House Committee report finds broad financial surveillance by federal government using financial institutions data following January 6th events

Privacy, Cyber Risk & Data Security House Judiciary Committee Banking Bank Secrecy Act

On March 5, the Committee on the Judiciary and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an interim staff report on how federal law enforcement agencies, in the wake of the events of January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol, engaged in financial surveillance by encouraging financial institutions to provide data on private transactions of consumers without a nexus to criminal conduct. The report indicated the consumers particularly targeted were those who tend to hold “conservative viewpoints.” The report cited several whistleblower testimonies and provided email transcripts of the government agents’ requests. One institution allegedly acted “voluntarily and without legal process” and provided the FBI with a dataset of names of those who used that institution’s credit or debit card in the Washington, D.C. region between January 5 and January 7, 2021, but also included those who had ever used that institution’s debit or credit card to purchase a firearm. The report suggested that citizens who did nothing other than go “shopping or exerciz[e] their Second Amendment rights” were placed under a type of financial surveillance between their financial institution and the government, making specific mention of right-leaning individuals now at risk.

The report provided context with the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978, Section 314(a) of the USA Patriot Act, and the Bank Secrecy Act in mind. While these federal acts were created to protect citizens, the report alleged they “have failed to adequately protect American’s financial information.” The report was particularly critical of the federal government using “informal meetings and backchannel discussions” with financial institutions to devise the best methods for getting Americans’ private financial information, including using merchant category codes and politicized “search terms,” and the federal government disseminating “political materials” to such institutions that were allegedly “hostile” to conservative viewpoints and “treated lawful transactions as suspicious.”