Apple refused to give the FBI encrypted data from a phone belonging to Muslim terrorists who killed 14 people. Google refused to do artificial intelligence work for the Pentagon but then did work helping China censor its own people. But Bank of America (BoA) had no problem handing over the private information of innocent customers — to federal investigators on a witch hunt for Capitol riot “right-wing extremists.”
Well, it’s plain what side corporate America is now on: every one but yours.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported on the BoA story last night, saying:
“Tucker Carlson Tonight” has exclusively obtained evidence that Bank of America, the second-largest bank in the country with more than 60 million customers, is actively but secretly engaged in the hunt for extremists in cooperation with the government. Bank of America is, without the knowledge or the consent of its customers, sharing private information with federal law enforcement agencies. Bank of America effectively is acting as an intelligence agency, but they’re not telling you about it.
In the days after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Bank of America went through its own customers’ financial and transaction records. These were the private records of Americans who had committed no crime; people who, as far as we know, had absolutely nothing to do with what happened at the Capitol. But at the request of federal investigators, Bank of America searched its databases looking for people who fit a specific profile.
Here’s what that profile was: “1. Customers confirmed as transacting, either through bank account debit card or credit card purchases in Washington, D.C. between 1/5 and 1/6. 2. Purchases made for Hotel/Airbnb RSVPs in DC, VA, and MD after 1/6. 3. Any purchase of weapons or at a weapons-related merchant between 1/7 and their upcoming suspected stay in D.C. area around Inauguration Day. 4. Airline related purchases since 1/6.”
The first thing you should notice about that profile is that it’s remarkably broad. Any purchases of anything in Washington, D.C.; any overnight stay anywhere in an area spanning three jurisdictions and hundreds of miles; any purchase not just of legal firearms, but anything bought from a “weapons-related merchant,” T-shirts included; and any airline-related purchases — not just flights to Washington, but flights to anywhere, from Omaha to Thailand. That is an absurdly wide net.
Bank of America identified a total of 211 customers who met these “thresholds of interest.” At that point, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has learned, Bank of America turned over the results of its internal scan to federal authorities, apparently without notifying the customers who were being spied upon. Federal investigators then interviewed at least one of these unsuspecting people. That person, we’ve learned, hadn’t done anything wrong and was cleared.
BoA claims it was just complying with the law, but Carlson asserts (video below) that this isn’t true. The bank had a choice — and unlike Apple, it chose not to resist the feds’ request.
As with Apple, however, BoA decided to take the anti-American position. Speaking volumes is that in Apple’s case, the FBI was merely asking for information from the phone of a terrorist, Syed Rizwan Farook, who’d already committed a heinous crime; he was one of two people who perpetrated the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, which claimed 14 lives.
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In contrast, the BoA customers are completely innocent; their only crime is fitting the wrong profile. Don’t misunderstand, profiling is a legitimate criminological method — but it’s only legitimately used when the ends are valid.
In this case, being advanced is “Reichstag fire” opportunism. The Capitol riot was not an “insurrection” as was CHAZ, the forcible, armed, left-wing takeover of Seattle streets last year. It was not racially driven (“white supremacism”) as is Black Lives Matter. It wasn’t authored by forces seeking the government’s overthrow, as is Antifa. Its members didn’t wears masks à la Antifa, either.
The rioters also weren’t part of an organized destabilization effort responsible for approximately 600 riots, often involving looting and arson, during the last year. That would be, again, Antifa and BLM.
Of course, if the government had put the kind of effort into combating Antifa/BLM that they’re putting into the current witch hunt, we wouldn’t have had 600 violent riots, thousands of destroyed businesses, and the resulting deaths.
Antifa/BLM action is an actual threat while the “threat” of white supremacists, a vanishingly small group, is illusion. But they do share a commonality: Antifa/BLM and white supremacists both are used to advance leftist power — by serving as, respectively, shock troops and scapegoats.
