[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 7300-7301]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          BANKING PRIVACY ACT

  (Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, Americans are generally concerned about 
their withering rights of privacy, and my fellow Members will be 
shocked to learn how at-risk those rights are in regard to our banking 
records.
  Serving on the Committee on Banking and Financial Services, I 
recently learned that we Americans do not even have the right to insist 
that our banks not disclose our personal financial information, our 
checking account, our savings account records to other companies, and 
other companies want these records so that they can market and sell us 
products.
  Madam Speaker, I believe that America ought to have the right to 
simply inform our banks that those records

[[Page 7301]]

are private records of to whom we write checks, from whom we receive 
checks. What is in our savings account is a private matter, and we 
ought to have the right to advise our banks not to share it with 
anyone.
  To that end, Madam Speaker, I will shortly be introducing the Banking 
Privacy Act, which will give Americans the right to simply keep their 
records private, keep their private personal lives to themselves, to 
give Americans what they deserve.
  I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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