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On May 14, 2026, we published an article on RealClearPolitics, “A Call to Arms Against the SEC’s Spy Games,” urging all investing Americans to voice outrage with the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), a creature of powerful, unelected bureaucrats in the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who track in real time the trillions of transactions that investors make on U.S. exchanges. Disregarding the absence of any suspicion whatsoever, and rather than fulfill its duty to protect investors, through the CAT, the SEC tramples the civil liberties guaranteed to Americans in the Constitution, grabs power from Congress, and imperils the hard-earned savings of investing Americans.
Our May 14 article indicated that the deadline to submit comments to the SEC is June 15, 2026. However, the SEC now reports that the due date for comments is June 22, 2026 (i.e., 60 days from publication in the Federal Register, and not calculated from publication on the SEC website, as we had erroneously done).
This gives an additional week for the public and interested organizations to explain to the SEC that its CAT has no place in a free society. Its unwarranted spying on innocent Americans’ investment activities and the collection of that information in a central repository abridges the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. These affronts are made worse knowing that Congress did not grant the SEC a shred of authority to enact the CAT, much less pass on the exorbitant costs of running it – billions of dollars to date – to investors, which is a de facto and lawless tax – just like President Trump’s tariffs. The SEC already has all the enforcement tools it needs to protect the securities markets, as one commissioner and the American Securities Association have pointedly noted. And the final – and perhaps worst, and certainly most dangerous – insult is that aggregating trillions of pieces of personal, sensitive, financial data in a single database (as the CAT does) subjects the savings, retirement accounts, and college funds of average investing Americans to massive cybercrime, made easier every day by advances in artificial intelligence. Many commentators believe a successful cyberattack on the CAT is a question of “when,” not “if.” And the risk is not just a data breach but actual theft of assets.
So we take another opportunity to urge Americans who value their freedoms, privacy, and financial security to reproach the SEC for its unconstitutional power grab, and demand that it abandon the CAT altogether. You have until June 22, 2026, to submit comments on the SEC’s website through the regulations.gov portal. A deluge of thoughtful, informed comments opposing the CAT will be necessary to remove this lawless, costly, and wholly unnecessary threat to American personal and national security.
Peggy Little and Caitlin Moyna are senior litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is suing the SEC over the CAT in the Western District of Texas.
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