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."

Comments

Forgotten 2012 campaign poster

[Sparticus789]

Hope and "look at all that change left in your bank account"

I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message.

Re:Forgotten 2012 campaign poster

[ebno-10db]

But he hasn't answered the follow up to the follow up: define "engaged in combat". Judging by current trends, the definition might get pretty creative, or include "preparing to engage in combat" based on the say-so of some jerk off in the executive branch. Just because we survived the British Empire, the Civil War, the Kaiser, the Nazis, the Japanese Empire and the USSR with the Constitution more or less intact doesn't mean we can continue with that luxury. Now we face a serious enemy, don't ya know?

Re:Forgotten 2012 campaign poster

[CrimsonAvenger]

You must have missed the follow up.

Dear Senator Paul:

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional qustion: "Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?" The answer to that question is no.

Sincerely,
Eric Holder

So, what exactly does "not engaged in combat" mean to this administration, given their rather interesting interpretation of the word "imminent"?

Note, by the way, that when I read the article that Holder was "responding" to, the whole "not in combat" thing was included in the original query by Paul, but at that time, Holder could not be pinned down to a "no".

Note that he wasn't pinned down to a "no" in his answer either, since there is pretty much no situation where someone is actually "in combat" in the USA where anyone is going to be asking the President for permission to wax him - the local SWAT team will handle it quite nicely without consulting with the Pres....

Re:Forgotten 2012 campaign poster

[harrkev]

It seems like this always happens... President does bad, bad things (fascism,perhaps). New candidate promises change and reform... Get elected, does the same bad bad things or worse.

So my theory is that whenever a new president is elected, they are taken into an office for "the talk." I have no idea, but would guess that it has something to do with nuclear weapons, aliens that look just like humans, Atlantis, and Elvis. After "the talk" the new president changes his underwear and gladly goes along with what the previous president did.

No evidence, but it does seem to fit my observations that no president takes us further away from fascism.

Re:There goes the 4th Amendment

[lostmongoose]

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.

Re:There goes the 4th Amendment

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Buy a bag of nails, a bottle of propane, batter

[Anonymous Coward]

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.'

Re:Cue the apologists

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Holy shit!

[anagama]

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.

That follow-up was a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Apology? No. I blame you.

[fyngyrz]

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.