A friend who works on public policy issues flagged this to me and I'm wondering if anyone else has heard about it. I've been searching around, but there isn't a lot of information out there about it.

When Congress comes back from their August vacay, one of the bills they have to pass is the annual National Defense Authorization Act. This is one of these absolutely essential to pass bills that gets treated like a Christmas Tree with everyone trying to hang their pet ornament (or piece of pork) on it.

I am told that the House version this year contains a provision that is supposed to make it harder to offer high-interest loans to active duty military, military families and veterans. This sounds awesome, except that it contains a provision written by congresswoman Katie Porter that would make lenders who are offering credit to active duty military, military families and veterans collect tons of new data related to their service/their family members’ service that is not currently collected, in order to accomplish this.

Does anyone know anything about this? As I understand it, the Military Lending Act already makes short term loans with interest rates over 36% illegal, so I don't know if this provision does anything meaningful anyway. But it strikes me that with all the data breaches we've seen lately (ahem Equifax) this could put a lot more personal information of people literally on this subreddit out there on servers and in data centers to be hacked and exploited, and people don't even know that it might become law.

I'm going to call my congressman and ask about this but if anyone else has any information it'd be nice to know.