During Tuesday’s night GOP presidential debate Carly Fiorina accused a government agency that polices banks of conducting a dragnet on financial consumers. She declined to mention, however, that she once abetted the government in conducting illegal surveillance more than a decade ago.
In a screed reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s 1961 vinyl recording, in which he spoke out against “Socialized Medicine,” a.k.a. Medicare, Fiorina claimed that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is engaged in mass domestic espionage and part of a plot to enact totalitarianism in the US.
“We created something called a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with no congressional oversight that is digging through hundreds of million of your credit records to detect fraud,” she claimed Tuesday night.
“This is how socialism starts. We must take our government back,” Fiorina added.
The GOP hopeful’s attack on the consumer watchdog agency Tuesday night, however, did not comport with her prior position on government surveillance.
As has been widely-reported, Fiorina, the ex-Hewlitt Packard CEO from 1999-2005, assisted the NSA in the War on Terror by gifting it “truckloads” of computer servers. The agency used those to set up a massive warrantless wiretapping program known as “Stellar Wind,” which was in 2004 deemed illegal by Department of Justice officials.
In an interview with Yahoo News in September, Fiorina defended her 2001 decision.
“I felt it was my duty to help, and so we did,” she said. “They were ramping up a whole set of programs and needed a lot of data crunching capability to try and monitor a whole set of threats.”
In that same interview, Fiorina also defended the CIA’s use of waterboarding, claiming that it was “used in a very small handful of cases” and “when there was no other way to get information that was necessary.”
Other defenders of the national security state have attempted to deflect criticism of the NSA by claiming the CFPB is engaged in widespread domestic espionage.
During Senate debate this summer over the spy agency’ bulk collection of telephony metadata, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, claimed that the CFPB “collects financial transactions on every American.”
He went on to say, in a floor speech directed at NSA critics: “There is nobody down here trying to eliminate the CFPB. I would love to eliminate the CFPB tomorrow. But there is no outrage over it.”
Unlike the covert NSA surveillance programs, the CFPB’s bulk data collection capability has been widely known and openly defended by the bureau as a way of analyzing the the financial industry and the relationship between banks and consumers.
CFPB Director Richard Cordray said during a 2013 Senate Banking Committee hearing that analysis of big data is “the way of the world.”
“The big banks know more about you than you know about yourself and me, too,” he said told senators. “The notion that the regulators wouldn’t keep up with them in trying to do our job of overseeing them, I think would be quite misguided.”
The Government Accountability Office examined the issue last year, and reported on “large-scale data collections” at the CFPB that included automobile transactions, credit card reports, and mortgage loan data, including records that contained personally identifiable information.
The watchdog found, however, that the collection was in compliance with federal law, and similar to other types of analysis conducted by the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
GAO did in its report outline steps the bureau should take to “to reduce the risk of improper collection, use, or release of consumer financial data.” CFPB agreed with the agency’s recommendations.
