In today’s Wall Street Journal, CEI’s John Berlau explains how the mortgage bailout bill contains ominous provisions that would create a vast fingerprint database.  The bill also contains customer-reporting requirements that could undermine data security and privacy rights.

As I noted yesterday, the mortgage bailout bill, which Bush has threatened to veto, is welfare for the politically-connected.  It gives a reckless federal agency that spawned the mortgage crisis even more opportunity to gamble with taxpayer funds, bails out a mortgage lender that gave senators sweetheart loans, and contains pork for politically-connected special interest groups.   It will further destabilize the housing market by encouraging borrowers to default.