The Treasury Department admitted to Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Tim Scott that it gave banks a list of political terms to search in private bank transactions.
FinCEN provided these typologies so that the participating banks could integrate this information into their AML/CFT programs to the extent they found it helpful. Banks consider a variety of factors and inputs as part of their AML/CFT and efforts, including a bank’s existing knowledge of its customers and their histories and information about the nature and purpose of specific transactions.
“I write regarding recent reporting that the U.S. Treasury Department through its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network urged private financial institutions to surveil customers’ transaction-level data using politically charged search terms, in order to flag certain customer profiles on behalf of Federal law enforcement,” Scott wrote in the letter, obtained by Fox News Digital. “These allegations, if true, represent a flagrant violation of Americans’ privacy and the improper targeting of U.S.
The situation came to light when the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on Weaponization obtained documents as part of an investigation.If Trump is serious about undermining the ‘deep state’ then getting rid of all these sorts of post 9/11 powers granted to Intel agencies and LEO to conduct domestic surveillance to fight ‘terrorism’ or whatever other boogeyman of the moment would be a good place to start.