The FBI: Steals American Citizens Private Financial Information

First, it was Facebook stealing user’s private information, and now it is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), United States. It has come to notice through recently released documents that revealed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has indeed for years have been secretly demanding information on American citizen’s financial and consumer data from renowned U.S credit giants. 

The national security letters are an administrative subpoena issued by the United States government to collect information for national security purposes. The National Security Letters do not require prior approval from a judge. The FBI has been regularly using these legal powers to compel credit agencies to submit non-content information, such as – records of purchases and location of the purchase made, that the FBI deems necessary in National Security Investigation. 

The Letters have no American judicial oversight. The letters are filled under a gag order, which prevents the receiver from disclosing the demand, also, including the agenda of the letter. 

Tech giants like Facebook, Google and Microsoft have come on record quoting that they have received one or more national security letters from the FBI. Ever since the Edward Snowden fiasco over revealing the U.S government’s surveillance operations, the law was amended in 2015 in the wake of compromised U.S national security. However, the recipients have been allowed to publicly petition the FBI to be cut loose from the gag provisions and publicly publish the letter with redactions. The tech giants have gone out of the way and have used “Transparency reports” to inform their users of the government’s demands for their private data. Nevertheless, major credit agencies have failed to publish their figures to support their users. 

The Renowned Lawmakers of America – Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren, and the Republican senator Rand Paul have collectively sent letters to Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. Expressing their concern as to why these credit giants have failed to disclose the number of times the government demanded consumer and financial data of the citizens. 

The letter addressed,

“Since your company holds so much potentially sensitive data of so many American citizens and collects this amount of information without obtaining mutual consent from these individuals, you have the responsibility to be transparent on how you handle that data. Unfortunately, your company has not provided the information to the public or the policymakers on the number of times of disclosures that you have made to the FBI under the National Security Act, 1947”.

The Spokesperson for TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian chose not to respond to the comment beyond business hours. 

The concern did not recon on how much national security letters were issued to the credit companies ever since the legal powers were amended into law in 2001. Renowned Newspaper in New York quoted that the national security letters to credit companies were a “small but telling fractions” of the overall half a million FBI issued demands made to this date.

To conclude by adding, That Financial Institutions and banks, even universities, cell service, and internet providers, were targets of National Security Letters revealed in the document. However, the U.S senators have given the companies until December 27th, 2019, to disclose the number of demands each of the companies has received.