LITTLE ROCK – Attorney General Tim Griffin today issued the following statement after filing an amicus brief on behalf of 23 state attorneys general with the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit opposing the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) adopted by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—a database of personal information about each American involved in stock trading, including those owning 401(k)s:

“The SEC wants Americans to believe that it’s capable of securing a massive new database containing personal information about every single person who has a 401(k) or buys stock. But the SEC has a long history of failing to secure its computer systems. Indeed, just this year, its X (formerly Twitter) account was hacked, creating market chaos. That’s why I led a group of 23 attorneys general in filing an amicus brief supporting a challenge to that database, which Congress never authorized.”

Created in the wake of the 2010 “flash crash” caused by algorithmic trading decisions, CAT houses personal information about every retail investor and contains real-time information about their investment decisions. The SEC claims CAT will better enable it to reconstruct and analyze events like the flash crash.

CAT gives thousands of authorized government employees—and an unknown number of hackers across the globe—access to real-time information about every investor and investment decision. And, as the SEC has mandated that the CAT must contain personally identifiable information of every American investor who buys or sells stock, it has created a repository of information that is economically valuable to hackers and strategically valuable to America’s foreign adversaries.

Other states joining Arkansas in the amicus brief include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.

To read Griffin’s filing, click here.

To download a pdf of the release, click here.