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Obama Administration To Allow All Spy Agencies To Scour Americans' Finances
New submitter KrisJon writes "The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters. Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of 'suspicious customer activity.' A move like the FinCEN proposal 'raises concerns as to whether people could find their information in a file as a potential terrorist suspect without having the appropriate predicate for that and find themselves potentially falsely accused,' said Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel for the Rule of Law Program at the Constitution Project, a non-profit watchdog group."
Hope and "look at all that change left in your bank account"
I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message.
sudo make me a sandwich
and some duct-tape at your local Home Depot, and I guarantee you you'll be flagged as a terrorist. Thinking of paying for things in cash to avoid that? That looks suspicious too these days.
Welcome to the Vater^H^H^H^H^HHomeland Americans. Enjoy your civil liberties while you can...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
somewhere, and he wants it!
Obama administration - making sure you're broke and enforcing it in every way possible!
(unless you're a campaign contributor of course, then you get "stimulus")
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Total surveillance is the road to hell. Once the people have reached a suitable level of fear, those in power can do anything and everything. It does not take long to start killing off those deemed "undesired". Or better, lock them up and have the other pay for that. Already happening? Maybe the US voters are asleep at the wheel?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And people wonder why gun owners don't want the Feds to have a central database with all of our names, addresses, etc. in it. I'm all for background checks, but I'll be damned if I let the government develop a database they can "scour" like this for whatever purposes they deem fit in some nebulous future where the party I trust the *least* is in power.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I realize facts are anathema to political discourse, but the president doesn't operate in a vacuum. Congress has just as much, if not more, blame than either Bush or Obama have. The sooner people see this, the sooner the messes can be cleaned up. Too bad it won't happen as long as The People are more concerned with Facebook, Twitter, et al.
Certain interesting financial transactions have been reported on for quite some time. This predates both Obama and Bush II. The only thing new here is perhaps the idea that people are actually looking at the information we've been collecting pretty much forever.
You're pretty tardy if you are trying to get your panties in a bunch over this situation.
Yeah, if they collect it they are going to data mine it sooner or later. That's pretty obvious. That's why you don't create the data to begin with.
Horse left the barn and the barn burned down there a long time ago.
Although I wouldn't mind getting back the $500 and $1000 bills what with inflation being what it is.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I agree with your statements. The answer to your question on where am I going to get my supplies is 'from my neighbor who doesn't believe in gun ownership and thinks the cops will show during a crisis.'
I just always assumed they were already doing this.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
This is slashdot. If we can't spin it into "OMG Obama/MS/Apple/Patents/Republicans are evil and spying on us and there is no freedom" it's not worth mentioning.
Yet again, Obama ceases to surprise me. Anyone who wasn't dazzled by the "hope and change" saw this coming a mile away. I can understand people being fooled the first time around. It was the charismatic yet relatively unknown Obama vs. John "Bush squared" McCain.
Then Obama turned out to be Bush cubed. He continued exactly the same policies that Bush put in place, then added his own touch by maxing out the taxpayer's credit card several times trying to fix the economy with no better results than could easily be explained by the economy recovering on its own, pushing through a health care law that basically merged the worst parts of American and European style systems with almost none of the benefits, increased domestic spying to a level that would have had Bush salivating, claimed the right to kill citizens with drones, and now wants to peek in on all our bank accounts.
Anyone who voted for Obama deserves exactly what they get. It's just too bad they had to drag me into all this. Can't I just opt out of all this nonsense and take my chances with the terrorists?
What's it going to take for people to realize that Obama is just as bad as and in many ways worse than Bush?
I swear, Obama could issue an executive order mandating that they suck a dick and the apologists would just shrug and say "Yeah, but Bush would have made us swallow!"
It would be grand if people only had to live with the consequences of the policies they support.
LK
It would be even nicer if people understood that we have this thing called Congress, and that THEY are the ones who passed the laws which require your bank to report this activity in the first place.
"legal experts emphasize that this sharing of data is permissible under U.S. law. Specifically, banks' suspicious activity reporting requirements are dictated by a combination of the Bank Secrecy Act and the USA PATRIOT Act"
If you really must bitch, at least bitch about the right people. You retards are busy attacking what is essentially a Straw Man who will be gone forever in a few years, while the goons who actually are trashing your liberties keep getting elected term after term. It's not an especially clever plan, but it works every damn time... Congress gives power to the President to decide to implement an unpopular policy, he takes the blame and all you fucking idiots eat it up like candy.
It's not the President's fucking budget, it's Congress's budget. It's not the President's Law... it's Congress's law. If you mental midgets can't figure this shit out it's never going to change.
Classic 4th amendment, but the 4th has been raped for about 30 years now in the name of the War on Drugs with no complaints. NYC allows stop-and-frisk which is by the letter a violation of the 4th as are most unwarranted searches by law enforcement. It's simple, you can't search me, my house, my car, or my records without a warrant. But, every time a big bad drug dealer gets away "on a technicality" people agree to turn the other way and allow laws to encroach just a bit further on our rights.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Just asking ...
Your question implies the invalid assumption that the constitution is still followed.
You keep using that word. [Communism] I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Is there any room at all in this discussion for "this is wrong, regardless of whether the President has an "R" or a "D" after his name"?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Fourth Admentment Anyone? Just asking ...
Which of *YOUR* papers and effects are being searched, hmm...? What's being searched is the *GOVERNMENT'S* papers and effects, or possibly the banks'. This is not a Fourth Amendment issue.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
He's more than Bush 2.0. He took what was radical under GWB, and made it the "New Normal." Before Obama, there was hope that the abuses of the previous administration could be rolled back. That is no longer possible because those abuses are now firmly ensconced in those issues that form the bipartisan consensus. As a result, expect to hear virtually nothing about them from most of the cheerleader/stenographer "press" corps. It's sickening the way Democrats as whole have just clammed up during the Obama administration, and proof that their rhetoric during the GWB administration was nothing but hot air designed to fraudulently attract liberal voters so that they, like the GOP, could go agro-neo-con on America. There is no way back now -- only through to what comes next.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
As a Libertarian, obviously I voted Gary Johnson. However, I think our best candidate from the two major parties in the past 8 years was McCain. But the Democrat spin at the time was McCain was Bush 2.0, and if you hated Bush, you had to vote against him. They said he would be pro-war and bad for the country.
McCain routinely called out Republicans while heading the ethics commission in D.C. After he was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he volunteered to go back to Vietnam as an ambassador and help end the war. He did the same thing in Korea. While Americans wanted to see the war in Iraq and Afghanistan ended, we had a president with strong military background (having served, and was raised by a 4-star Admiral), existing rapport with foreign leaders and experience ending wars. But the media said he'd probably be pro-war.
Americans wanted someone who would improve foreign relations, so we voted against he guy who had great rapport with foreign leaders, and voted for Obama who went on TV and made a joke about the Special Olympics, and who made fun of McCain's physical disabilities (a result of his POW torture). We have a President only capable of speaking off a teleprompter who makes offensive comments when off it. I don't see how that helps our rapport with foreign leaders.
McCain routinely crossed the aisle in D.C. and didn't care about party lines, but rather what was right. He promised to call out individual politicians in either party who added pork to bills.
He also said that instead of doing talk shows perhaps as a Senator, his first job should be working in D.C. to fix the economy, which Obama disagreed with. Apparently talk shows are more important than fixing the economy.
I get a number of reasons why people didn't like Romney, but it is a damn shame we elected Obama over McCain.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
We told you so.
The first sentence is a lie; First, this was not just coming to his attention, and second it was not a new question... Eric Holder had been asked repeatedly and kept dodging a straight answer. His people told congress moths ago that Obama had authority to kill Americans with drones (and Obama had done it) that this included people in non-combat situations (like the US citizen teenage son of an American who Obama had killed with a drone) and they had also (separately) said that the entire world was now the modern battlefield; all of this led to the very natural question about drone-striking an American within the US.... and administration officials were first asked about drone-striking Americans within the US about 3 months ago. Every Obama admin person who responded to the questions in congress either gave a different answer or pointed at some other official ("ask him...") so Holder is just being a dishonest jerk when he pretends this is a new question or that it has just come to his attention.
This is what we get for putting a terrorist's lawyer (Eric Holder sought-out and voluntarily represented terrorists who'd killed Americans before becoming Obama's Atty Gen) in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice
BTW: Obama does lots of things he has no authority to do (like taking over car companies, voiding their stocks, and replacing their CEOs) safe in the knowledge that his buddy Harry Reid will block any attempt to stop him in the Senate...... So the Holder letter is essentially meaningless
Oh come on, you think the government is paying any attention to that old piece of paper? For reference, here's the status of the Bill of Rights:
I am officially gone from
McCain made himself unelectable when he picked Palin as a running mate. Then the republicans shot themselves in the foot by offering Romney. All the while, the republican congress was doing its best to give us as many reasons as possible to not respect the republican brand. Your convention cheated Paul out of his moment in the sun, insignificant as it was in the light of the political atmosphere. On the other side, Obama was offering healthcare to a bunch of people who really needed it and had a record of doing a number of other things people liked.
You had enough advantages among the swing voters -- particularly with those who don't care about the health of others, and the homophobes, and those who would declare a fertilized egg a "baby" -- to win. But you pissed it away with bad choices, congressional malfeasance above and beyond the usual, and a running mate as crazy as anyone I've ever seen proffered for office.
It's that simple.
Obama, for all his faults (and I could go on and on) still seems to me to be better than the alternative was. That was all we had to go with, you know. There was nothing "good" out there. There rarely is. Paul would have been best for civil liberties, but he would have rocked the economy, rolled back civil rights to a ridiculous degree, and put a bullet in what little progress we've been able to make with health care. He just wasn't electable. McCain might have been, until they inflicted Palin on him. We'll never know, now. The rest were clown-shoes-of-the-week, all competing with one another to see just how far they could shove their own feet down their throat.
Plus, they're all either pretending to be, or actually are, religious crazies. I honestly don't know which is worse, but both are really bad.
If -- somehow -- you can get the republicans in congress to act responsibly -- you know, pass laws, get rid of bad law, undertake some moderation of their fringe drooling, muzzle the idiots who keep saying batshit crazy things about rape and pregnancy -- you could still win the next election. The signs aren't hopeful at this point, but the American people have extremely short memories, so it could still happen. I would vote republican; all they have to do is convince me they'd do better for the people than the democrats. I just... don't see any signs of that right now.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What a juvenile point of view. People like you are the first to die in any crisis - not only are you unwilling to participate in a community to survive, you automatically jump to violence against those who do not threaten you the moment you perceive your life to be threatened. It's like throwing the guy in the cubicle next to you out the window because the building is on fire; you perceive yourself to be ahead of them on the way to the door, but the entire community will now work against you.
It simply does not matter how well-armed and prepared you are, either, life is full of examples of people, societies, and even entire species gone by the wayside for being overly aggressive and unwilling to change to their environment. So while you may be able to steal someone's can of beans at gunpoint, eventually you will either run into someone like yourself or someone who knows exactly what you are, and there is only one possible outcome.
Start thinking about how you can keep your neighbours alive during any sort of crisis, and I promise you will live much, much longer.
90+% of those going into politics are power hungry and relatively rich. They care only for more money and more pwoer. It does not matter if they are democain , repucrate, socialist, libs, communist, facism, neo nazi or whatever country they are in. The political process is self filtering and self selecting the sewage waste greedy corrupt to come up. Some are just much better at hiding they are as bad as the rest, and still fool other people. Some are less able. They will tell the populist things to do during the election, but care only for the end results : the power and money. Yep I am very cynical.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The problem is that none of these things have anything to do with communism, and everything to do with Totalitarianism.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!