“Financial data can tell a person’s story, including one’s “religion, ideology, opinions, and interests” as well as one’s “political leanings, locations, and more,”’ the report begins. This investigation began after a whistleblower who happens to be a retired FBI agent alerted Congress that the Bank of America (BoA) voluntarily provided the Biden Administration information on customers who used a credit or debit card in Washington, D.C., around the January 6 protests. The new report has revealed that federal agencies have been working “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.”
As I’ve said countless times, “money laundering” is ALWAYS the excuse for why the government must track and monitor our financial transactions. The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) E-Filing System is a system for financial institutions to file reports required by the BSA electronically. By law, the BSA requires businesses to keep records and file reports to help prevent and detect money laundering. This is how the Biden Administration is attempting to disregard privacy and weaponize financial institutions.
US intelligence agencies searched through records for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA” to target Americans who they believed may hold “extremist” views. The agencies searched for Americans who purchased religious texts, such as the Bible, and also labeled them extremists. Anyone expressing disdain for the COVID lockdowns, vaccines, open borders, or the deep state were placed on a watchlist. Again, the BSA was used as a premise to pull transactions placed by the individuals on this list.
As explained by the investigative committee:
“With narrow exception, federal law does not permit law enforcement to inquire into financial institutions’ customer information without some form of legal process.9 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.10 In doing so, the FBI gets around the requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), which, per the Treasury Department, specifies that “it is . . . a bank’s responsibility” to “file a SAR whenever it identifies ‘a suspicious transaction relevant to a possible violation of law or regulation’”11 While at least one financial institution requested legal process from the FBI for information it was seeking,12 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.”
Under this premise, anyone who held a viewpoint that opposed the Biden Administration was considered a “suspicious” individual who required monitoring. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network created a database to carefully watch potential dissenters. Over 14,000 government employees accessed the FinCEN database last year and conducted over 3 million searches without a warrant. In fact, over 15% of FBI investigations during 2023 has some link to this database. It is estimated that 4.6 million SARs and 20.8 million Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) were filed in the last year.
The committee noted that the government is incorporating AI to quickly search the web for “suspicious” Americans:
“As the Committee and Select Subcommittee have discussed in other reports, the growth and expansion of AI present major risks to Americans’ civil liberties.211 For example, the Committee and Select Subcommittee uncovered AI being used to censor “alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election . . . .”212 Those concerns are not hypothetical. Some AI systems developed by Big Tech companies have been programmed with biases; for example, Google’s Gemini AI program praised liberal views while refusing to do the same for conservative views, despite claiming to be “objective” and “neutral.” With financial institutions seemingly adopting AI solutions to monitor Americans’ transactions, a similarly biased AI program could result in the systematic flagging or censoring of transactions that the AI is trained to view as “suspicious.”
This is extremely troubling and goes beyond government overreach and violated numerous Constitutional protections. The government effectively transformed banking institutions into spy agencies, and anyone who could potentially hold a view that did not fit the Biden-Harris agenda has been treated as potential terrorist. It is completely insane that someone could be seen as an extremist for purchasing a religious text or purchasing a firearm. This is discriminatory, predatory behavior that puts millions of lives at risk. Think of governments in the past who have rounded up names of dissenters based on religion or ideology. They claim they are merely observing us, but the goal is to silence us.
The committee said their investigation has just begun as they will not allow the government’s abuse of financial data to go unchecked. Furthermore, they are concerned that these warrantless searches can lead to widespread debanking practices where the government can easily block any dissenter from participating in society by crippling them financially. This is yet another reason why governments want to push banks to create CBDC so that they can punish citizens with a simple click of a button.
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TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew responded to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Friday allowing a ban of the social media app to go into effect, saying he hopes to work with President-elect Donald Trump on a solution.
Trump posted on Truth Social that the Supreme Court’s Friday decision was expected. He noted that his own decision over the platform would be made soon and said, “Stay tuned!”
The CEO posted to the app on Friday following the ruling, thanking Trump for supporting the platform’s efforts to be accessible in the United States.
“I want to thank President Trump for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States,” he said. “This is a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship.”
Chew continued: “We are grateful and pleased to have the support of a president who truly understands our platform, one who has used TikTok to express his own thoughts and perspectives, connecting with the world and generating more than 60 billion views of his content in the process.”
Before the ruling, Trump had said he had a productive conversation with Chairman Xi Jinping of China. The two discussed topics such as trade, fentanyl, TikTok, and other issues. Trump expressed optimism about resolving issues between China and the U.S. and emphasized working together to promote global peace and safety.
The outgoing Biden administration stated they would be leaving the ban up to the incoming administration.
“Given the sheer fact of timing, this Administration recognizes that actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next Administration, which takes office on Monday,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
Canada has a regulation problem. Our economy is over-regulated and the regulatory load is growing. To reverse this trend, we need a deregulation agenda that will cut unnecessary red tape and government bloat, to free up the Canadian economy.
According to the latest “Red Tape” report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, government regulations cost Canadian businesses a staggering $38.8 billion in 2020. Together, businesses spent 731 million hours on regulatory compliance—that’s equal to nearly 375,000 fulltime jobs. Canada’s smallest businesses bear a disproportionately high burden of the cost, paying up to five times more for regulatory compliance per-employee than larger businesses. The smallest businesses pay $7,023 per employee annually to comply with government regulation while larger businesses pay $1,237 per employee.
Of course, the Trudeau government has enacted a vast swath of new regulations on large sectors of Canada’s economy—particularly the energy sector—in a quest to make Canada a “net-zero” greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter by 2050 (which means either eliminating fossil fuel generation or offsetting emissions with activities such as planting trees).
For example, the government (via Bill C-69) introduced subjective criteria—including the “gender implications” of projects—into the evaluation process of energy projects. It established EV mandates requiring all new cars be electric vehicles by 2035. And the costs of the government’s new “Clean Electricity Regulations,” to purportedly reduce the use of fossil fuels in generating electricity, remain unknown, although provinces (including Alberta) that rely more on fossil fuels to generate electricity will surely be hardest hit.
Meanwhile in the United States, Donald Trump plans to put Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will act as a presidential advisory commission (not an official government department) for the second Trump administration.
“A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” the two wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. “DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.”
If Musk and Ramaswamy achieve these goals, the U.S. could leap far ahead of Canada in terms of regulatory efficiency, making Canada’s economy even less competitive than it is today.
That would be bad news for Canadians who are already falling behind. Between 2000 and 2023, Canada’s GDP per person (an indicator of incomes and living standards) lagged far behind the average among G7 countries. Business investment is also lagging. Between 2014 and 2021, business investment per worker (inflation-adjusted, excluding residential construction) in Canada decreased by $3,676 (to $14,687) while it increased by $3,418 (to $26,751) per worker in the U.S. And over-regulation is partly to blame.
For 2025, Canada needs a deregulatory agenda similar to DOGE that will allow Canadian workers and businesses to recover and thrive. And we know it can be done. During a deregulatory effort in British Columbia, which included a minister of deregulation appointed by the provincial government in 2001, there was a 37 per cent reduction in regulatory requirements in the province by 2004. The federal government should learn from B.C.’s success at slashing red tape, and reduce the burden of regulation across the entire Canadian economy.
