Hester Peirce's parting speech takes aim at finance's mass data collection

Hester Peirce's parting argument to the digital-asset industry, delivered eight days before she left the SEC, was about data rather than tokens.

Speaking at SIFMA's Digital Assets Conference on Sept. 23, she described a society at a crossroads, according to Will Schwartz, a policy associate at the Blockchain Association. Schwartz recounts the speech in a CoinDesk opinion piece published on her last day at the agency, and writes that she did not treat the occasion as a victory lap.

One road, as Schwartz describes it, runs through dragnet surveillance, the datafication of every aspect of life, and cybersecurity breaches that expose sensitive information to bad actors worldwide. The other leads to a world with both privacy and security, where Americans can prove they are following the law without handing over their personal information.

Schwartz writes that Peirce describes a system built for more than 50 years on mass collection and storage of personal data from every American who interacts with it, with businesses passing that data to a government tracking actual criminal activity — the “needle,” in her phrasing, in a “haystack” of innocent Americans' records. The needle, Schwartz writes, is rarely found there.

The piece credits Peirce with more than eight years at the Commission, where Schwartz writes she frequently dissented under the previous chairman when the agency brought enforcement actions instead of writing rules the industry could follow, and with proposing a token safe harbor years before regulators were ready to listen. He also credits her with leading the Crypto Task Force and insisting that the agency's duty to protect investors required it to provide regulatory guardrails for the industry.

Schwartz frames the remarks as work still to be done, even in her absence. Because the account comes from a staffer at an industry trade group writing as she departed, it reports what she argued rather than what the agency does next. The choice she drew, as he tells it, is between a compliance system that runs on stored personal data and one that does not.