Man, I love VPPence
IYKYK
The Consolidated Audit Trail (See Also: Article II, Individual Rights)
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has circumvented congressional authorization
and appropriation powers by launching a massive surveillance program against the American
people and compelling private entities it regulates to build and pay for it.6
The anodyne-sounding Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), a data collection and surveillance system
that aggregates, for the perusal of a multitude of federal and quasi-regulatory agents, every
securities trade in the United States and match it to personally identifiable information (PII) of
those on both sides of the transaction.7 The inflow of data is so large that it is believed that the
only data-collection program that is larger is one gathering signals intelligence from potential
adversaries by the National Security Agency.
It appears that, “through a long train of abuses and usurpations,” the SEC has been piecing
together this unconstitutional chimera since 2012, hacking off powers from one branch of
government and monstrously grafting them on to parts of others, while amputating various parts
of the Bill of Rights. The SEC, a regulatory agency in the executive branch, has abrogated the
congressional power of the purse by force, funding CAT through entities it regulates that are in
no position to protest. In turn, CAT surveilles Americans on a mass scale without benefit of
judicial warrant and chills First Amendment freedoms of speech and association. It is hard to
imagine a less constitutional construct in the entire administrative state. The CAT is responsible
for storing incredible amounts of sensitive information about Americans in a database which will
become the number one target of malicious state and non-state hackers. CAT is an attempt to
regulate Commerce and to exercise a taxing power8 and would not be a Necessary and Proper
Exercise of Congress’s Commerce Clause authority, even if it had been created by Congress.
When it established the CAT, the SEC, an agent of the executive branch, usurped the legislature
https://advancingamericanfreedom.com/omb-deregulation-comment/