The Cloak-and-Dagger Fed

Wiretaps, surveillance, and searches of private property cannot be authorized and executed without a warrant issued by a judge, who (hopefully) maintains the commitment to privacy enshrined in the Constitution under the fourth amendment. However, the Federal Reserve has essentially assumed plenary power for authorizing and executing these privileges against Wall Street banks by means of its almost 2,000 undercover federal regulators who monitor everything from employee lunch conversation to “financial performance,” hoping to catch banks slipping up in regards to regulations and working to provide inside information to federal regulators about the inner workers of these financial firms.

The first problem here is the obvious violation of the right to privacy to which these companies and their clients are entitled under the constitution. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these undercover Fed cops is that their presence has been both authorized and executed by a politicized bureaucracy (the Fed) instead of first passing through constitutional scrutiny in our judicial system. Worse, this program isn’t even temporary, as the “embeds” (another nickname for the Fed’s army of financial narcs) each have a five-year term at one bank before being cycled to the next one. The self-contradictions of government abound, as it is blatantly illegal to search one’s private property without a warrant but legal to do the same to private enterprise.

Second, the Fed has extended its tentacles too far. Have we learned nothing from the failure of centrally planned economies and their cloak and dagger environment of constant surveillance required to ensure compliance to the government “plan?” Contrary to its incessant claims,  government cannot effectively “guide” the private sector — the information that the embeds collect only further enables a bloated bureaucracy of federal regulators to further aggrandize itself while shackling the private sector. Ultimately, the permanent federal surveillance or “oversight” (as regulators prefer to say), seems to only be a euphemism used to hide Big Government’s inherent goal of nationalization.