Operation Chokehold 2.0

America's Secret Police (Part 16)

One of the more disturbing discoveries to come out of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of government is this recent one that a rather obscure bureau within the treasury department known as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) used transactions that conveyed political affiliation, firearms ownership, religious beliefs, social media subscriptions and travel to certain rallies and demonstrations as “extremism indicators” to tell banks and other financial institutions that certain customers were “threat actors” after the capitol riot of January 6, 2021 that mostly resulted in trespassing charges. Of course, this was not intended just for people who participated in this one event but like every other dragnet surveillance program every American indefinitely. FinCen instructed financial institutions to search transaction histories using MCC codes for small arms purchase and sporting and recreational goods with key words for stores like Cabela’s and Dick’s as a way of detecting an “active shooter” with an arbitrary purchase limit of $2,500. I would say this is more disturbing than CISA, Global Engagement Center and FBI coordinated censorship pressure on social media as it potentially implicates all of us as suspects without actual individualized reasonable suspicion of a crime instead of only people that post to social media regularly.

As I noted in 2022 about Operation Chokehold, conducted under Obama’s DOJ against certain vendors and non-profits instead of customers, these kinds of extrajudicial punishments and sanctions of legal activity can become the foundation of a social credit system that punishes political dissent without the hassle of due process and the public scrutiny of a trial.