https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rdKsO3NFv8s
Subcommittee will come to order without objection. Big government was colluding with big tech to censor Americans. That’s the first thing we learned. But now it’s big government colluding with big banks and big business to spy on everything Americans buy, every place they go, everything they do. Big government wants your financial data because it’s full of sensitive information about you. Our investigation started when an FBI whistleblower, George Hill, came forward and talked to the committee. Mr. Hill was supervisory intelligence analyst at the FBI up in the Boston field office, told the committee that the FBI got information from Bank of America. Specifically, it received a list of any customer who made purchases in the Washington, D.C. area January 5th through 7th, 2021. The whistleblower’s supervisor, special agent in charge of the Boston field office, Mr. Bonavolanta corroborated Mr. Hill’s testimony when he spoke to the committee. And so did Steve Jensen, the FBI’s domestic terrorism operations section chief. But it wasn’t just purchase data around a specific date that the FBI got from Bank of America. That was actually also overlaid with any firearm purchase at any time. And how did the FBI get this information? They asked for it. In fact, you can see on the display on the screen here, the email that was sent. The FBI told Bank of America to recap our morning call. We are prepared to action immediately the following threshold customers confirmed as transacting business in Washington, D.C. between these specific dates. So if you’re in Washington, D.C., visiting your kids, maybe visiting your aunt or maybe just a friend, the FBI wanted to know about every single purchase you made. And and if you’re a gun owner, look out, you’re going to the top of the list for simply exercising your Second Amendment right. You’re on the FBI’s target list. Never forget the federal government got this information without any process, no warrant and frankly, no notification. The bank didn’t tell the customer that we’re hey, we’re handing this information over to the FBI, the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world. Now, these FBI agents, Mr. Hill, Mr. Bonobon to Mr. Jensen, they all said this was wrong and in fact, sent the information back to FBI headquarters in D.C. So that’s how our investigation began. But since then, we continue to investigate. But since then, we’ve learned that the financial surveillance was broader and there was actually a specific objective. Federal government is building profiles on the American people. And the profile isn’t based on criminal conduct, it’s based on political beliefs. And if you got the wrong political beliefs, well, you’re potentially a domestic violent extremist. We now introduce today’s witnesses. Dr. Jordan Peterson is a psychologist, author, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. He previously taught at Harvard University and McGill University. He has published more than 100 scientific papers, hosts a popular podcast, hosts public lectures across the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, and offers online programs to help consumers better understand their personalities and themselves. Dr. Peterson has been targeted for his views on the importance of free speech and traditional values and has warned of the dangers of debanking political opponents as he has seen in Canada. We’ll begin by swearing you in. Would you please rise and raise your right hand? Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that the testimony you’re about to give is true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information and beliefs so help you God? Let the records show that the witnesses have answered in the affirmative. Thank you. And we will start with Dr. Peterson. Mr. Peterson, you’re recognized for five minutes. Thank you again for being here. As well, I would like to start by expressing my appreciation for the opportunity to be here. I’m not here to talk about January 6th or about any particular threat, insurrection or protest, political or ideological, real or imaginary. I’m here to talk about the already extant and expanding collusion of government and corporation. I’m here to talk about the already extant and expanding collusion of government and corporation. In restricting the individual freedom and autonomy upon which the productive, generous and stable psyche, psyche economy and state are themselves necessarily founded. I’ll begin my comments, therefore, in the most general terms to shed light on the mounting problem. There are now 700 million CCTVs in China under the rule of the communist party. The system to which those electronic eyes are attached is the most complete state apparatus of surveillance yet imagined with the ability not only to recognize faces at a distance but gait itself when facial features are hidden or obscured. Such capability can and will soon be augmented to the point where the movement of eyes themselves monitored by high resolution and intelligent cameras will soon be sufficient to identify any aware and active party. The demented, naive and prideful engineers who so enthusiastically helped build this system call it Skynet. After the rogue and all-seeing technology that took such a dreadfully wrong turn in the famous science fiction movie Terminator series featuring artificially intelligent robot intelligences hell-bent on protecting themselves by destroying humanity. The name also references a well-known Chinese phrase describing the reach of the divine itself. The net of heaven is vast, yet it misses nothing, which aptly describes the capability of the new state apparatus. The system is integrated with the so-called Chinese social credit system which awards its involuntary participants with a score indicating their compliance with the dictates of the Chinese communist party allowing for full control over access to everything they possess electronically. Most ominously their savings and their access to travel, certainly almost all of which are modern means of travel, but increasingly as the electronic gates come up even by walking, if you’re a Chinese or a visitor, your access to the world can be reduced to zero if your social credit score falls beyond an arbitrary minimum. This allows you purposefully to be shut out of all activities that can be virtualized, and in a rapidly virtualizing world this increasingly means all activities that can be virtualized, driving, shopping, working, eating, finding shelter, even fraternizing with friends and family as merely being in the presence of someone with a low social credit score means that your own score can be lowered. This has also opened up the opportunity for the government to extract slave-like labour from its citizens so burdened as the donation of free work to the state still constitutes one means by which erring Chinese men and women can increase their score and remain part of human society. This is precisely the payment system most desired by the most tyrannical, not the work for me and benefit thereby that constitutes the contractual arrangement undertaken by free and sovereign citizens, but the work for me and I will lift the deprivation I imposed that has always been the leitmotif of the slaver. Why is any of this relevant to people in the West? Well because the technology that the Chinese Communist Party employs is an extension of Western technology because we already fell prey to the terrible temptation of lockdown employed by that state in the face of hypothetical crisis once and in the very recent past because we’re walking step by step in the same direction, partly because of the hypothetical convenience of universal and automatic recognition of identity and partly because any problem whatsoever that now confronts us can easily be used to justify the increasing reach of the security and nanny state. It is said that Stone Age people first confronted with cameras and their resultant photographs by modern anthropologists objected to having their images captured as they feared the captivity of their souls. It turns out that such fear was prescient. The images that we leave behind while navigating virtual space are such close duplicates of our actual selves that the capture of our essence is at this point all but guaranteed. We all now have our doppelgangers. We all live so much in the virtual world in consequence of our purchasing habits and modes of electronically mediated communication that our very selves have become reducible to a frightening degree to data, the modern equivalent of our footprint, with the same data making up an image of our identity, an identity which can be and is increasingly bought and sold by the invisible corporate brokers that still mostly use it to sell us what we so desperately and carelessly and conveniently want but can also be used to track, monitor and punish everything we do and say. Behavioral scientists facilitate this process with their reprehensible nudging, the practice of pushing people in a given ideologically determined direction by manipulating invisible incentives behind the scene. Corporations track purchasing decisions, developing algorithms that with increasing accuracy track our patterns of attention and action, allowing for the prediction of what might next be most enticing, doing so not only to offer us what we want but to determine and shape what we need. Governments can and are colluding with these corporate agents to develop a picture not only of our actions but of our thoughts and words so that deviation from the desired end can be mapped, rewarded and punished. The development of a digital identity and currency is nothing more than the likely end consequence of such inclinations and the combination of both can and will facilitate the development of a surveillance state, the scope of which optimistic pessimists of totalitarianism such as George Orwell could scarcely imagine. The new AI systems which are so rapidly emerging do nothing but increase this danger, providing for the possibility of a super surveillance whose scope exceeds anything that mere unaugmented humans could imagine while also making it certain that even the perceptions that in the real world shape our attitudes, conduct and personality can be manipulated to the degree that we will not even be able to see a reality outside which that has been constructed by the super state, the ultimate fascist collusion between gigantic self-interested corporations and paranoid security-obsessed anti-human governments. We’re already selling our souls to the super state for the purposes of immediate gratification while being enticed to do so by fear-mongering idiots. Mr. Chairman, could the witness be asked to summarize, please? Do I have my five minutes or do I not? You’ve gone over five. Oh, I’m sorry. I can certainly… If the witness can summarize. We’re always a little lenient with the time. I’ll take ten more seconds. Sure. With increasing ability to monitor not only the actual attention patterns and behaviors of its citizens but to predict those that are most likely, the persecution of even potential crime becomes ever more likely. If you have nothing to hide, you will have nothing to fear will be the slogan commandeered by those most likely to turn to surveillance to protect and control. What was the famous Soviet totalitarian joke attributed to Lavrenty Beria, head of the secret police? Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime. Those words were true enough in the time of Stalin’s KGB and the police were secret enough then as well. But that’s nothing compared to what we can and likely will produce now. A police so secret that we will not even be able to detect their comprehensive and subtle activity. Monitoring crime so pervasive that everyone under the dictates of the system will have something to hide. Regular order, Mr. Chairman. I’ll now proceed under the five-minute rule with questions. Dr. Peterson, do you think they’re just going to stop with conservatives? My history tells us that the cancel culture mob, the surveillance state, whatever you want to call it, it doesn’t just, they never are satisfied with just certain, it always expands. And I’ll give you an example. A few years ago, Senator Feinstein, iconic Democrat senator from the great state of California, the folks in San Francisco renamed the Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. They took her name off the school because they found that she said something like 40 years ago that the cancel culture mob didn’t like. So even a liberal Democrat senator wasn’t good enough for the mob. They came after her too. And this is the thing that scares me. We’ve invited probably more Democrat witnesses in front of this committee than any other committee. We invite Democrats to come in and say we respect the First Amendment, Second Amendment, Fourth Amendment, respect the Constitution. My concern is it never just stops with certain people. It always goes further. Do you agree with that? Well, the reason I preface my remarks with an insistence on non-partisanship is because the danger posed by this increasing ability of governments and large corporations to collude threatens everyone’s freedom equally. And it could well be that at the moment, and this is I think the case the Republicans here are trying to make, is that the people who are in the sights of that collusion tend to have more conservative leanings. But that will shift in a moment whenever the political tides shift. And we’re concentrating in this hearing a fair bit on the specific events of January 6th, a very partisan issue that produces a very intense partisan divide. But we’re not addressing the fundamental issue here directly, which is that our new technology enables a mode of surveillance that’s so intense and all-pervading that no one will escape its purview regardless of their political views. Dr. Peterson, why are you such a Luddite? Why don’t you embrace artificial intelligence and facial recognition and massive computer surveillance and cameras on every street corner so that we could all be safer? Well, because there’s tremendous danger and too much security. If the emerging collusion between government and corporation, gigantic corporation, continues in the manner that it is continuing, there won’t be anything that you do that can’t be used against you and will be used against you in very short order. And the concerns that are expressed here about the local consequences of that, let’s say with regards to January 6th, seem to me to fail to take into account the much broader threat that lurks underneath, that everyone should be attending to. We’re in danger of eliminating the private sphere entirely. That’s already happening in places around the world, particularly in China, which is why I made reference to that. That technology is at hand and it appears as though both giant governments and giant corporations are utilizing it in every way that they can manage. And it’s generally, it’s often motivated by the claim that that’s forestalling an immediate proximal threat. Right? Well, that’s a short-term justification for engaging in a tremendous long-term danger. And it should be perceived as dangerous to those on the left who are politically committed because it will be the politically committed who are first identified by such systems. Is it true that you have a PhD? Yes. Well, then why did Canada decide that you needed more education? Can you tell us about that? Well, one reason, the entire transcript of an interview that I did with Joe Rogan was submitted as evidence with regards to the unacceptability of my views. What I was doing primarily in that interview that was criticized was questioning the validity of the economic models of economic collapse that were stacked upon the unstable models detailing out climate change 100 years into the future. That was the reason why I did the interview. That was deemed in Canada sufficient to proceed with complaints against me with regards to my professional competence to serve as a licensed psychologist. That was only one of many anonymous complaints that were fostered directly in relation to my political views. Well, I thank you for showing up today. I think they may use your testimony as evidence that your re-education has not been successful. I yield back to the chairman. There are Republicans and Democrats who want to roll back the Patriot Act. What a beautiful name. But it’s being used to violate American citizens’ rights to privacy. We have one of the rarest things possible. You have Mr. Jordan and Mr. Nadler in complete agreement on how to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And frankly, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act part works pretty well. It’s the Domestic Surveillance Act. Well, there isn’t one because the Fourth Amendment guards it. It says you’re supposed to get a warrant. And we’re covering a giant hole here, not about January 6th. What about the Bank Secrecy Act and third-party doctrine? Things that are being abused, weaponized against the citizens of this country. Now, they don’t have all these same safeguards in Canada. And, Dr. Peterson, you’ve experienced some of the consequences of not having the safeguards that we have in this country. I wonder if you could elaborate on how consequential it is to have the safeguards we do have here on privacy and speech. Well, I know that my colleagues on the psychological front and on the medical front in Canada are increasingly frightened of making any of their political opinions known in any form whatsoever because governmental agencies, usually of the mid-level bureaucratic sort, have been empowered as a consequence of our lack of First Amendment rights to intervene as they see fit in relationship to stated opinion, political or otherwise. And it’s not good. It’s seriously not good. And there’s new legislation coming up also reflecting that lack of proper constitutional protection that will make even the suspicion that a crime may be committed punishable. That’s Bill C-63. I’m just saying in a fundamental sense, do you think there should be a warrant requirement before some financial institution hands over the name of the customer based on certain purchases they may have made? Say in a general sense. Yes. You think there should be? Yes. That’s great because your colleagues don’t think so. Now let me go to this. Do you think Mr. Michel that if it can’t do a warrant, do you think there should be at least a notification? So should at least the bank say, hey, Mr. Smith, the FBI just asked me for all your purchases on a certain date and they want to know if you’ve ever bought a gun. Do you think that the bank should at least tell their customer, their customer who they’re supposed to serve? Do you think they should at least be compelled to tell them that? Yes. Mr. Tedesco? Yes. Mr. Knight? Yes, with reasonable exceptions for an ongoing criminal case. Fair enough. Mr. Peterson? They should get a warrant. Let’s get a warrant. Back to the first thing. Mr. Pallone? Again, with exceptions for criminal investigations. We got agreement on the panel. The first time we’ve had that this morning. Mr. Dr. Peterson, I want you to talk about the debanking issue we saw so much of and how that was particularly, I guess, with the truckers and how that’s because I see it coming. I see it coming here and it frightens me. I want you to talk about what took place in Canada and if it anyway impacted you. Well, there was a essentially a working class protest against the COVID lock, extensive length of the COVID lockdowns and one consequence of that was that Canadians who participated, even by donating to the protest and even by donating small amounts to the protest, had their bank accounts seized by, seized in consequence of a collusion between the banks and the government that was extrajudicial, that was recently deemed unconstitutional despite the fact that we don’t have strong First Amendment claims. So this happened. The government is currently maneuvering in Canada to make the possibility of such collusion a certainty across multiple actual and potential domains of so-called harm, particularly in relationship to government-defined hate. Yes, this is absolutely coming and it’s facilitated by the kinds of advancements in technology that we talked about today. Yeah, we know it’s coming because we’ve seen this, what do they call it, the liaison information report from the FBI to the bank saying possibly include firearm legislation to ease immigration status, new limits on public land and discontent with renewed measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. So the very issue, the very issue that these truckers were debanked in Canada is the very thing the government is saying to banks, we need to look at this as well, that single issue. That is again what frightens me so much. Who would you consider to be the biggest victims of this surveillance operation? I think it’s the American citizens and I think it’s a bipartisan issue. Even some of the Democrats in this chamber and the Senate sent letters to the big banks just a few weeks ago talking about de-risking, they call de-banking de-risking. We’re talking about the same thing of Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, including because of their religious donations and donations to charity. So it’s a bipartisan issue and I think we all should be concerned about it and try to work together for solutions. No, I 100% agree with you and what do you think right now under the BSA, under the current structure, what is the remedy for Americans? Well, there isn’t. There is none, right? There is no mechanism for judicial review, right? So Americans cannot protest a bank who is ostensibly an arm of the government at this point. They cannot protest the disclosure of their financial transactions to the federal government. There’s no mechanism for that, is there? That’s right. And so, and obviously they don’t have any knowledge that their data was collected to begin with, do they? Yeah, I think one of the scariest things I heard at this hearing was what Mr. Michel said, once the bank has the data, the government has the data. Right. Can you hire a private security firm to search somebody’s house without a warrant? I don’t think so, no. No, you have to have a warrant. So what is the difference here? It’s a big risk and it needs to be fixed. So you would articulate, let me ask you, the panelist, do you think that under the current BSA or other laws that it would be wise, given where we are from a technological standpoint, do you think it would be wise to revisit the BSA or the other laws to provide that protection for Americans’ privacy, sir? Well, there were some concerns expressed earlier about what might happen in the aftermath, let’s say, of Donald Trump’s election with regards to political belief and anything that facilitates the collusion between government and giant corporation and enables that kind of information gathering will absolutely be used in that way. That’s why I made comments earlier regarding this as a bipartisan issue. Once this capability exists and it’s being magnified, now it will be used in all directions. So the people at risk will be politically active, vocal Americans. The silent ones will remain relatively safe. Thank you. Anyone who speaks. And briefly, do you all think that we should examine? We should absolutely examine it. Yes, definitely. Yes. Gentlemen’s time has expired. The gentlelady from Florida is recognized. Mr. Chair, I have a point of order. In your last statement, you said that Steve Jensen of the FBI posed the collection of this information for banks. That’s a misrepresentation of his testimony. It’s not an appropriate point of order. The gentlelady from Florida is recognized. Would you release the transcript so that we can hear exactly what Mr. Jensen said? She’s not an appropriate point of order and the gentlelady knows that, but she continues to try to ask the question that is not appropriate. Same way you do. Same way you interject, sir. I don’t think I’ve raised one point of order today. You interject all the time, sir. The gentlelady from Florida is recognized. All the time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I continue to be stunned by the big government advocates that we come across and the ones that serve in this very chamber. They’re not even hiding it anymore. They’re saying the quiet part out loud. They want dependency. They want control. The total disregard for the Constitution and the oath that many of my colleagues, actually all of my colleagues have taken and violated. It’s so disturbing to me. Many people know, probably as evidenced by what is on the face of my iPad, that I detest big government and I detest big tech. The two combined have proven to be a lethal combination when it comes to liberty and freedom. Because quite frankly, we know that the MO of big tech and big financial institutions combined with big government, it’s to erode and evade Americans’ constitutional rights. We’re here today because of a blatant Fourth Amendment violation where big banks colluded with big government to turn over data that didn’t belong to them to target Americans, innocent Americans. Because in this country, it is still a fact that you are innocent until proven guilty, despite what everyone is trying to do and flip that around. Dr. Peterson, it’s good to see you again. I couldn’t help but notice your reaction when my colleague was talking about the First Amendment not being absolute. I do want to give you the opportunity to weigh in and respond to that. I couldn’t help but notice your reaction. But before I do, I am really glad that you have been talking about the social credit system that the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, utilizes. I am literally around the corner in a classified briefing right now talking about the use of big tech and how it is targeting American citizens. In fact, this very morning, I have been inundated in my office with phone calls from TikTok users who have been denied access to the app because they live in my congressional district. And until they call my office and demand that I do not take adverse action against the app, that they cannot use it. Talk about big tech directing behavior. I think that we are on a very dangerous path, and I want to give you my time to really lay out in the most succinct way possible the dangerous nexus of big tech, big government, and financial institutions that seek to weaponize that information against Americans. And I know you are more than capable of doing that in two minutes and 30 seconds. I don’t think people understand the degree to which they are profiled online and to which their virtual representation is now an iconic representation of them, nor do they understand that they have no rights whatsoever to that representation. So for example, let’s say we turn our information about our purchasing habits over to the bank when we open a bank account. 30 years ago, that wasn’t such a big problem. With AI systems, it’s a problem that’s so big you can’t imagine it. I mean, I’m certain that my staff could find the data online to absolutely predict your voting patterns with 95% accuracy. You have no idea what sort of digital footprint that you’re leaving behind you, and there are almost no protections for that. And so, now, and you also asked about the First Amendment. Yes. We have very weak free speech protections in Canada, and I can tell you that is not going well. And so the combination in my country, the combination of that and the invasive technology that we’re producing at a rate that is, beggars the imagination, produces a threat to the integrity of sovereign citizenship, the likes of which has not yet been experienced. And that’s what this committee should be concentrating on. It’s very interesting to watch it because it devolves continually into discussion of a particular event, serious though that event was. It’s like, no matter how serious that event was, it pales in comparison to the potential severity of the issue that we’re attempting to point to with regards to our testimony. These artificially intelligent systems can do things you can’t imagine, and not only can they, they are and they will. And that will be abetted by the collusion between large corporations and government. And it’s certainly the case that the people who stand on the left, especially with regards to their, what would you say, skepticism of large corporations, which is often perfectly warranted, should be utterly terrified about this. Man, you did that in less time than I thought. Well, I had to get right once today. No, I appreciate that. And I think you have seen it front and center. Certainly we all watched in horror as the truckers’ bank accounts were seized or shut down, who protested the mandates. And people think that that’s such a faraway concept, but we have seen that here with people who have been given ultimatums of jab or job, and we’ve seen ways that they’ve been targeted and positioned in ways that are just un-American, unconstitutional. So thank you all to our witnesses for being here today. I appreciate you guys in the fight against weaponization, and we’re seeing it more and more every day. Mr. Chairman, with that, I yield. General, the idea is back. This includes today’s hearing. We thank our witnesses for appearing before the subcommittee today. And I apologize, I do have to run out to another thing, but we really appreciate the discussion that you all brought in the analysis that you brought today. Without objection, all members will have five legislative days to submit additional written questions for the witnesses or additional materials for the record. Without objection, the hearing is adjourned.