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Financial Responsibility == Terrorism?
An anonymous reader writes "Capital Hill Blue is reporting that recently a retired Texas schoolteacher and his wife had a little run in with the Department of Homeland Security. The crime? Paying down some debt. From the article: 'The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522. And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable. [...] They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified.'"
This isn't surprising. I work for a regional bank. Every employee is required to undergo training to know "what to look for". Doesn't matter if you are a teller, or a computer help desk operator. Anything over a certain dollar limit must be reported. As time goes on, the threshold has lowered. Pay off your house early? Gets reported. Large deposit? gets recorded. And anything overseas gets more scrutiny than J-Lo's panty lines.
The training creeped me out. the uber-patriotic person assigned to train our group was so into it. 3/4 of our group thought it was great... bringing down meth dealers who weren't smart enough to structure their money better. In fact, however, structuring is a crime as well... Go just below the radar one too many times, and you can be charged, eevn if there is no illegal activity behind the generation of money.
And, I would be wise to post AC (I won't, so this message might get more credibility) as advising someone how to avoid setting off the bells and whistles is a crime too.
We don't live in 1984, but we might be at 1983...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
And Bin Laden is still free.
Isin't that funny you can be freer in Afghanistan than in the US.
Everyone on /. send me a dollar. I will apply it to one of my credit cards and then we will see how quickly the FBI shows up. I don't mind taking the hit. So as soon as I collect a dollar from everyone I will make the payment. Not a problem. Glad to do it. It's all for the experiment.
>
>And Bin Laden is still free.
He hates us for our freedom. All this means is that he's got less and less reason to hate us every day!
Of course. Living within your means is un-American. Did you not get the memo?
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Just to put things into perspective, you have a greater chance of being killed or injured by your own car than you do suffering death or injury from a terrorist attack.
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Which is why you need a driver's license, are required to wear seat belts, can't drive before a certain age, and have to drive a vehicle that meets government safety standards. It's also why you're required to have regular inspections, and why you can be pulled over and ticketed for driving with faulty equipment, or arrested and jailed for driving under the influence or even just recklessly.
In other words, not a good example to support your argument. (Which I basically agree with otherwise.)
But this all misses the point. Where is the rest of this story? All we know from this article, factually (or at least according to these people, who may or may not be telling the truth), is that one is a retired schoolteacher and they were contacted by homeland security because of a large payment they made. We also know that this guy has a lot of anger towards the government that may or may not have been caused by this action by DHS, or it may have existed previously and manifested itself in other ways. We don't know for how long or why these people were under surveillance by DHS - and some people have pretty good reasons for being under surveillance. (Yes, even Americans - remember Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols?)
Now, if large payments alone were a trigger for a DHS audit, you can bet it would be front page news. Millions of people every year make large payments into their IRA's or on their home mortgages at various times for tax purposes, or other reasons. I myself have made payments larger than $6,000 on both my credit cards and student loans, and I can assure you that's not my normal payment amount - but I have yet to be contacted by DHS. Why is that? The only difference between me and this guy, according to this article, is that he is a retired Texas schoolteacher and I work in the entertainment industry. The DHS must love their cable TV.
No, it just sounds fishy. Either the story is made up, or there's a long backstory here that we're not getting. Otherwise this surveillance would appear to be basically random (targetting some people who make payments like this but not others), in which case they may as well just close their eyes, open a phone book and point to get their latest victim. Why even bother?
Sometimes I do get a little tired of seeing these conspiracy theory stories on
And perhaps you are willing to wink at criminal behaviour so that you can secretly wire a few thousand quid to your mistress without having a few questions raised. I am not.
And here we have it, folks. That fantastic attitude called "If you don't like it, you must be doing something wrong". Every scare and people like you grant the government more power to brighten your fucking night light. It's okay to trample our civil liberties as long as those nasty drug traffickers are brought to justice.
Fuck you, Ritz.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
The reasoning behind this is because, generally, if you have that much debt, you do *not* have the means to pay it off. The reasoning continues that people deep in debt can get desperate--and indeed, they do. Many financial crimes have been born out of pure desperation.
Therefore, they generally reason that any time you suddenly have a large pile of cash, they want to know where you got it from (the implication being that you might have stolen, embezzeled, or acquired it from some other illegal activity).
But yeah, it's not exactly a good thing for your privacy. Even so, there are enough laws on the books that merely having too much *cash* is a bad thing. I think that you can be accused of drug trafficing or something silly for having more than $10k in cash, too, but IANAL and that may just be some random Internet rumour.
Been that way since the '80s.
Bush hasn't been president since the '80s, so that cannot be true!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Of course the feds are interested in the movement of money over x. And I see that there are plenty of readers eager to justify the monitoring of citizens all in the name of security.
It is interesting that the justifications that existed when the level of x was thousands of dollars are now quoted when x is hundreds, when in theory, the effects of inflation should cause x to increase.
In a few years, as technology, and data storage, and indexing allows, all transactions will be reported, catalogued, and analyzed, all in the name of security, and there will be plenty of readers that will be happy to step up to the plate and explain the justifications.
The real reasons of course are about control of the masses, and to maintain authority by reminding all citizens that they are being watched and can be brought in to explain their actions and transactions at any time should their activity, be it financial or political opinion, raise an eyebrow in Washington, or the local town hall.
While this particular example of credit card activity may or may not have occurred, the interesting point is that the assumption is that if someone's financial activity appears to change to a third party, the first party must explain their behaviour, as if there is a presumption of wrong doing.
This is in opposition to the principals set forth in the Bill of Rights and the forth amendment:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Since there is no probable cause to believe that a person with $600 or some other arbitrary amount has acquired the funds through illicit mechanisms, requiring the person to provide documentary evidence is clearly an illegal search and seizure.
This also may be a violation of the tenth amendment:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"
Since the ability to keep tabs and monitor the general population is not expressly granted to the federal government by the constitution, such activity must be the domain of the states. This is why the feds now claim that this is part of the "war against terrorism" to create a federal interest in monitoring of ordinary citizens, just like the illegal wiretapping of ordinary citizens phoning back to the old country.
The future is bleak, and the trends before us further demonstrate that these United States have continually moved from a democratic republic for the people, by the people, to a fascist state that operates in the interest of the new aristocracy, let's not forget that the most interesting of all financial transactions are the least scrutinized.
Has any else noticed the huge transfer of wealth from public coffers to private hands..? (hint: it was more than 600 bucks).
You had an onion tied to your belt, which was the style at the time... ... ;)
sorry, coulnd't resist.
I'm assuming from the way you worded your post you're a US citizen. If you're not a citizen, well, the following only really applies to citizens and you can read about how the US so warmly treats its citizens that travel there.
The US does NOT welcome you back from a trip to Cuba with welcome arms unless you either have a license to travel there from OFAC, or if you went there quietly and never mentioned it to immigration.
If you go to Cuba without a license (eg to visit your dying grandfather), and are honest enough to tell immigration about it when you come back into the USA, you get a big Illegal CUBA stamp on your passport, and then get a friendly threatening letter from OFAC a few months down the line. Sometimes they'll 'nicely' let the problem disappear for a $10,000 fine. That's a nice pair of welcoming open arms there, pal.
And the open arms aren't necessarily guaranteed even if your travel to cuba is licensed. I've travelled to Cuba twice, both time perfectly legally as licensed with OFAC. One of those times we first flew to Canada, then to Cuba. Believe it or not that was the easier way to go. The more difficult way involved flying to Miami first, and then dealing with the absolute worst set of red tape I've ever dealt with in any travel. If going out wasn't bad enough, coming back through Miami was absolutely horrible, when my girlfriend and I didn't join in the immigration official's anti-communist tirade, he sent us and our luggage to be hand-inspected for evidence of illegal farm visits. Again, nice open arms there.
And to anyone reading this, if you are issued a license to go to Cuba, think seriously about going through Canada (or Mexico) first, instead of flying through Miami, it will really make your life much easier.
make world, not war
These things are really bipartisan with 9/11 just advancing what would have slowly occurred over the next 20 years to occur within just a few. Prior to 9/11 and during the 90s they used things like "It is for the children", to pass laws like these. For example during the Clinton years we had the bipartisan "1996 Welfare Reform Act". What most Americans do not realize that Act created the single most invasion of every Americans privacy in history. (enacted long before 9/11). Due to the Welfare Reform Act every employer is required to report their employees (or face fines) to the new hires database. The new hires database is used to track where Americans citizens are working at all times in case they ever father or mother a child. Therefore the used for the purpose of locating you for lifestyle child support collection.
Just replace Anti-Soviet and Counter-Revolutionary with the word Terrorist and you'll get something that is uncannily similar to this:
* n.b. the abbreviations may not match up with the descriptions because they are acronyms for russian words.
The above list was taken from Solzhenitsyn's study on the Gulag. They were criminal codes (mainly Article 58) used by the soviets as reasons to send people the off to the Gulag. Note that the first two (ASA and KRD) were used very liberally, for example, some engineers were warning that a particular railway system was not going to work. They were slammed with KRD and tossed in the Gulag. Later on the system failed as they had warned. They were brought out to fix it but put back as soon in when it was done.
Perhaps Bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11? This is quite the opposite of what most everyone seems to assume, but when the FBI's suspected suicidal hijackers start turning up alive after 9/11, I think we have to question their whole case:
1 51.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559
And that is hardly the end of the problems with the official story of 9/11. There are plenty of sites that have raised legitimate issues with regards to the nature of the WTC building collapses (3 buildings suffered complete, symmetric collapses that resembled controlled demolitions) and the "failure" of the air-intercept system.
While the above may seem to be off-topic, consider what has been justified on the basis of the official story. Shouldn't we be a little more sceptical of this version of events, as it is often the justification for so much that goes on?
Obviously you haven't been doing much traveling. Check out Cuba, Nicaragua, Israel, Croatia (until recently), etc. No matter where I've been the U.S. has always welcomed me back with open arms compared to some of the places I've traveled.
Just think about what you've written. You're saying the US is not so bad, not compared to Cuba, Nicaragua, Croatia, Israel. If you're trying to say that the US is not such a fortress state and in doing so favourably compare it to countries like Cuba or Nicaragua, or countries undergoing as much *real* terrorism as Israel, or countries with such recent mass-conflicts such as Croatia, then you're not doing a very favourable comparison.
... And the attackers of the Sep 11 2001 weren't hiding their identity at all or borrowing from other people (there have been some clouds around the real identity of Muhammad Atta though, the family Atta denies the person being their [missing] son).
The interesting and most Anti-PATRIOT thing about the suicide bombers of Sep 11 2001 was that they were just normal. They were regular students at a regular university in Germany. They had regular student visa for both Germany and U.S., they were using their regular passports, they were openly going to their preferred mosque.
They did nothing to hide their tracks. Of course they wanted a good credit report on their credit cards. Of course they didn't want to be chased by debt collectors. Of course they didn't want the cheques they were writing to bounce. Basicly all they did was being good citizens. And that should scare anyone who thinks waging a War on Terror might be a good idea. If you didn't to anything wrong, you are a prime suspect.