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Built to Exploit: The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Architecture of Surveillance Capitalism
By Akashma News
A journalist instinct is to follow the money. Behind every policy, every piece of legislation, and every public justification of “job creation” or “modernization” lies a paper trail of influence, lobbying, and institutional gain. The 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) is not just a financial deregulation bill. It is a blueprint for legalized data exploitation, designed not to protect consumers, but to enable powerful actors in finance, law, and technology to erode privacy under the guise of innovation.
A Brief Note on the Glass-Steagall Act
Before diving into the GLBA, it’s important to understand what it replaced. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was enacted in the wake of the Great Depression to curb reckless banking behavior. It established a firewall between commercial banks (which hold your deposits) and investment banks (which take financial risks in markets). This separation protected consumers from speculative losses and systemic risk.
For decades, Glass-Steagall kept the financial system relatively stable. But by the 1980s and 90s, pressure mounted from Wall Street to deregulate. Financial giants wanted to combine services, trade riskier assets, and access more consumer data—all in the name of “efficiency.”
GLBA would be the crowbar that finally pried the firewall open.
Chapter One: A Bill Born of Lobbying
On its surface, the GLBA repealed parts of the Glass-Steagall Act, allowing banks, insurance companies, and investment firms to merge. But peel back that surface, and you’ll find a law crafted in boardrooms, pushed by lobbyists, and polished by elite law firms.
The bill was sponsored by Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), Representative Jim Leach (R-IA), and Representative Thomas Bliley (R-VA). Its passage paved the way for mergers like Citicorp and Travelers Group, which had already defied Glass-Steagall by merging a year earlier, knowing the law would catch up.
Following the GLBA’s passage, Senator Gramm took a lucrative position as Vice Chairman at UBS Investment Bank, a direct beneficiary of the law he helped draft. The revolving door wasn’t symbolic—it was functional.
Chapter Two: Law Firms and Lobbyists
Major law firms such as Venable LLP, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, and Holland & Knight played vital roles in crafting language and lobbying legislators. Their influence extended beyond bill writing—they represented financial institutions who stood to gain billions.
Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs lobbied heavily. So did the American Bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable. The prize? The legal ability to aggregate consumer data across services.
Chapter Three: The Illusion of Choice
GLBA’s privacy protections were packaged in Title V, a weak set of guidelines requiring financial institutions to notify customers of data sharing—and allow them to opt out. But the burden is on the consumer, and most never fully understand what they are opting into.
Let’s break this down.
“Nonpublic personal information” sounds technical, but here’s what it really means:
It’s everything a bank or financial company knows about you that isn’t publicly available. That includes your Social Security number, your income, your credit card balances, your mortgage details, what you buy, when you buy it, and where you spend your money.
It’s the digital fingerprint of your financial life.
Under GLBA, banks and their “affiliates” (which often means dozens of partner companies and third-party marketers) can legally share and profit from this data—unless you tell them not to. But most people don’t know they even have that option. The opt-out notices are buried in fine print or written in legalese.
The result? Your private financial behavior becomes part of a massive database, traded and analyzed like a commodity. And this is all legal—because GLBA made it so.
The Constitution is supposed to protect us from this kind of intrusion. The Fourth Amendment was written to safeguard our privacy from government overreach. But what happens when the government outsources surveillance to private corporations? When the law becomes the mechanism for exploitation?
Then we are no longer protected citizens. We are data sources.
Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) raised privacy concerns. Advocacy groups like EPIC and Public Citizen warned the bill prioritized corporate power over constitutional rights. They were right.
Chapter Four: The Rise of Data Capitalism
The GLBA helped usher in a new business model: surveillance capitalism. With legal cover, financial institutions began collecting, selling, and analyzing behavioral and financial data. This economy flourished with the help of tech giants and their tools.
Enter Peter Thiel. In 2003, Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies, a data analytics firm that marketed itself as a tool for counterterrorism and security. But the story starts earlier—with the quiet establishment of In-Q-Tel.
In-Q-Tel, originally launched in 1999—the same year the GLBA passed—is the CIA’s venture capital arm. Its mission: to identify and invest in private tech companies developing tools for national security and intelligence. That includes data analytics, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and surveillance tech.
Acting as a bridge between Silicon Valley and the intelligence community, In-Q-Tel accelerates the commercialization of technologies that would otherwise take years to be adopted by government agencies. By investing in early-stage startups, the agency ensures these tools align with intelligence priorities from the ground up.
It’s not a stretch to say that Palantir, which received early government contracts and whose architecture resembles core In-Q-Tel investment priorities, is a kind of public-facing evolution—or even a rebranding—of In-Q-Tel’s deeper ambitions. The surveillance state didn’t just grow—it was engineered and privatized.
Banks like JPMorgan used Palantir to spy on internal threats. But Palantir wasn’t alone. Israeli firm NSO Group, known for its Pegasus spyware, is suspected of having U.S.-based contracts and informal influence within federal surveillance strategy. Though publicly denied, internal tech sourcing from foreign firms is not uncommon in post-9/11 America.
Minority Report Wasn’t Fiction, It Was a Warning
In 2002, the film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, imagined a future where people were arrested not for what they had done—but for what they might do. The state used advanced technology to predict crimes before they happened, stripping individuals of their rights in the name of public safety.
That future is now. Predictive policing is real. It uses algorithms, historical crime data, and social profiling to forecast who might commit a crime—or even who might be a “threat.” It has already been deployed in cities across the U.S. and abroad.
Palantir is one of the companies enabling it. The connection between GLBA, surveillance tech, and predictive policing isn’t cinematic paranoia. It’s a roadmap that was drawn in legislation, funded by public money, and sold as innovation.
Minority Report warned us. We didn’t listen.
Chapter Five: The Infrastructure of Control
GLBA’s repeal of Glass-Steagall was not just about profit—it laid the legal groundwork for data pipelines that now span banks, credit bureaus, tech platforms (Venmo, Zelle, PayPal), and federal agencies. With FinCEN and the Patriot Act as co-conspirators, every transaction became a data point.
The result? A legally compliant surveillance state—outsourced to private corporations.
Chapter Six: Legal, But Not Right
Edward Snowden said it best: “What is right is not always what is legal.” GLBA was legal. But its effects—on privacy, democracy, and human autonomy—are deeply wrong.
Today, our financial footprints are monitored, mined, and monetized. Not for national security. Not for economic health. But for institutional dominance. This isn’t oversight. It’s exploitation.
Final Notes: The Fight Isn’t Over
We name this system for what it is: institutional corruption enabled by the revolving door, driven by profit, and shielded by law. As journalists and citizens, we must continue to track the networks, question the narratives, and expose the architecture.
Because the next bill will already be in motion before the public even hears its name.
Sources & References
Congressional Record on the GLBA (1999)
OpenSecrets Lobbying Profiles (1998)
Palantir company reports, Forbes, Business Insider, Government Contracts
EPIC archives on GLBA privacy concerns (2004)
Church Committee and In-Q-Tel background
Public statements by Senator Richard Shelby (2015)
Reports on NSO Group and international surveillance contracts
*2023)
Snowden interviews and public lectures
Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg
In-Q-Tel official mission summary and public records
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