by Joseph Vazquez at News Busters
Apparently Big Tech isn’t the only sector that the U.S. government is exploiting to achieve its dystopian ends against Americans. An explosive new congressional report unveiled another field of abhorrent government collusion with financial institutions to surveil citizens’ private transactions.
The House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a 36-page interim report March 6 outlining the extent of the “mass” government spying effort. “This financial surveillance was not predicated on any specific evidence of particularized criminal conduct and, even worse, it keyed on terms and specific transactions that concerned core political and religious expression protected by the Constitution,” the report stated.
One document shared with financial institutions by federal law enforcement “noted that those Americans who expressed opposition to firearm regulations, open borders, COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the ‘deep state’ may be potential domestic terrorists,” despite them not having to be suspected of committing any specific crimes. The House report concluded that federal law enforcement used this Stasi-esque line of reasoning to “commandeer” financial institutions to conduct sweeping, Orwellian searches of Amercians’ financial data.
The FBI and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) were both flagged as having multiple meetings with a litany of financial and fintech institutions, including Barclays, U.S. Bank, Charles Schwab, HSBC, Bank of America, PayPal, KeyBank, Standard Chartered, Western Union, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Santander, JPMorgan Chase, and MUFG. The purpose of these meetings were to coordinate strategies for the aforementioned institutions to “voluntarily” share private customer information with federal law enforcement “outside of normal legal processes.”…
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