Senate bank bill ‘sets up new supersnooping agencies to collect data on Americans’

Big Brother wants to watch you more closely. Especially how you spend
your money.

His latest snooping plan comes from provisions in the banking bill
being debated in the Senate.
The bill is being pushed by Sen. Chris Dodd,
D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Among other things,
the bill is supposed to alert regulators to hazards in the industry to
prevent another financial meltdown like the one that started in
September 2008, and to make it easier to spot rip-off artists like Bernard Madoff.

In this handout photo provided by CBS, Senate Banking
Committee Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) appears on "Face The Nation"
on May 9, 2010 in Washington, DC. Dodd discussed the latest developments
with finance reform and the Wall Street
"Flash Crash" with CBS' Bob Schieffer.
(Photo by Chris Usher/CBS via Getty Images.

The bill sets up two new supersnooping federal agencies to collect
data on ordinary Americans:

•The Office
of Financial Research. This supposedly would predict risk in the
system by collecting massive amounts of new financial data, such as
patterns of credit card use.

•The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It would collect data,
especially on consumer transactions.

The data are supposed to be "scrubbed" of individual identifiers, so
your privacy would be protected. But that might not work, Mark Calabria
told us; the director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute
formerly was a member of the senior professional staff of the U.S.
Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.  MORE>>>>>>>>>