According to a new lawsuit, everyone who invests in the stock market is allegedly the target of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) unlawful snooping and data collection.
In a lawsuit, the New Civil Liberties Alliance claimed the SEC is coercing brokers, clearing agencies, exchanges, and other trading platforms into collecting personal information and diverting all trades to its data collection and surveillance program called Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT).
According to their website, legal scholar Philip Hamburger established the nonpartisan, nonprofit Civil Rights organization known as the National Center for Law and Justice (NCLA) to counteract the potential abuse of constitutional rights by the Administrative State.
There is a serious and unnecessary danger that the CAT database, which would supposedly be the biggest securities database ever built, and the enormous federal database of any kind outside of the National Security Agency (NSA), may be breached, endangering the financial data and security of Americans. Consolidating this information into one government database raises the probability and severity of a catastrophic security breach that might compromise the national debt.
Congress never gave the SEC the green light to institute such a system of data collecting and monitoring. Despite this, the SEC is breaching Article I, which gives Congress the right to make laws. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and other SROs have had billions of dollars stolen from them by the SEC, which they use to support their CAT scam.
The flagrant disregard for the Constitution and laws that set apart tax and appropriations authority for Congress alone, together with the embezzlement of billions of dollars, amounts to taxation without representation. Under their regulatory control, agencies cannot solicit billions of dollars from self-regulatory groups to finance new initiatives.
According to NCLA, the SEC is using it to protect Americans’ financial data while infringing upon their Fourth Amendment rights to privacy and against excessive search and seizure.
According to Peggy Little, senior litigation counsel at NCLA, the SEC has amassed surveillance powers and stolen billions without authorization from Congress by obtaining financial data from every American who trades on American exchanges. This puts Americans’ savings and investments at grave and permanent risk.
Our Founding Fathers included substantial safeguards in our Constitution to avoid precisely these hazardous and despotic measures. It is necessary to remove this CAT from the ground up.
