The Saving Privacy Act: A critical shield against government financial spying (2025)

OPINION:

Since the founding of our nation, Americans have cared deeply about privacy, especially the privacy of personal financial information. That is why our founders enshrined important protections in the Constitution, such as the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, meant to safeguard the confidentiality of these records.

If you think your personal finances are safe from the prying eyes of warrantless government surveillance, however, you’re sadly mistaken.

For decades, as Congress has wrongly delegated more and more of its power to the executive branch, federal agencies have expanded their surveillance capabilities, gradually eroding the privacy of law-abiding citizens. Moreover, unelected bureaucrats have hijacked financial and regulatory enforcement tools, magnifying these abuses of power and highlighting the need for drastic change.

For example, rather than pursue financial criminals, the surveillance state uses dragnet collection systems to harvest financial transaction data from tens of millions of people, only to pursue a few criminal prosecutions. This strategy effectively deputizes financial institutions as arms of law enforcement, all to support an ineffective federal anti-money-laundering regime that imposes significant compliance burdens and risks misuse of citizens’ private financial information.

In fiscal year 2023, almost 300,000 financial institutions submitted 4.6 million suspicious activity reports to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Yet, upon closer inspection of the data, a mere 0.3% of these reports were used in IRS and FBI cases. Only the government could operate a system with an abysmal success rate of 0.3%, and it was considered not only satisfactory but also necessary to maintain.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the FBI have, in recent years, used this vast financial surveillance apparatus to conduct warrantless bank searches, harvesting transaction data involving the words “Trump,” “MAGA,” “firearms” and even the purchase of Bibles, classifying such terms as possible indicators of “homegrown violent extremism.”

It is troubling enough that federal law allowed for warrantless searches, but it is alarming that nearly all these transactions involved no criminal activity.

To make matters worse, in 2012, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted Rule 613, establishing a centralized database known as the Consolidated Audit Trail to “track all activity throughout the U.S. markets” by recording every single stock market transaction and each market participant’s personally identifiable information. This action was not authorized by Congress — the people’s elected representatives — posing a major problem. To borrow from SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce: “We need to look carefully at all of the costs that the CAT is likely to impose after it is operational. The non-financial costs of being surveilled reach to the very core of our humanity. … Untargeted government surveillance programs, even well-intentioned ones, threaten that freedom.”

As encouraging as it is that the SEC recently issued an order providing an exemption from the requirement to report personally identifiable information to the Consolidated Audit Trail, Congress must act to permanently shut down this Orwellian database.

To reassert Americans’ constitutional rights and place much-needed limits on the federal government’s unchecked surveillance systems, I recently introduced the Saving Privacy Act. This legislation would reduce the amount of private information reported to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, require government agencies and law enforcement to obtain a warrant in most situations before accessing private financial information, mandate the destruction of the SEC’s Consolidated Audit Trail and repeal the Corporate Transparency Act.

The act also prevents the establishment and use of a central bank digital currency, perhaps the greatest threat to financial privacy we face in the 21st century.

My bill subjects any major rule published by federal financial regulators to congressional approval before that rule can go into effect, secures an individual’s right to self-custody of cryptocurrency assets and repeals the pending rule that would mandate all small businesses to report significantly more financial transaction information to the IRS.

The Founding Fathers included the Fourth Amendment for a reason: to prevent unwarranted government intrusion into our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” They would be deeply disturbed by the expansive financial surveillance state that has embedded itself in modern-day America. The Saving Privacy Act would end government infringement on financial privacy and restore critical Fourth Amendment protections for all Americans.

Thomas Jefferson once swore eternal hostility against tyranny over the mind of man. For freedom’s sake, we should now swear the same eternal hostility against the surveillance state’s invasion of our finances.

• Mike Lee is an American lawyer and politician, serving as the senior United States senator from Utah, a seat he has held since 2011.