US government using credit history pulls without court authorisation.
I don't really see how this is much of a surprise: The Pentagon and CIA have been pulling the credit records of US citizens without telling them.. Frankly, this is SOP these days. Anyone with $30us to spend can buy the credit history of anyone in this country without even a second glance. It's mostly legal to do so because information brokering companies are in the business of selling information, with the understanding (usuall enforced by a click-through agreement) that the information will not be abused. It has been a reasonably common practice for at least the past ten years for employers to pull the credit histories of prospective employees. Background checking companies and skiptracers have been doing this for nearly 30 years now. Even private citizens do this from time to time to check up on not only themselves, but sometimes their significant others. This is commodity information, and doesn't really fall under FISA. Hell, for all we know these days, it might fall under the heading of OSINT because credit histories can be gotten so readily for so little.