According to a Judicial Watch press Room release, they have obtained documents, via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed on April 24, 2013, which show the Obama administration by way of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), spent millions of dollars for the warrantless collection and analysis of Americans’ financial transactions.Via JW's press release:
The documents uncovered by Judicial Watch include:
- Overlapping contracts with multiple credit reporting agencies and accounting firms to gather, store, and share credit card data as shown in the task list of a contract with Argus Information & Advisory Services LLC worth $2.9 million
- Deloitte Consulting: solicitation issue date 11/30/2011, award effective date 05/29/2012;
- Deloitte Consulting: solicitation issue date 11/30/2011, award effective date 05/29/2012;
- Argus: solicitation issue date 02/14/2012, award effective date 03/15/2012;
- Experian: solicitation issue date 07/03/2012, award effective date 09/24/2012
- An “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” contract with Experian worth up to $8,426,650 to track daily consumer habits of select individuals without their awareness or consent
- $4,951,333 for software and instruction paid to Deloitte Consulting LLP
- A provision stipulating that “The contractor recognizes that, in performing this requirement, the Contractor may obtain access to non-public, confidential information, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), or proprietary information.”
- A stipulation that “The Contractor may be required to share credit card data collected from the Banks with additional government entities as directed by the Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR).”
The full extent of the CFPB personal financial data collection program is revealed in a document obtained by Judicial Watch entitled “INDEFINITE-DELIVERY INDEFINITY-QUANTITY (IDIQ) STATEMENT OF WORK.” Issued by CFPB Contracting Officer Xiaoling Ang on July 3, 2012 the IDIQ document’s stated objective:
“The CFPB seeks to acquire and maintain a nationally representative panel of credit information on consumers for use in a wide range of policy research projects… The panel shall be a random sample of consumer credit files obtains from a national database of credit files.”
To accomplish this objective, the CFPB describes the scope of the program accordingly:
The panel shall include 5 million consumers, and joint borrowers, co-signers, and authorized users [emphasis added]. The initial panel shall contain 10 years of historical data on a quarterly basis [emphasis added]. The initial sample shall be drawn from current records and historical data appended for that sample as well as additional samples during the intervening years [emphasis added] to make the combines sample representative at each point in time.
The CFPB data collection program has been highly controversial since the April 2013 hearing, when Cordray disclosed elements of the venture at a Senate Banking Committee hearing. At the time, the US Chamber of Commerce accused the CFPB of breaking the law by demanding the account-level data without a warrant or National Security Letter.
Between this newly revealed information and the scope of the NSA's collection of phone data on approximately 121 million Verizon users, as well as the massive data mining of information obtained from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple, via the Prism program, it looks like Democratic Representative Maxine Waters was accurate when she said that "Obama has put in place the kind of database… will have everything on every individual."
[WATCH]
Transcript: (H/T BIN)
"The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life.
That’s going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They’re going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can’t get around it. And he’s [President Obama] been very smart. It’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place."
So, yes, big brother is watching you.
