Federal Law Enforcement Using Banks to Circumvent Warrant Requirement in Surveilling Sensitive Financial Data of Americans
by James Mills
Federal law enforcement agencies have been gathering sensitive financial information of American citizens by manipulating the Suspicious Activity Report (“SAR”) system, according to the House Judiciary Committee. The Committee accuses the FBI, in particular, of treating financial institutions “as de facto arms of law enforcement.”
The Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government declared, in its recently-released report, that the FBI “has manipulated” the SAR filing process in order to issue requests and gather financial information about citizens considered to be “suspicious.” The report notes that, with rare exception, federal law generally forbids law enforcement from inquiring into customers’ financial details without some form of legal process. “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,” according to the Subcommittee.
The Bank Secrecy Act (1970) requires that any request for customer information be made with a warrant. This recent practice of using the SAR filing process is essentially an end-run around that requirement. Rather than waiting for law enforcement agencies to investigate suspects and develop probable cause, the agencies provide lists of names to banks and require them to submit paperwork for any transactions or customer changes that involve those names.
According to the report, “all too often the FBI appeared to receive no pushback” from the banks. “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.”
Beginning in the aftermath of the events at the Capitol on January 6, the FBI apparently has even asked banks to provide information regarding customer transactions using search terms like “MAGA” and “Trump” and (mysteriously) “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” among others. Incredibly, the FBI has warned that purchases of “religious texts” could be linked to “extremism.”
In the words of the report, the FBI and other agencies are overstepping their bounds “by deploying financial institutions as arms of federal law enforcement, directing financial institutions to profile Americans using the typologies it distributes.” This will “erode any remaining semblance of financial privacy in the United States,” according to the report. It also adds further credence to the belief held by a growing number of Americans that the FBI has been weaponized to go after political opponents and those whose only “crime” is that of wrongthink.
Source: yahoo.com
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