This appeared here
and I would like to thank John for allowing me to publish his work. RK
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is
coming to Mississippi Wednesday and Thursday with a public forum on “access to
information.” A vital question for Mississippians to ask leaders of the
bureaucracy at the venue, being held from 11 AM to 1 PM tomorrow at Mississippi
Valley State University in Itta Bena, is why the CFPB wants so much access to
their personal information.
Here is the CFPB’s meeting agenda for Mississippi. This
Facebook page tells about the privacy
violations and other problems with this uniquely unaccountable governmental
entity.
The CFPB, created by the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul to
defend consumers in the credit card and mortgage markets, is building a
database of sensitive individual financial information that rivals that of the
National Security Agency. According to Bloomberg News, the CFPB already
has “anonymous information about at least 10 million consumers.”
On top of this, at a U.S. House hearing in July, CFPB
acting deputy director Steven Antonakes revealed that bureau hopes to
monitor 900 million credit-card accounts. This represents nearly 80 percent of
the U.S. credit-card market. Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), a consistent advocate
of privacy who called for limits on the
surveillance provisions of the PATRIOT Act during the Bush administration, declared, “The bureau was founded
with a mission to watch out for American consumers, not to watch them.”
CFPB director Richard Cordray, who will be at the forum
as well as CFPB meetings in Itta Bena and Jackson that are closed to the
public, has defended the database by
saying that the CFPB blocks out “personally identifiable information” such as
Social Security numbers, and that these mounds of data are needed for the CFPB
to “understand” the markets it is regulating.
On the first point, the
process is for “anonymizing” the data unclear, and the CFPB is evasive in
answering the questions raised by the agencies’ contracts with private data
mining firms. A contract obtained by the
conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch indicates that an individual’s age,
postal code, and Census block identifier are all included in the CFPB database.
The CFPB also has not said whether and under what
circumstances it will share this data with other government agencies. Privacy
experts add that handling and storage of such voluminous amounts of
confidential data will almost certainly be vulnerable to hacking and abuse.
As to whether all this info is necessary to protect
consumers, the CFPB has yet to explain why it can’t “understand” markets with
statistical sampling of at most a few thousand consumers. That’s the way other
federal and state agencies have done it for decades.
At the same time the CFPB demanding the most intimate
financial information of consumers, it is fostering excessive secrecy about its
own activities. It is holding daylong meetings in Itta Bena on Wednesday and at
the Hilton Garden Inn in Jackson on Thursday with private sector activists and
academics on its Consumer Advisory Board, but most Mississippians will not be
invited. In describing the two-day agenda, the CFPB states that “only the 11 AM
to 1 pm Public Session will be open to the public.” Apparently, not even a
video of these “closed sessions” will be available to the public. The CFPB only
states that it will “issue a summary of the board’s activities during the
closed session.”
This secrecy may be in violation of federal laws
promoting openness in government. In a letter objecting to similar
meetings of the CFPB’s advisory board, the Community Financial Services
Association noted that the Federal Advisory Committee Act allows such meeting
to exclude the public “only where information to be discussed involves trade
secrets, classified government materials or national security matters related
to foreign policy.” As the letter points out, these are” topics that are never
within the purview” of the CFPB.
If the CFPB wants the trust of Mississippi and American
consumers to foster transparency in markets, it must be more open in its own
affairs. And it must stop nosing around in the personal financial matters of
the individuals it was created to serve.
Michael Mayfield, a research
associate at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and senior at Mississippi
State University, contributed to this post.
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