Last month, we reported that the office of Ohio congressman and chairman of the Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan sent a letter to Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
The letter requested clarity on why FinCEN had “distributed slides, prepared by a financial institution,” detailing how other private companies could use MCC transaction codes to “detect customers whose transactions may reflect ‘potential active shooters,'” Jordan’s team was requesting responses from Bishoff.
The slide indicated that the “financial company” was vigilantly searching for terms such as “Trump” and “MAGA,” as well as minor arms and sporting goods purchases, and transactions at pawn shops and Cabela’s, in an effort to detect potential “financial threats”.
Jordan’s letter to Bishoff went on:
According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of “extremism” indicators that include “transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,” or “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”
As part of their work during the “Twitter Files,” American journalists Matt Taibbi and his colleagues sought snapshots of the company’s denylist algorithms, or the rules the platform was employing to deamplify or remove users. It was evident that they possessed them due to the frequent allusions to them in documents (for instance, a report on the Russian denylist that included Jill Stein and Julian Assange provided one example).
They were unable to locate anything comparable to the photograph that Jordan’s team has just released:
The highlighted portion shows how algorithmic analysis works in financial surveillance.
- First compile a list of naughty behaviors, in the form of MCC codes for guns, sporting goods, and pawn shops.
- Then, create rules: $2,500 worth of transactions in the forbidden codes, or a number showing that more than 50% of the customer’s transactions are the wrong kind, might trigger a response.
Matt Taibbi recently commented on Jordan’s findings in a SubStack:
The Committee wasn’t able to specify what the responses were in this instance, but from previous experience covering anti-money-laundering (AML) techniques at banks like HSBC, a good guess would be generation of something like Suspcious Activity Reports, which can lead to a customer being debanked.
If Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already shown a tendency toward wide-scale monitoring of speech and the use of subtle levers to apply pressure on attitudes, financial companies can use records of transactions to penetrate individual behaviors far more deeply. Especially if enhanced by AI, a financial history can give almost any institution an immediate, unpleasantly accurate outline of anyone’s life, habits, and secrets. Worse, they can couple that picture with a powerful disciplinary lever, in the form of the threat of closed accounts or reduced access to payment services or credit. Jordan’s slide is a picture of the birth of the political credit score.
There’s more coming on this, and other articles forthcoming (readers who’ve noticed it’s been quiet around here will soon find out why). While the world falls to pieces over Tucker, Putin, and Ukraine, don’t overlook this horror movie. If banks and the Treasury are playing the same domestic spy game that Twitter and Facebook have been playing with the FBI, tales like the frozen finances of protesting Canadian truckers won’t be novelties for long. As is the case with speech, where huge populations have learned to internalize censorship rules almost overnight, we may soon have to learn the hard way that even though some behaviors aren’t illegal, they can still be punished with great effectiveness, in a Terminator-like world where computers won’t miss anything that moves.
Ryan DeLarme is an American journalist navigating a labyrinth of political corruption, overreaching corporate influence, a burgeoning censorship-industrial complex, compromised media, and the planned destruction of our constitutional republic. He writes for Badlands Media and is also a Host and Founder at Vigilant News. Additionally, his writing has been featured in American Thinker, the Post-Liberal, Winter Watch, Underground Newswire, and Stillness in the Storm. He’s also writes for alt-media streaming platforms Dauntless Dialogue and Rise.tv. Ryan enjoys gardening, kung fu, creative writing and fighting to SAVE AMERICA
