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U.S. Secretly Tapping Bank Databases
The Washington Post and New York Times are reporting on a Bush administration initiative that has tapped into a vast global database of confidential financial transactions for nearly five years. Relying on a presidential emergency declaration made under the International Emergency Economic Powers, the administration has been surveilling the data from the SWIFT database, which links about 7,800 banks and brokerages and handles billions of transactions a year. From the article:
Together with a hundredfold expansion of the FBI's use of "national security letters" to obtain communications and banking records, the secret NSA and Treasury programs have built unprecedented government databases of private transactions, most of them involving people who prove irrelevant to terrorism investigators.The NYTimes goes on to say that the joint CIA-Treasury program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia. Still, the access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, and concerns were raised about legal and privacy issues.
It's not so secret any more!
Anyway...
Why don't companies announce immediately when they have been forced to do something by the government against their will (like Google)? As far as I was aware America is still a country where you can speak freely against the government without fear of punishment. Why not just admit it in public that you are being forced to hand over confidential information? If the banks are hiding it too, then they are as much to blame and should not be trusted.
Or is the government using threats to keep the banks quiet? If so, what threats do they use? And can anything be done about it to make sure it doesn't happen again?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
It would be greatly appreciated by the Billions of us that don't live there if you Americans would do something about your current government.
America increasingly represents the antithesis of 'freedom' and personal liberty especially for those in other countries. They are innovators in the strategic reduction of civil rights, at home and elsewhere. Freedom is not a brand, it's a right and you don't have to be American to have it FFS.
The CIA and NSA did see 911 coming.
It's just that if it had not happened then the US public wouldn't have been so tolerant of their own sons and daughters dieing in countries like Afganistan and Iraq while trying to secure the rest of the worlds oil reserves.
In Afganistan they wanted to build a pipeline that the taliban never would have agreed to. In Iraq, well the largest oil field in the world speaks for itself.
Just look at what was happening to US defense expenditure before 911. It was going down as the majority of the population realised that there was no big bad communist Russia to fight anymore so there was no need for aircraft carriers and nuclear subs.
Now we have terrorists, an enemy who can never go bust like Russia did. And if you kill a terrorist, 10 more just spring up their place. It is a war the US can never win. Which obviously suits the people who make from money from war by selling defense equipment to the US govt.
The NSA and CIA let planes crash into the twin towers and that conveniently empty (for redecoration apparantly) wing of the pentagon. They did this as they knew it would result in massive increase in their budgets.
And before you dismiss this as a troll, just think what you might ignore if you were looking at redundancy from somewhere you had worked for 20 years. From a career you enjoyed, possibly with no other hope of employment in the same field. After all, who hires people with a 20 year gap on their CV which they are not allowed to discuss for reasons of national security.
If all I had to do to protect it was look the other way briefly, I might just do it if I had a wife and 3 kids to support.
But herein lies the problem, the people on the other side are more desperate the we are. Most of Iraq has a much lower standard of living than the US, the population is on the edge of starvation, disease is rife and on top of that the country is a war zone where you might just catch a stray bullet or bit of shrapnel and die. Now on top of that only thing your country has of value to trade with (oil) is in the hands of foriegn companies (the only ones with the expertise to extract it) who are allied with the foriegn invaders. Try putting yourself in this position and think of how determined you might be to throw those foriegn invaders out.
But my final point is more disturbing than all of this. We now NEED the CIA and NSA. We need them to stop some super pissed of terrorist obtaining a nuclear device from Pakistan (Definately have nukes unlike Iran) or Iran (Maybe have nukes but definately dont like us) and blowing us up with it. All they have to do is smuggle the nuke onto a plane bound for the US from some third world country.
I dont read
But answer me this: what part of what he describes would be difficult for the USA government to do? Is it a good idea to simply let them have the power to do these things and assume they'll never exercise it?
The parent comment brings up some salient points. I unfortunately believe that his/her points only tangentially address the real problems we face now. Our nation and most importantly our government is showing all of the signs of age, as in biological age. It no longer functions effectively, but that is among the least of our problems, because the intent of Adams and Jefferson was that it would not. However, the problem is that is does not function effectively in representing the body politic. That was never intended. Our government was intended by those who wrote the Constitution ("Oh God, not that pain in the ass document again" as many in the Legislative and Executive branches say) to be inefficient in imposing its will on the populace. Back to aging, our society and culture seems to have bought into the idea that everything will be fine if only someone ELSE can take care of it for us. We are far too risk-averse, and on our way to proving Ben Franklin's quote about trading liberty for security true in the worst way. It is us, as a people, who bear the burden of responsibility for this. And it can bring us to our collective knees if it does not do us worse. My family came to this country long ago (about 175 years) and I cannot imagine my Grandparents, to say nothing of my Great-Grandparents, standing by and letting our rights be chivvied away as they are now. But the fact is that we do. More specifically, in the future we are going to face increasing encroachments on our right to be left alone, because of a fundamental flaw in jurisprudence. We can only expect privacy if it is "reasonable" in the current societal context, and with technology marching on, reasonable privacy is an ever shrinking circle. Could you imagine in the last century that you could not expect privacy in your own back yard. Well now Predator drones are flying overhead, so you cannot. It will go much farther than this. My bitch about this is done for now. I would only quote from one more free than I: "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their quick brown foxes running over lazy dogs and jumping away to the aid of their party." If we do not wake up and take the phrase "by the people and for the people" seriously, then we deserve what we get. I can find work anywhere, so what I'll do, if all is lost, is get away from this national and cultural self-destruction. Best of luck to the rest of you.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.