February 5, 2021 - On January 6th, a group of protesters broke into the US Capitol building, supposedly to protest the certification of the presidential election by Congress. While the break-in never should have happened, the Capitol is one of the most surveilled buildings in the country and various news outlets (with cameras) were present at the time. On top of that, many of the supposed protesters who illegally entered apparently wanted to have some "souvenir photos" for posterity sake. Not exactly the wisest course of action when you are breaking the law, but the fact that many of those photos were subsequently posted to social media sites should mean that tracking down the culprits should be fairly easy. So it seems like overkill that under the guise of helping law enforcement with their incident investigation that the nation's second largest bank is sharing information with the feds on pretty much any of their customers that had any transactions in Washington around the date of the incident. Moreover, it may be illegal.
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It turns out that B of A's cooperation wasn't as the result of a search warrant. In fact, it wasn't even the result of a subpoena from what we can gather. Apparently, the bank launched an investigation that was very broad in scope and once it had identified 212 people that it thought might be of interest to federal law enforcement, it turned that information over to them.
If you think that sounds reasonable then consider this. The bank's criteria include anyone who made a purchase or stayed in a hotel in Washington, DC immediately preceding or after the break-in. It also included anyone who purchased an airline ticket to anyplace in the world around those dates. What's really remarkable with this set of criteria is that the bank only came away with 212 names. It is also quite frightening.
B of A's actions were uncovered by Tucker Carlson. Regardless of what you think of him or his network, you would be well served to watch the segment he did on B of A. And while watching it, consider that B of A is the only bank we know to be involved in this type of action at this time. That doesn't mean that they are the only ones doing this.
Frankly, what B of A has done here is more than a little disturbing. If you extrapolate their actions out, you have to wonder what other information are they sharing with the government without telling their customers. If you have multiple safe deposit boxes, is that of interest to the government? Or if you purchase from certain stores, is that of interest? What about certain types of merchandise? Or subscriptions to certain internet services? After all, your bank knows all of your financial details. Do you really want them shared with anyone?
You really shouldn't have to worry about that. Unfortunately, now you do.
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