,1648,3940,182,4281,2244,3302,1701,38,30,4280,708],"class_list":["post-20302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bible","tag-biden","tag-cash","tag-congress","tag-extremism","tag-fdic","tag-fincen","tag-guns","tag-jordan","tag-kleptocracy","tag-maga","tag-nra","tag-obama","tag-surveillance","tag-treasury","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\nBuy a Bible, Become a Terror Suspect - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Federal surveillance is targeting people who buy Bibles and Bass Pro Hats\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/08\/12\/buy-a-bible-become-a-terror-suspect\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Buy a Bible, Become a Terror Suspect - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20302"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20307,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20302\/revisions\/20307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}