Big Brother wants to watch you more closely. Especially how you spend your money.

His latest snooping plan comes from provisions in the banking bill being debated in the Senate. The bill is being pushed by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Among other things, the bill is supposed to alert regulators to hazards in the industry to prevent another financial meltdown like the one that started in September 2008, and to make it easier to spot rip-off artists like Bernard Madoff.

The bill sets up two new supersnooping federal agencies to collect data on ordinary Americans:

•The Office of Financial Research. This supposedly would predict risk in the system by collecting massive amounts of new financial data, such as patterns of credit card use.

•The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It would collect data, especially on consumer transactions.

The data are supposed to be “scrubbed” of individual identifiers, so your privacy would be protected. But that might not work, Mark Calabria told us; the director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute formerly was a member of the senior professional staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.