Federal law enforcement has been manipulating the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) system to gain access to Americans’ financial information without warrants or probable cause , the House Judiciary Committee said Friday.
The panel and its Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released its interim report, first obtained by Fox News Digital, which details its findings.
The committee said in the report that the FBI “has manipulated” the SAR’s filing process to treat financial institutions “as de facto arms of law enforcement, issuing ‘requests’ without legal process, that amount to demands for information related to certain persons or activities it considers ‘suspicious.'”
“With narrow exception, federal law does not permit law enforcement to inquire into financial institutions’ customer information without some form of legal process,” the report states. “The FBI circumvents this process by tipping off financial institutions to ‘suspicious’ individuals and encouraging these institutions to file a SAR — which does not require any legal process — and thereby provide federal law enforcement with access to confidential and highly sensitive information.”
House judiciary
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/feds-using-banks-surveil-americans-financial-data-without-warrants-house