Rarely does a federal agency concede that the program it is defending in court needs to be drastically overhauled. As Advancing American Freedom has stated in its amicus brief, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) created a serious constitutional contravention with its Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), a massive, invasive database of Americans’ personal information. The agency has spent the past year quietly rewriting CAT’s rules while trying to avoid defending its legality in court. While the SEC seeks delays in Davidson v. Atkins, the case challenging CAT, the database continues to swell.CAT is the SEC’s database that tracks every single stock and options order, execution, and cancellation in the U.S. financial markets in real time. The SEC wields an illegal tool that peeks into the personal lives of every single American who owns stock. But the SEC is yet again asking a federal court in Texas to forestall its consideration of a case challenging CAT for another six months. The courts should not allow the SEC to delay again.The SEC implemented CAT after the 2010 “flash crash” as a tool to help regulators reconstruct chaotic trading days. Ostensibly, a simple way to track and stop illegal activity in the market became something else: a permanent, centralized ledger that compels broker-dealers and exchanges to report the personal, completely lawful trading activity of tens of millions of Americans without a warrant, without even a suspicion of illegal activity, and without meaningful limits on how long the government keeps or uses the data.