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US May Invoke "State Secrets" To Stop Banking Suit
An anonymous reader sends us to the International Herald Tribune for news that the Bush administration is signaling that it plans to turn once again to a favorite legal tool, the 'state secrets' privilege. The administration wants to shut down a lawsuit brought against Swift, a huge Belgium banking cooperative that that the article calls the "nerve center of the global banking industry," after it was revealed that Swift secretly let the CIA comb through millions of private financial records. Quoting: "Two US banking customers sued Swift on invasion-of-privacy grounds. Many legal and financial analysts expected that the lawsuit would be thrown out because US banking privacy laws are considered much more lax than those in much of Europe. But to the surprise of many, a judge refused to throw out the lawsuit in a ruling in June."
Sue in Belgium.
So, uhhhh, when will Americans start to realize that there's just a wee bit of fascism taking hold of their nation? You'd think with something as clear-cut as this, more people would wake up to that fact...
Since when can the State Secret privilege be used to keep secret a program that is probably illegal? That's an enormous conflict of interest. The president doesn't (or at least shouldn't) have the "privilege" to cover up what are probably illegal actions.
It's surprising how similar this administration is to Reagan's. I've been reading Noam Chomsky books just a little at a time because some of the things I learn make me physically ill.
Bush touts the media as having a liberal bias. In reality the media is strongly conservative, Fox news, rather than being the conservative voice, is just outright fascist, and most people still believe everything they hear on their particular brand of news. Expect very little protest as this most recent step in the massive defecation on our rights probably won't make a sub note in the evening news.
If not for the internet, you probably wouldn't have even heard about this.
"CIA takes neccessary steps to prevent the deaths of American children. Slashdot liberal weenies start to cry about the rights of terrorist criminals. CIA as usual disregards impotent nerdy chestbeating."
Even 'terrorist criminals' have rights. The value of an American child should not be greater than that of a child from any other country.
> They could do this because Swift also has a datacentre in the USA
> (because this data is very precious it has to be duplicated in
> geographically different areas).
So precious that bunch of Bushmonkeys get to pore over it?
This should all be taken care of within a generation or two, when even the holdout industries of banking and finance decide that doing business in the US is not worth it.
On some hypothetical "absolute scale" of liberal/conservative, it might be true that CNN or ABC is 'conservative' and Fox only more so, but in reality there is no absolute scale. Everything is relative to something else: either the citizenry at large, or to the consumers who affect a particular market.
To Noam Chomsky, it's probably true that CNN is very conservative. On his own scale, he's the zero point, and CNN is right of him, and Fox even further right of that. To Ann Coulter, they probably both read as rather leftist, because she's her own zero point and they're both left of her. Depending on which opinion poll you want to believe, the "American public" is somewhere else on the spectrum, and various news sources are 'conservative' or 'liberal' relative to that.
The only borderline-objective source for normalcy seems, to me, to be what the market actually produces in response to consumer desires. It's easy to lie on an opinion poll to make yourself look or feel good, when you're not spending your own money or time. But the market is a good measure of what people actually do; and people abandoned CNN in the late 90s and early 2000s to watch Fox News instead. That's an indicator to me, that the public is actually quite -- perhaps frighteningly -- conservative.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So called National Security Interests, that's what. If National Security Interests take precedence over the Geneva Conventions and Habeas Corpus, you can't really expect the US government to respect international banking and privacy laws either.
Look at everything their government has done to them while they've just sat their waving their flag.
... but failed to remember that it was CANADIAN government disaster response team that got into that area first ... even though several days had passed since the storm.
Look at the outright lies used by Bush to invade Iraq when it was well known that Iraq had nothing to do with 911, had no WMD's, and was already fully contained.
Look at the many ways their constitutionally protected rights have been stripped away, while not one of their judges has had the balls to do their job and strike down the Patriot Act and similar unconstitutional.
Look at the way they've allowed fundamentalist christian groups to take control, destroying the separation of church and state.
Look at the way their government has repressed the black community, including the needless destruction of New Orleans. Bush spoke at the 2 year anniversary of Katrina in the Lower 9th Ward
Look at the way they have yet again allowed their banking system to run scams that built up to the point of being able to hurt the world economy. About every 5 years its something, this time it was their unregulated 'sub-prime' mortgages. Golly Gee! maybe we shouldn't have been giving mortgages to people without even verifying their income! duhhhh!
The american people couldn't revolt their way out of a paper bag.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
The damage the current administration has done will last for quite a while after the next election. Do you really think the loyalties of the judges that have been appointed in the past 6 years are to the American people? That is the scary part of what this administration has done.
To my knowledge, the last report about it stated that the data-transaction to the American government had not stopped, since then the (small) mediastorm has passed over and nobody cares anymore.
This was recently up in Norwegian media too. I wasn't (couldn't? be) stopped, but our banks have to inform all their customers the US is snooping in all international transactions. Personally I find it rather astounding that other governments accept that a third party nation can look at all the financial transactions between two nations, but what do I know. I'm sure they'll resort to the same way money is smuggled out by immigrants - good old cash.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Since when did Clinton turn Liberal? Clinton was the guy who introduced the DMCA, 5 year max limit for anybody needing welfare, among other things. These points I just got off the top of my head. It's been said many times and in many ways that in America there is small "c" conservative and large "C" conservative. Nothing seems to be liberal about American politics except the rhetoric.
Last time I checked, "Texan" isn't a race, or even an ethnic group. The comment may have been in poor taste, and ad hominem at that, but it wasn't racist.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Your government is showing us a perfect example right now of why invading a country whose people don't want to be free never works.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
It has nothing to do with people desiring more conservative media as the grandparent states and everything to do with people exhausted by 9+ hour work days, then dealing with household chores, being quite literally hypnotized by flashing graphics and loud insistent voices. It worked for Hitler and unfortunately it seems to work for our new right wing authoritarians bent on taking over the world as well.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I was born in Texas.
I have lived in Texas all my life.
I have never in my life spoken any language with a Texas accent.
I've heard the Deep South drawl all my life, but never from someone who is thoughtful or considerate, let alone intelligent. It's a problem not because it implies poor diction or ignorance, but because it reliably represents a specific flavor of thoughtless, hostile, institutionalized idiocy. The stereotype didn't come from nothing.
And it is a fucking tragedy that the current U.S. president is one of them, nothing more than an ignominious third-grade bully, but even worse than that, he has validated the rest of the hostile, retarded hyenas who are just like him.
So I disagree, I think it was damned insightful.
First some history, there have always been times throughout history where violence tries to rob people of their rights and their humanity. It's even not the first time someone has tried to blow up a financial building in NYC. Here's one from 1920: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing Here's a different bombing not in NYC from 1927http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disa
Your right to be assured of your kids safety also doesn't trump the right of a "brownish shifty looking guy" to be secure in his person, papers and possessions or trump his right to Habeas Corpus. There are reasons that you equate the safety of your kid in whatever piss-ant town you live in, with massive invasive search that flaunt centuries old law. First you think that your kid qualifies as an important target, sorry no one outside of you family and friends thinks your kid is anything special. Second and probably the more important reason is that you are scared. When people are subconciously aware of their own moratlity they make very black and white emotional decisions. I highly recommend reading the whole linked article, it's shows the exact the Presidents insistence that "if we don't do this there will be another Sept.11th" works so well.
We are all just people.
Odds are that the Bush administration is using this data for other purposes such as his war against porn and offshore gambling, industrial and political espionage, etc.
Have gnu, will travel.
Don't worry at all. The thing is, the Bush administration is simply doing this, ONCE AGAIN, to hide the fact that they've behaved ethically for the past 8 years. All the problems? All the lies used to justify an illegal war of aggression? All the illegal prisons in Cuba, all the secret prisons in Europe? All the secret illegal wire-tapping programs? All the firing attorneys for purely political reasons? All of them had perfectly good explanations, but the Bush Administration is simply too humble to want everyone to know, so they use things like "state secrets" or "executive privilege" to protect themselves from the lack of controversy.
It's been a long time.
They do all that monitoring and they let the robber wire money to his bank account FIFTEEN times? Not possible to catch him? Yeah right.
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;).
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/30/03212
Call me real cynical but the reason why a lot of the stuff is secret is because the rich and powerful don't want "the wrong people" to know how much money they are moving about and where. Same reason why these "holes" are there in the first place.
They don't want to "accidentally" catch the big fish while catching the small fry
"When any other country achieves half as much as the US does...."
Remind me what that achievement was again? All I see are a set of mindless genocidal murderers who want to enslave the rest of the world. In the short 200 years this appalling country has been in existence it has broken every treaty it has signed, invaded the native lands and murdered the original inhabitants, then picked on small nations colonize by force, while staying out of every big war until it could see who was going to win, and selling arms to both sides in the meantime to make a fortune. It then lies to itself, pretends that it was solely responsible for any victory gained, and preens itself producing Hollywood films which show Americans as the sole heros performing feats which were actually performed by other countries troops.
It is amazingly bad at either cultural or scientific input to humanity - I cannot think of a single advance which was uniquely American, but I can think of a lot of advances which, having been made, the Americans tried to take over and claim that they were theirs. Computing is a good example here, and Microsoft is a classic example of what America has given the world.
When America has done a tenth of what Greece or Italy has done for the world perhaps it will be able to begin to talk about it!