Bank of America compiled a list of any customer who used their debit card or credit card in Washington DC from Jan 5 to Jan 7, 2021. Then they prioritized by moving to the top of the list the names of any person who had used their product to buy a firearm on any date ever.
They did this on Jan 7th or 8th, only days after the "insurrection." No warrant, no notification to customers that their privacy was to be violated in this way. It seems that BoA was very willing to provide this information about its customers to the FBI. I'm sure they earned friendly treatment from other agencies in the Biden administration by selling us out.
I wonder how they decided which purchases were gun purchases. I happen to be a BoA customer (not for long), and I happened to have used my debit card to buy a shotgun from Academy in December. On my transactions history, it just says $XXX.XX and Academy, it doesn't say what I bought.
I guess it doesn't matter. Anyone who goes into a story that sells guns deserves whatever the FBI decides to do to them, I guess.
You know, just about anything that our government wants to do, it will and it will cite an exception to settled case law as authorizing it's behavior. Then it's up to the person who's rights were violated to fight the government for said violation.
U.S. citizens cannot sue the government without the government's prior permission with a narrow list of exceptions. And then, if the government is found to have violated any of the citizen's constitutional rights, then depending upon which one it was, the government sanctioned "remedy" may not actually rectify the harm done by the violation. As an example, take the 4th Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things ...
If you are a defendant in a criminal case and the government ("the police") arrested you based on evidence obtained during an unlawful search without a search warrant or one of the exceptions that would allow them to conduct the search without a search warrant, then the remedy is that whatever evidence they seized that they wanted to use to prosecute you, has to be thrown out. It can't be used because it was illegally obtained
Fruit of the poisonous trees is a doctrine that extends the exclusionary rule to make evidence inadmissible in court if it was derived from evidence that was illegally obtained
In the above example, the remedy for the government's unlawful behavior solves the problem that they created even if you were guilty of what they accused you of because they violated your rights in their zealousness to "catch" you.
However, in the case of the bank unlawfully data mining your purchase records, on behalf of the government, to look for purchases of firearms, ammunition or anything else that the government believes to be indicative of, or a predictor of intended "unlawful" behavior since the mere purchase of these items is lawful, what's your remedy? For them not to do it anymore when they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place?
Again, our government can do just about anything it wants and all it has to do is cite "national security" concerns but there are a plethora of banking laws, any one of which could be used as authorized "pre-consent" that you gave when you opened your account (it's in the fine print) and this is before they even get to the Patriot Act. The
Bank Secrecy Act and
Suspicious Activity Reporting are two of these laws that readily come to mind.
When people are fighting for our rights, oftentimes it is not readily apparent how their fight could help ensure the rights of others, ourselves included. When I saw your title it invoked memories of AT&T turning over their customer's cellular records to the government and the fight to bring this out into the open that ensued
