Bob Barr Says Financial Reform Endangers Consumer Privacy

Bob Barr recently penned an article to Roll Call, a website that reports on Congress. The article concerns how certain financial reforms can “imperil consumer privacy”.

There may be a number of reasons to oppose the financial services “reform” legislation passed recently by both houses of Congress and now headed to conference committee to work out differences — its length, its complexity and its many regulatory mechanisms.

One of the strongest grounds on which to cast a jaundiced eye toward this latest legislative initiative of the Obama administration, however, is its creation of privacy-invasive mechanisms through which the federal government will be able to monitor and direct every facet of personal consumer financing activity in the country.Lurking within the more than 1,600 pages of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act are provisions that empower a new office to be set up (headed by a high-level presidential appointee) to gather “financial transaction data” on everything from the largest bank’s internal transaction sheets down to the daily withdrawals from a community bank’s local ATM. Another new agency will have jurisdiction to establish and enforce far-reaching measures to ensure that every “financial product or service” is “fair, transparent and competitive.”

Bob Barr was the presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party of 2008.