Officials with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are monitoring 80 percent of Americans’ credit cards and 95 percent of their mortgages. The Department of Health and Human Services is collecting “social and behavioral” data for patients’ health care records. These are the latest additions to the deeply personal information that federal bureaucrats have been empowered to access in recent years under programs initiated by President Obama. Intrusions into the privacy of individuals and families on this scale are without warrant for a government that is supposed to be limited.
The CFPB, the ironically named entity created by the Dodd-Frank Act within the Federal Reserve, is conducting its intrusive activities through a data-mining program that Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy described during a recent House Financial Services Committee hearing as a “step closer to a Big Brother form of government.” Bureau Director Richard Cordray refused to say during the hearing how many credit cards his agency is monitoring or to provide other details about the program, but he stoutly denied any parallel between it and the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. Americans who are uneasy knowing the NSA has been collecting their phone records and metadata, however, may well view CFPB monitoring their credit cards and mortgage payments as just more cogs in the Big Government machine.
