Report: Feds Helped Orchestrate Anti-Zimmerman Protests after Trayvon Martin Shooting

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Photo Credit: APBy Fox News. A conservative watchdog group accused the Justice Department of helping manage the “pressure campaign” last year against George Zimmerman in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, citing documents that show an obscure agency spent thousands assisting local demonstrations.

The little-known agency, the Community Relations Service, is described by the Justice Department as their “peacemaker” for community conflicts over race.

The protests last spring over Martin’s death certainly qualified as such a conflict. But while the department claims its “peacemaker” agency does not “take sides” in such disputes, Judicial Watch said the documents and public accounts show otherwise.

“These documents detail the extraordinary intervention by the Justice Department in the pressure campaign leading to the prosecution of George Zimmerman,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.

The documents the group received — and has since published online — show the CRS agency filing a series of expenses incurred during the late March and early April demonstrations. Read more from this story HERE.

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Federal Agency Involved in Protests is a Secretive Branch of the Justice Department

By Tom Topousis. A secretive branch of the U.S. Department of Justice was deployed to Sanford, Fla., in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting to help organize rallies, including one headlined by the Rev. Al Sharpton, calling for the arrest and prosecution of George Zimmerman.

Records obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch, under the Freedom of Information Act, showed that members of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service were sent to Sanford in March and April of 2012 to help manage protests, The Daily Caller reported Wednesday.

The 347 pages of documents obtained from the federal government showed that $5,320 in expenses was claimed by the Community Relations Service for workers assigned to protests and marches in and around Sanford after Zimmerman was accused of shooting Martin. Read more from this story HERE.

International Human Rights Group: NSA Surveillance Undermining US Democracy

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Photo Credit: WNDBy F. Michael Maloof. The National Security Agency, probably the most secretive of the U.S. intelligence branches, has very limited congressional oversight, and those privileged few – generally the chairmen of the respective intelligence committees in the House and Senate – cannot divulge information to other members.

Supporters say it’s needed for national security.

But a human rights organization is warning that such “national security” efforts may, in fact, be undermining the democracy on which America was built, or worse.

“A system of secret surveillance for the protection of national security many undermine or even destroy democracy, under the cloak of defending it,” warns the European Court of Human Rights, a part of the European Union’s European Council.

The issue of secret spying on Americans has been flooding the headlines since whistleblower Edward Snowden grabbed as many classified surveillance secrets from the government as he could, then took off on a globe-trotting trip and started spilling secrets about the tentacles Washington is using to spy on individual Americans. Read more from this story HERE.

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Government tapping into underseas cables for surveillance?

By Fox News. Not only is the U.S. government gathering information from tech companies on global Internet traffic — according to new reports, the NSA is also siphoning off data from underseas cables that criss-cross the world.

The Washington Post on Wednesday published a classified NSA slide that provided side-by-side guidance on the two surveillance programs.

“You Should Use Both,” the slide said, in an apparent message to NSA personnel. Read more from this story HERE.

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The NSA slide you haven’t seen

Photo Credit: Washington Post

By Craig Timberg. Recent debate over U.S. government surveillance has focused on the information that American technology companies secretly provide to the National Security Agency. But that is only one of the ways the NSA eavesdrops on international communications.

A classified NSA slide obtained by The Washington Post lists “Two Types of Collection.”

One is PRISM, the NSA program that collects information from technology companies, which was first revealed in reports by the Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper last month…

The slide also shows a crude map of the undersea cable network that carries data from either side of North America on to the rest of the world. As a story in Sunday’s Post made clear, these undersea cables are essential to worldwide data flows and to the surveillance capabilities of the U.S. government and its allies…

Both slides have circles attached to arrows suggesting possible collection points, but they cover areas too broad to discern where NSA accesses fiber-optic cable networks. The slides also list code names under the Upstream program. Read more from this story HERE.

Army Vet Discovers Feds Now Digging Up Decades Old Minor Convictions to Prevent Gun Ownership

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A local Army veteran is fighting for permission to own a gun after a misdemeanor pot conviction from 1971 stopped him from buying .22 caliber rifle.

Ron Kelly, who retired from the Army in 1993, after a career of firing tanks, machine guns and an array of other weapons [shooting an estimated 100,000 rounds through the course of his career], was recently turned away at the Wal-Mart in Tomball after a computerized background check turned up the arrest.

Today’s Houston Chronicle has a front page story on Ron Kellly and his fight to own a gun.

Kelly said he’d forgotten all about the incident, in which he was arrested over a baggie of pot while in high school, and given one year of probation.

He was a bit embarrassed. Now he’s outraged…

According to the FBI, which runs the background checks known as the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the law states that a person can be prevented from owing a gun if they are convicted of a misdemeanor in which they could spend more than two years behind bars.

Read more from this story HERE.

Taxpayer-Funded Research Lets People Experience What it Feels Like to be a Cow

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerWould experiencing a day in the life of a cow make you less likely to eat meat? How would chopping down a tree affect your paper usage? These are questions that the National Science Foundation awarded universities $748,000 dollars to use virtual reality to answer.

“If somebody becomes an animal, do they gain empathy for that animal and think about its plight?” asked Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “In this case, empathy toward the animal also coincides with an environmental benefit, which is that [not eating] animals consumes less energy.”

Bailenson is heading research at Stanford in which participants don virtual reality helmets and walk on their hands and feet. They are then able to see themselves as a cow in a virtual mirror. They experience what a cow does on its way to being slaughtered and then record what they eat for the next week to see if being a cow reduced meat consumption.

This is just one experiment Bailenson is conducting, but all his experiments are tailored to finding new ways to encourage environmental conservation.

E&E News reports: “Volunteers also have virtually chopped down a tree, a study aimed at examining attitudes toward paper use. Others took a virtual reality shower while eating lumps of coal — literally consuming it — to gain insight into how much was needed to heat the water.”

Read more from this story HERE.

California Senate Passes Bill to Allow Non-Citizen Poll Workers to Help Non-English-Speaking Citizens to Vote

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe state Senate on Monday approved legislation that would allow immigrants who are not U.S. citizens to assist voters casting a ballot.

The measure from Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, would allow for up to five non-citizens to serve at a particular polling site. Those poll workers must be permanent U.S. residents who legally entered the country.

Those residents could provide much-needed help to voters with limited English skills, said Sen. Norma Torres, D-Pomona, who presented Bonta’s bill. There are 2.6 million eligible California voters who are not fully proficient in English, she said.

“These individuals have the absolute right to make fully informed voting decisions on Election Day,” Torres said.

More than three dozen organizations involved in elections and immigrant advocacy have signaled their support for AB817.

Read more from this story HERE.

The $100,000 Obamaphone for Millionaires

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Photo Credit: National Review The Obamaphone lady is moving up in America: She isn’t a rabble-rouser in Cleveland anymore, but a real-estate developer in Maui, a ski-resort owner in Breckenridge, and a dedicated golfer in Scottsdale — and, more important, the telephone companies that serve them. And she isn’t costing taxpayers a couple hundred bucks a year in subsidies, but more than $100,000 per household.

That’s the finding of a new study released by economists Thomas Hazlett of George Mason University and Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute, who have turned their attention to the aptly named “high-cost fund” administered by the Federal Communications Commission and supported by the 16 percent universal-service tax levied on everybody from landline users to voice-over-IP customers. The fund has spent some $64 billion on carrier subsidies since 1998, and while there is some dispute about how many additional households have phone connections thanks to those outlays, the highest estimates run around 600,000, meaning a cost of more than $100,000 per household.

The program was originally developed to help extend basic communications to poor people in remote rural areas without telephone service. But the United States ran out of poor people in remote rural areas without telephone service a good long while ago. The administrators of federal programs fear nothing so much as looking for a job in the private sector, so the program found new products to subsidize, such as broadband internet, and new places to subsidize them: No more dirt farms in the sticks, but high-end developments — “mansion-lined gated golf communities” in the words of Dave Herman of the Alliance for Generational Equity, which sponsored the study.

According to Hazlett, the $4.5 billion-a-year program has connected at most 0.5 percent of U.S. households to telephone service.

Read more from this story HERE.

GOP Immigration Plan Devised by Communist Party

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Photo Credit: WNDThe U.S. Senate’s “Gang of Eight” immigration-reform plan, as well as a strikingly similar plan now being backed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and a bi-partisan House “Gang,” both offer the “roadmap to citizenship” originally conceived and carefully developed by members of the Communist Party USA working within the Democratic Party and the radical left activist network for the purpose of using amnestied illegals to build a “permanent progressive majority.”

That is the inescapable conclusion readers will draw after reading the forthcoming book by acclaimed researcher and blogger Trevor Loudon, titled “The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress.” Although not yet published, Loudon agreed to allow readers to preview one chapter, titled “Latino Immigrants: Tools to Ensure a ‘Governing Coalition’ for the Left.”

In the book, Loudon exhaustively documents the Left’s longtime agenda regarding illegal aliens and how its activists have gone about implementing it. He provides irrefutable proof that the entire immigration-reform movement was the brainchild of American communists and that their goal has long been to establish unchallengeable political supremacy.

According to Loudon, the Communist Party USA has influenced U.S. policy toward illegals since at least the 1960s. He traces the history, showing how communists and communist-founded organizations slowly built the movement from the ground up. While other groups certainly joined the effort, the communists were always at the center.

For example, he tells the story of CPUSA member Bert Corona, the “Communist Father of the ‘Immigrants Rights’ movement.” In 1964, Corona, Cesar Chavez and future Democratic Socialists of America member Dolores Huerta forced Congress to end the guest worker “Bracero” program. Later, Corona sought ways to address “problems confronting Mexicans in the United States who had no visas or citizenship documents” – in other words, illegal aliens – including “how to defend persons detained by immigration authorities and how to help immigrants acquire disability and unemployment insurance and welfare.”

Along the way, Corona founded and/or led numerous organizations, such as the Mexican American Political Association, or MAPA, Centro de Action Social Autonoma, or CASA, and La Hermandad Mexicana Nacional (the National Mexican Brotherhood), all influential in the “immigrant rights” movement. The Communist Party still has strong influence in MAPA, which acts as a king-maker for Democratic Party candidates in the Los Angeles area.

Antonio Villaraigosa, former Los Angeles mayor and 2012 chairman of the Democratic National Convention, got his start with CASA. He was also a former member of the Communist Venceremos Brigades and worked with the Brigades in Cuba. As mayor of Los Angeles, he was “the most pro-illegal immigrant mayor the city has ever seen.”

Lorenzo Torrez, a long-time organizer of the Arizona Communist Party, paved the way for Communist-backed Congressmen Ed Pastor and Raul Grijalva to win congressional seats in Arizona. He organized opposition to Southwestern states attempting to prevent illegal immigration and also helped change voting patterns across the entire region.

Loudon’s book identifies many influential communist and socialist politicians holding positions of influence in Congress and state and local governing bodies. For example, Rep. Judy Chu, D.-Calif., writes Loudon, has “a thirty-year history with the now defunct pro-China Communist Workers Party (CWP) and its surviving networks.” Chu is an advocate for “progressive” immigration reform and was a co-sponsor of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill introduced by Rep. Luis Gutierrez in 2010. In 2012, Chu served as co-chair of President Obama’s reelection campaign.

Today’s Communist Party USA cites the current amnesty effort as its top legislative priority. Its official position is virtually indistinguishable from that of the Democratic Party:

As Congress begins to draft legislation, immigrant rights groups and the labor movement including the AFL-CIO and its constituent organizations, SEIU, Change to Win, and many faith-based groups are mobilizing for comprehensive immigration reform with legalization, a path to citizenship and workers’ rights …

This legislative and political battle is also at the top of the agenda of the Communist Party USA and Young Communist League. Our program includes stopping deportations now as legislation is being adopted, and calling for legalization with a clear and speedy road map to citizenship for all 11 million. Future workers who come should have the same opportunity.

But it was left to Eliseo Medina to let the cat out of the bag. Medina, writes Loudon, “is both the country’s most influential ‘immigration reform’ activist and a Marxist. He is an Honorary Chair of Democratic Socialists of America”:

Medina learned voting strategies from Fred Ross, a Saul Alinsky-trained activist and the brains behind Cesar Chavez. Ross was to eventually have an impact on the national stage. Fred Ross conceived the voter outreach strategy that not only elected Communist Party affiliate Ed Roybal as Los Angeles’ first Latino Council member in 1949, but also laid the groundwork for the Obama campaign’s Latino voter outreach campaign in 2008 …

Medina worked hand in hand with UNITE HERE President John Wilhelm, to change AFL-CIO immigration policy at the 1999 Los Angeles Convention. Then, claiming U.S. immigration policy is “broken and needs to be fixed,” the AFL-CIO on February 16, 2000, called for a new amnesty for millions of undocumented workers and the repeal of the 1986 law that criminalized hiring them …

According to the SEIU website, Medina has played the leading role in uniting Change to Win and AFL-CIO behind the immigration reform movement …

In 2009, Medina said, “We reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters. Can you imagine if we have, even the same ratio, two out of three? If we have eight million new voters … We will be creating a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle …”

Republican support

But why would Republicans get behind such a plan? Some astute political observers advise that when politicians appear to be promoting agendas against their own interest, follow the money. As Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian put it, “It’s no surprise that the Republicans supporting this thing are the ones with ties to the Chamber of Commerce, not ordinary voters.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and others have also stuffed the Senate bill with special perks for their backers – in Graham’s case, a provision granting more visas to workers for South Carolina’s meat industry. Rubio supposedly sought an amendment to assist Florida’s cruise-ship industry although he insists this is untrue.

But even if big business benefits, the cheap labor advantages are only temporary. Once illegal aliens are fully legalized, businesses will be required to provide just as much in pay and benefits as they pay American workers. In the meantime, however, it is widely assumed those workers will take jobs from American citizens, depress wages and increase unemployment. Moreover, in many key swing states, projected amnesties will swamp the rolls of the unemployed (see table).

Proposed Senate legislation delays full citizenship for 13 years, but if a bill passes, follow-on legislation is expected to accelerate that timeframe.

However, it is not even necessary for illegal aliens to achieve citizenship to significantly impact the vote in key districts. As a recent report for Capital Research Center detailed, Democrats are already employing illegals to boost get-out-the-vote efforts among Hispanics and won a major victory in a local Arizona election in 2011. They hope this strategy will win them key swing states, especially Texas, whose electoral votes will, many calculate, provide guaranteed Democratic presidents for the foreseeable future.

House Speaker John Boehner, R.-Ohio, has made much of his intention to ignore the Senate proposal and “do our own bill.” What the House has come up with, however, is considered by most to be “Rubio Lite.”

Boehner has enlisted former Republican VP candidate Ryan to promote the House plan. Ryan and the Republicans are working with some far-left House Democrats, including Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a former member of the Marxist-Leninist Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and Xavier Becerra, both members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and both longtime amnesty activists.

In an interview following Senate passage of the Gang of Eight bill, Fox News’ Sean Hannity pounded Ryan on the issue of border security:

HANNITY: So, my sources have been telling me, Congressman, that you guys are considering a five-year temporary legal status, and then [if] the border security measure is not met in five years, that that would be revoked.

RYAN: That’s right. That’s right.

HANNITY: I don’t believe that would ever happen.

RYAN: Well, look, they can’t get – what a person would want to have, is they would come out of the shadows, they get put on probation, they pay taxes, pay fines, learning English, learning civics. If they break the terms of their probation, they can be deported. And if the border is not secure by that time, if the verification system is not up and running, they can’t get – not only does that status go away, they can’t legal permanent residence …

So, illegal aliens would be granted legal status immediately, but five years down the road, if the fence still isn’t built and e-verify still isn’t being used, then their legal status would be revoked. Given that the Department of Homeland Security is already allegedly ignoring border security –with immigration and customs agents suing their own agency for failing to enforce the law – many voters place little confidence in political promises of future enforcement.

Boehner has announced a closed-door meeting with the entire Republican caucus, scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday, July 10, to decide the immigration issue, a meeting Politico calls “the most important day for immigration reform.”

Although this meeting was originally requested by Rep. Steve King, R.-Iowa, to air grave concerns shared by many Republicans over this “reform,” it is unclear if this meeting was the House speaker’s answer to King or his own idea. In either case, many fear Boehner will use the meeting as a vehicle to impose the plan as though it were a done deal.

In the meantime, Senate and House opponents have been painstakingly highlighting what they consider to be glaring flaws in these proposals:

Every single border security provision in the Senate bill, including the hire of 20,000 Border Patrol agents, denying amnesty to criminals, building fences and installing surveillance devices, can be waived by the Homeland Security secretary.
Both the House and Senate proposals emphasize the path to citizenship – the centerpiece of communist efforts – while making border security both vague and secondary.

Both bills provide a $5,000 incentive for companies to hire the newly legalized illegal aliens instead of Americans, since the aliens would not be subject to the Obamacare coverage mandate.

Although politicians and the media have settled on the claim that there are 11 million illegal aliens, the actual number may well be closer to 20 million to 30 million. There were 10 million in 1996, a mere 10 years after Reagan’s amnesty, and it is doubtful only one million more have been added in the ensuing 17 years. Since 1990, Border agents have apprehended on average more than 1 million illegal aliens per year, almost all from Mexico.

When the Reagan amnesty became law, the intention was to naturalize only 1.2 million people, but the actual figure turned out to be 2.7 million. Statistics on illegal immigration have longed tended to be underestimated, sometimes vastly so.

Thus, current proposals provide a path to citizenship for as many as 20 to 30 million illegal aliens here now, plus relatives who will be brought in through chain migration and at least 75 percent of those who will come in the future – virtually endless amnesty – while efforts to secure the border are almost certain to be insufficient.

Representatives Steve King, R-Iowa; Louie Gohmert, R-Texas; Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif.; Trey Goudy, R-S.C.; Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.; and others – 70 House members in all – as well as senators Ted Cruz, R-Texas; Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.; Mike Lee, R-Utah and others have sought to highlight the dangers of this legislation, with Rep. King recently stating:

If the House passed border security and interior security and sent that over to the Senate, Harry Reid is not going to take that up. Chuck Schumer has said that citizenship has to be part of the deal. It’s not going to go to the president’s desk, so why would the House take up anything if there’s no prospect that we’re going to improve the immigration situation, just the prospect that they’re going to jam amnesty on us?

With polls showing more than two-thirds of Americans don’t believe “immigration laws would be enforced in the future if illegal aliens were given amnesty,” it is clear that passage of the current Republican-backed bill may indeed fulfill the agenda of its communist originators – the creation of a permanent Democrat voting majority, guaranteeing permanent control of the United States government by leftist progressives.

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James Simpson is an investigative journalist, businessman and former economist and budget examiner for the White House Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Simpson’s work is published at AIM.org, American Thinker, Breitbart, Capital Research Center, Washington Times, WorldNet Daily and elsewhere. He is also featured in Curtis Bowers’ award winning documentary Agenda: Grinding America Down.

Experts: Both Parties Selling Out American Workers with Amnesty Bill

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Photo Credit: WND“Self-preservation has always been regarded as the first law of nature…Those who favor unrestricted immigration care nothing for the people. They are simply desirous of flooding the country with unskilled as well as skilled labor of other lands for the purpose of breaking down American standards.” – Samuel Gompers, founder, American Federation of Labor

The Gang of Eight’s Immigration Reform bill was celebrated by groups as diverse as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, LaRaza, Karl Rove and the new leadership of the AFL-CIO. Some observers say this is an example of real political compromise. Others say this is insider political corruption at its worst.

Sen. Ted Cruz says the alliance is not only suspicious, but “egregious” if the goal is actually economic or humanitarian. He says that buried deep in SB 744 is verbiage that allows the IRS to place a $5,000 fee on any employer who hires a legal African-American, Hispanic, union member, or other legal, disadvantaged applicant:

“I filed an amendment that would have corrected one of the most egregious aspects of the Gang of Eight bill as it intersects with Obamacare legislation, namely a penalty imposed on U.S. employers for hiring U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents. This bill says if an employer hires a citizen or a legal immigrant, the IRS can impose a $5,000 penalty on that employer. But if the employer instead hires someone with RPI [provisional] status [for illegal aliens], that penalty will go away. That is utterly and completely indefensible.

“Nobody in this body wants to see African-American unemployment go up. Nobody wants to see Hispanic unemployment go up, youth unemployment go up, union household unemployment go up, legal immigrant unemployment go up. Yet every one of those will happen if this Gang of Eight bill passes without fixing this problem. If that happens, all 100 members of the U.S. Senate will be accountable to our constituents for explaining why we voted to put a federal penalty on hiring U.S. citizens and hiring legal immigrants. I hope this body will choose to pass my amendment and fix this grave defect in the Gang of Eight legislation,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Navy Vet’s FOIA for the NSA’s Data Collection on Him Rejected Due to “National Security”

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Clayton Seymour, a 36-year-old IT specialist from Hilliard, Ohio, recently sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NSA, curious as to whether any data about him was being collected.

What he received in response made his blood boil.

“I am a generally law abiding citizen with nothing I can think of that would require monitoring,” Seymour wrote to me, “but I wanted to know if I was having data collected about me and if so, what.”

So Seymour sent in an FOIA request. Weeks later, a letter from the NSA arrived explaining that he was not entitled to any information. “When I got the declined letter, I was furious,” he told me. “I feel betrayed.”

Seymour had decided to request his NSA file after coming across a recent post of mine instructing Americans on how to properly request such files from the FBI and NSA. A Navy vet and two-time Obama voter who supported the President’s platform of greater governmental transparency, Seymour was shocked by the letter he received.

Read more from this story HERE.

Head of Fed’s CFPB Has No Idea How Many Americans the Agency Has Under Surveillance

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller A top official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could not tell the House Committee on Financial Services how many Americans are being monitored through the agency’s secretive data collection program Tuesday.

This response led some Republican lawmakers to question how seriously the bureau takes privacy concerns.

“It’s inconceivable to me, unless you’re the most dysfunctional agency in the entire world, that you’d come before the committee today unable to answer the very simple questions you’ve been asked,” Florida Republican Rep. Bill Posey told Steven Antonakes, the acting deputy director of the CFPB, at a contentious hearing.

…[W]hen Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy asked Antonakes how many Americans were included in the new database, he had no answer.

“I couldn’t give you an accurate range,” Antonakes replied, prompting an incredulous response from the congressman. Previous reports have put the number of individual consumers monitored by the CFPB at least 10 million.

Read more from this story HERE.