Nosier than the NSA? Shadowy bureau may have your credit card info

[Geee]

Watchdog.org:

While the domestic spying National Security Agency has been under the red-hot political spot light, another quasi-governmental agency has quietly gone about the business of collecting nearly 1 billion U.S. credit card records without consumer consent.

 

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB, unlike the NSA, operates with no congressional oversight and with little public transparency, even as it demands complete transparency from the businesses it targets.

 

As Brian Wise puts it, the rogue agency created under the Obama administration to protect consumers now serves as “judge, jury, and executioner” in determining winners and losers in U.S. business and consumption.

 

Wise is senior adviser to the U.S. Consumer Coalition, a free-market consumer rights advocate. The coalition has documented hundreds of cases of abuse by Operation Choke Point, an Obama initiative overseen by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that targets merchants, such as gun dealers and payday lenders, who don’t fit into the administration’s idea of what an American business should be.

 

“Literally, this agency can investigate, can enforce, and can make the judgment against any individual company or individual citizen that they say is violating the law,” Wise told Watchdog.org this week as the U.S. Senate passed a bill to scale back the NSA’s sweeping surveillance of American phone records. President Obama signed the bill into law a few hours later.