Turning Credit Cards into Comprehensive Financial Surveillance
In 2011 the Obama administration unleashed Operation Choke Point to use informal regulatory pressure on banks to debank the firearms industry, but that plan withered when exposed in congressional hearings. A few years later, the gun prevention lobbies convinced several states to mandate separate merchant category codes (MCCs) for stores that sell firearms; unfortunately for this initiative, the number of states with statutes that (opens in a new tab)forbid special MCCs for such stores far exceeds the number of states that mandate them. Today, the gun prevention movement is receiving an unexpected gift from merchant lobbies who are pushing to embed sophisticated surveillance infrastructure into the basic architecture of electronic commerce. With that architecture in place, the government will be able to track every item purchased with a credit card — firearms and everything else. The surveillance scheme emerges as an unintended consequence of superficially appealing legislation — namely state-level interchange fee laws — which are promoted as being aimed at helping waitresses, waiters, and small mom-and-pop shops.