Targeting Americans based on what their spending habits can tell us about their politics is an abuse of our financial system, writes Coin Center’s Laz Pieper.
Recent reporting has revealed that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been aggregating data of Americans’ financial activities to analyze and then provide local law enforcement with tips on potential criminals. This practice — known as predictive policing — is inherently authoritarian. It completely depends on mass surveillance to aggregate and analyze enough data to then determine whether or not you could be a criminal in the eyes of the state.
Here’s the problem: information tells a story and says whatever its narrator wants it to say, which is then used to justify subsequent actions. The state — as the collector of your data — is the narrator of your story. It determines which dots get connected and which picture gets painted about you. That’s ripe for abuse because anyone can take massive amounts of information and cherry-pick it to convey anything they want and then act on it.
In the words of Cardinal Richelieu, “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”
For predictive policing, law enforcement watches your every move to determine if you might be a criminal and then goes after you for it. With this current situation, part of this predictive policing is based on financial surveillance of the American people, meaning your transaction history is essentially treated as evidence before you’ve done anything wrong. This is deeply un-American and unconstitutional. Here, you are far from innocent until proven guilty; here, you are always a suspect that the state is always prepared to prosecute.
The clearest example is of Kyle William Olson, whose traffic stop in Montana was instigated by a Border Patrol Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team (PITT). A DHS memo produced in his criminal case and shared with 404 Media said the team had identified “financial activity patterns commonly associated with illicit narcotics activity,” but did not explain which records it examined or how it obtained them. Police ultimately found marijuana in Olson’s vehicle, but that discovery does not resolve the underlying question: why was the government secretly analyzing his finances before officers had identified a specific crime?
And the other examples provided by 404 Media illustrate this well. Americans are pulled over and questioned based on information provided to local law enforcement from the DHS. One of the victims, Alek Schott, was pulled over for allegedly drifting between lanes and had his truck searched for drugs, but none were found. The Associated Press reported that federal agents monitored Schott’s travel patterns through license-plate scans and other surveillance technologies. Schott is now suing Bexar County, as well as the sheriff and some deputies, for violating his Fourth Amendment rights — and rightfully so.
As the Institute of Justice put it, “Police must have a fact-based suspicion of a crime before making a stop, a valid reason to extend that stop, and either a warrant, consent, or an objective reason to believe there’s contraband inside to search a vehicle. In Alek’s case, the deputy failed to meet any of these criteria and instead used an unjustified traffic stop to probe into crimes Alek hadn’t committed.”
These two cases raise several questions. Where did law enforcement get these suspicions of a crime? Like the other stops reported by 404 Media, evidence suggests DHS Border Patrol instigated the stops. How does DHS obtain various forms of data on these Americans in the first place?
For financial data, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) — the agency within the Department of Treasury in charge of overseeing compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) — could be the culprit. The BSA requires financial institutions to maintain records and report certain large or suspicious transactions to the government to detect and prevent money laundering and other illicit activities. FinCEN then shares this information with other federal agencies in order to carry out regulatory duties — which is likely where the DHS received this information.
And the information is expansive. Financial institutions have a pattern of over-reporting to mitigate any risk of non-compliance. Hence, suspicious reporting is rampant and FinCEN collects an abundance of information on Americans’ financial activities.
However, these practices do not make Americans safer. Far from it. Financial transactions act as confessions about your beliefs, associations, and desires — intimate details that are often the reason for discrimination. This is not a hypothetical. Financial surveillance and censorship have long existed in both Western Democracies and authoritarian regimes to identify and silence political dissidents.
In 2022, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leveraged emergency powers to freeze the personal and corporate bank accounts of protestors, justifying his actions under the guise of safety and security. Canada is a proclaimed liberal democracy but acted no differently than China did that same year, where WeChat banned the accounts of protestors — a deeply integrated payments and messaging application.
The U.S. is no exception. Our financial system has repeatedly shown itself vulnerable to weaponization against political opponents and dissidents. In the aftermath of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, a 2024 Congressional report showed how banks were pressured by FinCEN and the FBI to identify “extremism” by searching for spending habits that demonstrated conservative views — such as purchasing “religious texts.” We are not here to litigate the matter of the riots themselves, but to point out that targeting Americans based on what their spending habits can tell us about their politics is an abuse of our financial system. Merely demonstrating conservative viewpoints based on one’s spending habits in the Washington, D.C. area should not provoke reporting Americans to law enforcement.
And these actions are not limited to any one side of the aisle. In 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The White House then proceeded with a memo directing law enforcement to “identify and disrupt financial networks that fund” domestic terrorism and political violence. Again, we are not here to litigate whether or not Antifa is a threat to the U.S. either, but to point out that this is the same form of targeting that was used against conservatives in the aftermath of January 6th. As the CATO Institute rightfully identified, to what extent would financial institutions go to comply? There may be obvious financial activity that indicates the work of terrorism, but when does one’s political views come into play? Will “onboarding documents include a questionnaire about a customer’s feelings about fascism?”
These examples are politically motivated and mainly from financial surveillance, but information can be leveraged and abused in all kinds of ways and from various sources. Just look to Sacramento, California, where local law enforcement was acquiring information about residents’ energy usage to identify who was illegally growing marijuana. Unsurprisingly, this led to harassment of innocent residents by law enforcement, and perfectly illustrates the dangers of too much information in law enforcement’s hands.
Predictive-policing is wrong, but it stems from the long-time surveillance of the American people. It is these various surveillance mechanisms that have empowered the state to target anyone for anything, even before they commit a crime — if they were going to commit a crime at all. Thus, DHS should end PITT’s use of financial information and other data for predictive-policing. Congress should direct the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to independently audit the DHS’s data sources, targeting criteria, retention practices, false-positive rates, and information-sharing, and assess the program’s compliance with the Fourth Amendment and other applicable laws. The GAO should be required to publish its findings for further action.
Congress must ensure that federal agencies cannot circumvent any Fourth Amendment protections by using secret profiles to manufacture suspicion. Judicial authorization should be required before the DHS can use sensitive financial records in an investigation of a specific suspected crime, and full disclosure whenever federal data analysis triggers a traffic stop.
Surveillance places all of us at the judgment and mercy of the state, where our activities, associations, or beliefs can easily be deemed criminal — or potentially criminal — and we have no way of defending ourselves. This is deeply un-American. The state should not be leveraging information to decide whether or not you may be a criminal and then tipping local law enforcement based on their judgment. The American people should be free to live authentically and with dignity without fear of wrongful prosecution. It is within our constitutional rights, and it is time the federal government be reminded of the
Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.
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