“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.
Posted originally on the CTH on December 9, 2024 | Sundance
It’s not AI per se’ that poses the problem, rather it is the ability of AI software to connect, filter and process multiple databases of stored information in real time, creating a tracking and tracing system, that can be weaponized and poses a problem for those who do not want the USA to turn into a full surveillance state.
When you combine government required “Real ID” with, enhanced facial recognition software, then connect the identity to a metadata library of all the public and private electronic information of a person, what you end up with is the ability to conduct total surveillance of a targeted individual without constitutional limits and privacy protections. This is the larger problem with Palantir’s partnership with government systems.
It is a conversation no one is having before the capability is reached.
That said, Palantir CEO Alex Karp appeared at the Reagan National Defense forum, and does a great job advocating for the U.S. to win the artificial intelligence race. Karp believes it is possible to insert “values” into the software at strategic places of connection, and thereby control the outputs. The question within the AI race then becomes, whose values? Ours or our enemies?
🚨 $PLTR CEO Dr. Alex Karp at the Reagan National Defense Forum 2024 thread!🧵🔮
“I probably shouldn’t say this, this is why I thought the democrats were going to lose the election, why they did, because people want to live in peace. They want to go home. They do not want to… pic.twitter.com/Q4j0hjlh7Y
In a series of video segments placed onto a Twitter Thread, you get a good sense for what Palantir, Karp, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and newly appointed White House Czar of AI, David Sacks, are trying to do inside this global race toward artificial intelligence as applied to government systems.
“Palantir is the largest by market cap defense startup in the world. Many of the people in this room are former Palantirians. Basically, your future is powered by us. We were the most hated, most pariah, most disliked. We used to do meetings in the backyard of the backyard because you couldn’t be seen with Palantir.
“The DOGE… this is crucial stuff. We have to measure- what is it being spent on, what is the output. Is the input more than the output? The only thing that will cure a legitimacy crisis I s measurement. Anything else is a platitude.
“No one’s listening. Everyone’s thinking you have an agenda. Everyone thinks you’re working back from who you like. My favorite example of this are analysts on Wall Street. The whole methodology they have is just a way of telling you if they like you.
“In a legitimation crisis, you’ve got about 6 months… we need to prove there is no one who can stand up- we don’t have Ronald Reagan now.
$PLTR CEO Alex Karp at Reagan National Defense Forum on @elonmusk’s @DOGE and rips analysts🔮‼️
“Palantir is the largest by market cap defense startup in the world. Many of the people in this room are former Palantirians. We just did an announcement with @anduriltech. Basically,… pic.twitter.com/eMxD9YMd1G
. “The rubber meets the road for the West and you’re attacked and massacred, you have to fight, and you have to fight to win.
“My sometimes former party, you know it’s like- Israel’s done very well. My version is- that’s how you roll. Why don’t we learn from that? We don’t learn from it because we have way too many people in this culture who are living in the faculty lab of their own ideology.
“Business 101- what worked? We’re not allowed to learn from what worked because a lot of people are committed to an ideology that will not allow them to win. The American people notice that. A lot of this comes down to legitimation.
“We want to know that Americans are being put first. If you’re getting in the way of that, the American people are not happy.
🚨 $PLTR CEO Dr. Alex Karp at the Reagan National Defense Forum calls democrats his “former party” 👀 and speaks on Israel 🇮🇱🔮
“The rubber meets the road for the West and you’re attacked and massacred, you have to fight, and you have to fight to win🔥
“America is in the very beginning of a revolution that we own- the AI revolution. We own it. It should basically be called the “US AI revolution.”
“Every single relevant company in the world, is in this country. The second tier of those companies are in this country. The JV of these companies are in this country.
“There is no other place to do technology really at scale besides America. Europe has basically decided to regulate its basically anemic and nonexistent tech scene out of production. All of those people want to come to America. The American tech community is booming”
$PLTR CEO Dr. Alex Karp at the Reagan National Defense Forum🔮
"America is in the very beginning of a revolution that we own- the AI revolution. We own it. It should basically be called the "US AI revolution."🇺🇸
“These are very dangerous technologies. If we didn’t have the world’s worst enemies, I’d be up here saying we should regulate this, charge energy, slow this down. And we do have to have a conversation about who controls these technologies.
“People didn’t adopt American values because they thought inherently, they were superior, they adopted them because they worked.
“We have to win. We have to be ahead of our adversaries. We can’t have rules that are only for us and not for our China. Because then, we will get rules- their rules. And we will not like those rules.
These are going to be hard conversations. But do not forget, we need to win so we can dominate the conservations. Because we could lose.
$PLTR CEO Dr. Alex Karp at the Reagan National Defense Forum on AI fears🔮
"You can be happy we're asking this question, because the question they're asking in Europe is, "why is this not real."
“I suspect our GDP is going to grow in a very different way from our allies. That’s going to adjust a lot of perceptions about us, for good and bad.
“One of the things we’re going to end up having to do in Europe is- how do we do a tech transfer so that they can have GDP growth?
“Between ’61 – ’92, France’s GDP growth was significantly better than the US’. 85% of the top 50 companies by market cap are American. I would bet that’s going to be above 90% by this time next year.
“You can imagine America healthy and strong in 200 years… but you can’t really imagine that in a lot of other western cultures.
“Palantir… we reduce everything to the core principle.
$PLTR CEO Dr. Alex Karp at the Reagan National Defense Forum on American growth and player haters🇺🇸🔮
"I suspect our GDP is going to grow in a very different way from our allies. That's going to adjust a lot of perceptions about us, for good and bad.
“We have a splendor of riches in this country. We have the most successful builder looking at our institutions. Americans want to know that the institutions are efficient, safe, and correspond to their purpose.
“I’m sure there will be some rough patches, but I don’t know how you do better than Elon looking at these things. I’m pretty supportive.
$PLTR CEO Dr. Alex Karp at the Reagan National Defense Forum in huge support of @elonmusk and @DOGE‼️🔮
"We have a splendor of riches in this country. We have the most successful builder looking at our institutions. Americans want to know that the institutions are efficient,… pic.twitter.com/Og3jidkxyZ
“The difference between A+ in tech and B-, is the difference between a helicopter that flies, and doesn’t. This compounds into every area.
“For the sake of our country, I think we should expose policymakers to Maven. This stuff is determinative for life and death. It’s not a playtoy. It’s going to change everything. Just because the LLM on your desk kind of is, that’s like uranium in the ground. Processed correctly, it changes the world!
“We’re really really focused on the best of the best of the best of the best of the best in building things.
$PLTR CEO Dr. Alex Karp at the Reagan National Defense Forum on the gap between policy makers and Americans🔮
"The difference between A+ in tech and B-, is the difference between a helicopter that flies, and doesn't. This compounds into every area.
Dr Alex Karp also joined Liz Claman on Fox Business to talk software’s role in government efficiency: “Palantir exists to serve this nation. We need to know what’s working and what’s not… Software is enormously efficient. The underlying economics are ‘Both sides get more’… Transparency will not only be cheaper, the output will be better.”
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Bottom Line: It is possible to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the risks and benefits to AI when combined with government surveillance interfaces (DHS) and government-controlled databases (NSA). It is possible to understand the risks and walk into the future with eyes wide open.
However, on the issue of how this makes the surveillance state far more likely, the conversation is not happening.
As Palantir CEO Alex Karp outlines repeatedly there are indeed great risks, and we need to have this conversation as a nation.
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