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The House Judiciary Committee and its Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report on how the federal government used banks to spy on Americans.

“Federal law enforcement has been manipulating the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) system to gain access to Americans’ financial information without warrants or probable cause, the House Judiciary Committee said Friday,” Fox News reported.

The FBI “has manipulated” the SAR’s filing process, the report explained, treating banks and financial institutions “as de facto arms of law enforcement, issuing ‘requests’ without legal process, that amount to demands for information related to certain persons or activities it considers ‘suspicious.’”

“With narrow exception, federal law does not permit law enforcement to inquire into financial institutions’ customer information without some form of legal process,” the report, obtained by Fox News Digital, states. “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.”

The Bank Secrecy Act stipulates that banks have to file a SAR when a “suspicious transaction relevant to a possible violation of law or regulation” is identified. According to the report, the FBI “gets around the requirements” in the methods it has employed.

The House committee said that “at least one financial institution requested legal process from the FBI for information it was seeking.” However, “all too often the FBI appeared to receive no pushback.”

“In sum, 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,” the report noted.

The committee’s oversight of “financial surveillance” shed “new light on the decaying state of Americans’ financial privacy and the federal government’s widespread, warrantless surveillance programs,” according to the report.

The FBI had “no comment” on the report but did deliver a statement to Fox News Digital.

“While we have no comment on the report, as a general matter the FBI frequently receives information from the private sector about possible criminal activity. Financial institutions are required under the Bank Secrecy Act to file Suspicious Activity Reports (SARS) on activity they deem reportable, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) shares the information with law enforcement,” the statement read.

“The FBI cannot open an investigation without evidence of a federal criminal violation or a threat to national security. We follow the law and the facts, and we never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment activity,” it continued.

Federal investigators working on a probe of the January 6, 2021 events at the U.S. Capitol had reportedly asked banks to search customer transactions for terms like “MAGA” and “Trump” as well as keywords like Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, and Bass Pro Shops.

The House panel gathered more than 48,000 pages of documents in its probe.

“Documents show that federal law enforcement increasingly works hand-in-glove with financial institutions, obtaining virtually unchecked access to private financial data and testing out new methods and new technology to continue the financial surveillance of American citizens,” the report stated.

The committee warned that “all Americans should be disturbed by how their financial data is collected, made accessible to, and searched by federal and state officials, including law enforcement and regulatory agencies.”

The investigation “makes clear that federal law enforcement has taken advantage of this dynamic by deploying financial institutions as arms of federal law enforcement, directing financial institutions to profile Americans using the typologies it distributes or urging financial institutions to identify any ‘suspicious activity’ an individual may have engaged in.”

Frieda Powers
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