Stefan Padfield: We Need to Stop the SEC From Tracking & Weaponizing Your Financial Data

On the One America News Network, Free Enterprise Project (FEP) Deputy Director Stefan Padfield told host Stella Escobedo why FEP has joined with the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) to stop the latest (and arguably most dangerous) power grab by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Stefan told Stella:

Basically this Consolidated Audit Trail is just a massive storehouse of data that includes essentially all trades by all people, whether they be individuals or institutions. It is, as I think you already mentioned, probably the largest attempt to store private information of citizens of this country outside of the NSA. And so we are very proud to be one of the plaintiffs in this case, challenging this new attempt by the SEC to really surveil Americans in a way that is unprecedented and we believe to be unconstitutional….

It’s specifically data related to your financial transactions, specifically as to stock trading. So every trade that you make as an individual would be basically followed and tracked in this way. And it may sound benign at first… — someone might say, “well, I’m not doing anything wrong so if they wanna have my trades online, so be it” — but the problem is twofold.

One is, when you add up all the data of all the people who are making trades on a daily basis — and this is just a growing field, certainly with retail investors and things like the gamification of trading and so on — it’s a massive amount of data. And we know how that data can be coordinated to give bigger pictures of people.

But it’s also the way that the data can be used. So someone again might say, “well, I’m not doing anything wrong.” But then all of a sudden you realize that the laws that we are subject to stretch library volumes full. And so then it’s a matter of simply, “well, we’re gonna find this particular law” and all of a sudden you are being told you’ve done something wrong that you didn’t know about.

So this sort of weaponization of this data tracking is a very real possibility, both on the level of just individual privacy — your data, nobody needs to know what trades you’re doing — and the information that it could reveal about you and your associations.

You can read more about the FEP/NCLA lawsuit against the SEC here.