DHS’s predictive policing is unconstitutional, un-American and should be stopped

And the information is expansive. Financial institutions have a pattern of over-reporting to mitigate any risk of non-compliance. Hence, suspicious reporting is rampant and FinCEN collects an abundance of information on Americans’ financial activities.

However, these practices do not make Americans safer. Far from it. Financial transactions act as confessions about your beliefs, associations, and desires — intimate details that are often the reason for discrimination. This is not a hypothetical. Financial surveillance and censorship have long existed in both Western Democracies and authoritarian regimes to identify and silence political dissidents.

In 2022, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leveraged emergency powers to freeze the personal and corporate bank accounts of protestors, justifying his actions under the guise of safety and security. Canada is a proclaimed liberal democracy but acted no differently than China did that same year, where WeChat banned the accounts of protestors — a deeply integrated payments and messaging application.

The U.S. is no exception. Our financial system has repeatedly shown itself vulnerable to weaponization against political opponents and dissidents. In the aftermath of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, a 2024 Congressional report showed how banks were pressured by FinCEN and the FBI to identify “extremism” by searching for spending habits that demonstrated conservative views — such as purchasing “religious texts.” We are not here to litigate the matter of the riots themselves, but to point out that targeting Americans based on what their spending habits can tell us about their politics is an abuse of our financial system. Merely demonstrating conservative viewpoints based on one’s spending habits in the Washington, D.C. area should not provoke reporting Americans to law enforcement.