Obama bureaucracy left our private data more vulnerable than ever

Without your knowledge or permission, the Obama administration collected and warehoused your most private bank records and continued to sweep them up — despite repeated warnings the data wasn’t being properly protected. Now there’s a good chance your personal information could be in the hands of identity thieves or even terrorists.

The government isn’t sure who has your information. It only knows the Obama-era databases have been breached by outsider threats potentially 1,000-plus times. That’s according to a recent investigation of cyber-intrusions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where the sensitive information is stored.

The number of confirmed breaches of consumers’ personally identifiable information is “just north of 200,” revealed Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget chief who took control of the CFPB late last year, in testimony to Congress. “We think there’s another 800 [incidents of hacked information] that we suspect might have been lost, but we haven’t been able to nail that down.”

In fact, the bureau has suffered 233 confirmed hack attacks and another 840 suspected hacks, putting at risk the financial information and other personal data — including Social Security numbers and birthdates — of potentially millions of Americans.

Most people don’t know this, but after President Barack Obama created the CFPB, he had the powerful regulatory agency snoop into virtually every financial account held by Americans to assemble a massive and secret government database as part of the post-financial crisis overhaul of the banking industry.