While the political class continues to gin up a moral panic over Big Tech, social media and other such hobgoblins elsewhere, the government itself is about to create the mother of all financial tracking systems. And yes, it tramples any commonsense notions of privacy, transparency, never mind accountability, in the dust. As Reason’s Jennifer Schulp writes:
The Consolidated Audit Trail is intended to collect and accurately identify every order, cancellation, modification, and trade execution for all exchange-listed equities and options across all U.S. markets, allowing the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to track orders and identify who made them.
It’s all in the name of enforcement, of course, and helping prevent shadowy persons from doing bad things in the public markets. But building an all-seeing, all-knowing system raises a host of questions:
Most of the criticism leveled at the CAT has focused on data security. The CAT will absorb information about tens of billions of trades daily, making it quite possibly the largest database in the world. Its sheer size will be an invitation for criminals, who then-SEC Chair Jay Clayton recognized in 2017 “could potentially obtain, expose and profit from the trading activity and personally identifiable information of investors.”
And as we all (should) know, government databases are already poorly-defended honeypots for hackers, scammers and foreign governments. The Government Accountability Office’s report on the government’s most pressing cybersecurity risks said:
We’ve made 236 public recommendations in [cybersecurity] since 2010. Nearly 60% of those recommendations had not been implemented as of December 2022.
There’s no reason to expect the new transaction database will be any more secure from harm or hack than any other government system.
There have been suggestions to limit what the database collects and how the SEC may use it. But don’t hold your breath waiting for a kinder, gentler SEC surveillance system to debut. Governments at all levels have demonstrated their unbridled affection for more and more intrusive surveillance.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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They are trying to turn the US into a new Communist China.
I think it must be 1917 and we are living in czarist russia, or maybe 1948 and mao is taking over – just a thought!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
communism rules!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just trash being the trash they are.
If all such laws are to be allowed, and that’s a big question mark, then the government should be financially liable for ANY losses caused by security lapses according to the RICO statutes. Make the state pay dearly for mistakes.