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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
Why not allow every agency access to our entire lives!? Why not throw away the rights we already have in the name of terrorism fighting? Notice how when the financial documents of celebrities and politicians were hacked, law enforcement jumped as high and hard as they could? Notice how they don't do that with you? There needs to be some common sense rebuilding of the way things are run in Washington. Wipe the slate clean and start over, and that includes every politician and every lobbyist.
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
..."not like it can get any worse".
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")
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Pretty soon withdrawing more than $50 from an ATM will be a precrime.
I better see them shine!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Just asking ...
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
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.
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It's only a matter of time before someone tries to assasinate this treasonous monster.
Why? He does the work of all the special interest groups. He would be in danger of being assassinated only if he didn't.
:)
We already know who the financial terrorists are that are the biggest threat to our economy and national security. And they're all Obama donors.
Why does Obama need a financial monitoring network when he can't bother to throw Lloyd Blankfein in jail for well established fraud, perjury, and racketeering?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
While I don't really approve of this change it's not nearly as bad as the headline suggests. This doesn't mean that the CIA will have instant access to your bank transactions. Banks are required to file reports for specific suspicious conditions that are associated with money laundering and other financial scams. What they're talking about is giving the other agencies unfettered access to the database (FBI already has unfettered access).
Not good news, but not nearly as bad as it sounds.
Careful dude, every time I mention Obama treating private property like communal property, I get down-modded.
Besides, all this communism can't pay for itself!
THL phish sticks
Exactly why are transactions over $10,000 considered suspicious and cataloged by the government?
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.
That would be awesome to do just for the fun of adding a false positive, but then I realized I have no damn use for the propane. I grill with charcoal (tastes better; sorry, Hank Hill). I hate the police state as much as anyone, but you're talking about wasting money! Let's not get carried away.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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!
And all your finance are belong to us.
Seriously -- is there anyone here who doesn't see yet /because/ Obama came along?
that the worst turns that history could make (in many
respects), it made
He's the one that started all this Gestapo stuff. President Obama is just Bush 2.0 except for some of the liberal stuff like a gay army and unisex marriages they look pretty much the same. Just enough to divide and conquer the American people on knee jerk social issues that keep them from focusing on how their freedoms are being stripped just a little at a time. All in the name of keeping us all safe.
Out of curiosity, could you expand on how you do it. Cash only seems like a difficult proposition with car/rent/mortgage/paychecks etc. Thanks in advance
You can always call up Romney and ask him which Island Bank he's keeping his money in. That way it'll be safe from prying eyes, including the worlds largest and most vicious collection agency the IRS.
If they haven't done it already, I'm sure they will soon do something like the following: We will lower the transactions fees for using debit/credit cards if you send us a list of items sold. (doesn't have to be with the transaction, just some time later would be sufficient, i.e. on a weekly or monthly basis). Though, now that I think about it more, it will go: We will RAISE the transaction fees unless you share the list of items sold...
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
Got news for you, eliminating the $100 bill has been proposed occasionally as no-one has a need for such large money clips. Benefits said to include reduced drug traffic / organized crime due to larger stacks of cash needed with lower denomination currency and reduced counterfeiting -- as if N. Korea can't counterfeit a 20 dollar bill.
Real reason likely includes pushing toward a cashless society where all transactions can be tracked.
As long as the dribbling idiot Joe Biden is VP then he's as safe as can be. Even the KKK would rather have Obama as President.
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
I am sure they have been doing this for years and years - but now since we live in a system that has figured out they can get away with nearly anything - why not come clean. After all we are just sheep, they are the shepherd.
Spy agencies are still not allowed to share most intelligence information arbitrarily, whether the subject is domestic or not. These roadblocks ensure the safety and reliability of each agency's intel, and provide confidence in policy decisions based on that intel (legislative, military, etc).
But spy agencies already could look at your financial information, independently. That is not a concern to me. Smart citizens already know Obomacare provides a stipulation that states, payments made electronically to health providers constitutes a waiver for the federal government to examine that individual's financial accounts from the bank who disbursed to the health provider. (So you have to pay in cash if you don't want the feds digging into your financial records because of a sore throat.)
What is a concern is that the intel each agency now has the access to that financial information regardless. And this concerns me because it can easily be used against a citizen. Say, you're behind on your student loans, the government can check your bank account, determine that you have funds to pay a monthly minimum they've decided you ought to pay, then they can order your physician not to provide health care to prevent you from spending that money on the doctor, ... basically they won't LET you get your health care until you've paid your other dues...
Another cause for concern is that, well, the agencies are using the same intel. that's a bad paradigm. In the intel world, redundancy and duplication of data is a good thing. Unlike in computer science land, in intel, that kind of thing actually encourages data accuracy and confidence, it reduces the possibility of tampering, and is a specific tactical tool in international anti-intel. (Think about it like this: Texas Hold 'Em wouldn't be an easier game to beat if all the players didn't share a deck and also share a hand. And if an attacker manipulates the deck, all players are equally affected.)
So I'm wondering. What is the priority my government has to monitor my financial data? And why is it so important that all spy agencies need to share that data, from one single source, when they already were allowed to collect that data independently as their investigation warranted? Is this about stopping crime or is it about providing means to extract every cent from every citizen? If the government was having trouble tracking drug cartel finances before, how is this supposed to help? The cartels were already beating the system. So it affects the bad guys zero, and the good guys by one. Really, what is the priority here?
Good question.
The only reason I stick with the bank I have is I've paid my child support with it over the years and I want to keep doing it this way so I can prove it on down the line. I actually started with a different bank, but buyouts/mergers, what have you. I liked the bank I signed up with.
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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.
I'm getting sick of reading articles that I can post the above subject to and get away with it. This is definitely change, but it doesn't look hopeful.
Take this sig and smoke it.
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
Don't sweat it dude. As long as you're just venting a little spleen here on a geek blog I doubt you're worth the bother of even looking at. Now if you get a following, look out.
The checks and balances were broken with the 17th amendment. That was the first chair to be removed from the game.
So leaving the election of Senators up to politicians rather than to the electorate was a check on the power of the electorate, presumably.
Is it time to retire the old "you've got nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong" lie yet????
recommended change to the national anthem:
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free, or the home of the SLAVE......
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Do we really need the government combing through everyone's financial data, identifying infidelities not affecting national security? Will they look for payments to household staff that could be illegal aliens? Nothing to stop them, so yes that will happen. Every aspect of every American's life will be meticulously analyzed and filed away. That doesn't make me feel safe at all!
You don't have privacy anyway.
So long as this gets proper oversight by the legislature and the judiciary, I'm completely cool with this. Letting some program look at my bank statements is a very, very small price to pay to make life harder for Islamist scum trying to kill me, or Chinese scum trying to steal all my work.
I am not the only person out there who would prefer a little more security, so long as TPTB are overseen, and deal robustly with our enemies.
We told you so.
Pretty soon withdrawing more than $50 from an ATM will be a precrime.
It already can be. The "know your customer" legislation (I believe passed originally in the Clinton era and enhanced in the Bush era after 9/11), require banks to monitor your transactions for abnormalities. Thus, if you make weekly deposits on Fri for $100, that wed deposit for $150 gets flagged. That doesn't mean it's immediately considered criminal activity. But banks are watching you for when you break the law.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Bush was a jerk, BUT a little history is important...
In 2006 the Democrats took over both the House and the Senate. In Nov 2006, after the election but while Republicans still held the House, Democrats announced that they would not cooperate with Republicans any further (since they were getting total congressional power in only 2 months) and they pronounced the FY2007 budgets (all the congressional financial work of 2006) "dead".... the nation ran those next several months on a "continuing resolution". Pelosi became Speaker of the House and she put Barney Frank in charge of the committee responsible for overseeing the finance industry. Harry Reid became Senate Majority Leader and he put Chris Dodd in charge of the Senate committee responsible for financial oversight. The 2007 and 2008 budgets were the ones the Democrats wrote in Congress. In 2007 The Bush Administration saw problems brewing in the home loan markets and the danger of crazy irresponsible actions over at the Government's home loan entities "Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac" but Bush had no legal authority to intervene... so Bush sent hes people to capitol hill to ask for legal authority to intervene. Chris Dodd led the Senate charge to deny Bush any control over Fannie and Freddie. EVERY democrat (including Senator Obama and Senator Biden) voted not to allow Bush any ability to regulate Fannie or Freddie. In The House, Barney Frank berated, belittled and insulted the Bush representatives who were asking for legal authority... Frank insisted nothing was wrong in the home mortgage business and particularly not at Fannie and Freddie. A year later, the mortgage mess exploded and the economy melted down. Barack Obama and Joe Biden had a bigger say in the meltdown (THEY got to vote to avoid it and THEY voted the wrong way) than Bush had (He had no vote and no legal power to intervene before the meltdown).
Romney is a tool; he would have only been marginally better than Obama, at best
Obama, however, is a nasty piece of work. His policies lead to the need for ever increasing government power, control, and money.... so he cannot avoid the continual drive to spy on the people, pry into their finances, examine their health, dig into their businesses, etc
As someone who has worked with several major processors and manages millions of credit/debit transactions per year, I'd consider that extraordinarily unlikely. It would take several years to implement, and would cripple the current infrastructure if attempted.
And has very little to do with Obama. We pretty much signed over a lot of our freedoms after 9/11, all in the name of security.
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
Join a credit union. You'll save tens of thousands of dollars on major purchases by spending 30 minutes a month maintaining a credit record.
Obama administration - making sure you're broke and enforcing it in every way possible!
The Obama administration isn't making sure you're broke: Obama and Romney's pals in the private sector are making sure you're broke, and all the Obama administration doesn't have to lift a finger. Another way of putting it: What Obama is doing here is a symptom, not the actual illness.
I am officially gone from
Seriously, how can this possibly be legal?
After being screwed over by three different banks six different times, I simply stopped using them a few years ago.
What do you expect? Banks are typically run by banksters. Unless they're too socialist for your taste, you're better off with a credit union.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Best comment ever.. wish I had mod points.. I keep about 2 weeks of supplies.. just in case... One day my wife asked what happens if the 2 weeks ever runs out.. my answer was almost identical to yours.
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
You know that other story on /. front page?
I left a comment on it, which I think is closely related to this story.
Go figure, /. sometimes operates like a set of loosely related Chinese fortune cookies.
You can't handle the truth.
It almost doen't matter who. We need to send Washington a message.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
From what I wrote in 2008 before I'd heard about "basic income", with a a typo and a rotted link fixed: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/openmanufacturing/a4Fw5A15GUE/wQbnjYso09sJ
----
Something I wrote in another list, but I am posting a variant here in public in part as a contribution towards [Nathan Craven's] work on an open enterprise, moving towards an open society. This is to support a transition to a post-scarcity future.
It seems that, sadly, we can expect zero privacy in our personal affairs in the USA between warrantless wiretapping and banks and ISPs rolling over for any governmental request for any reason. The US government is now underwriting all the major banks and the three major US car companies to the sum of approaching about a year's GDP. And the Fed is now doing "quantitative easing" which is Fed speak for printing money. This is all very *radical* (and hypocritical) compared to the ideology espoused by most political and economic leaders in the USA historically. We are now in uncharted territory.
So, since privacy is history, and banks are now socialized enterprises, and the main engines of US manufacturing (the car companies) are now run as welfare organizations for all those US Americans who otherwise would lose their jobs, and I could say more on what's going wrong but won't here, how can we get something good out of this spirit of radical innovation by our leadership by looking on the bright side? :-)
My suggestion:
* Close all the banks and have the US Social Security administration run a single debit checking account with a card based on the person's SSN (plus an additional PIN or other security measure like a physical token or biometric or some combination of all three the user might choose). We have no financial privacy anyway anymore, sadly, so the cost savings would outweigh making it easy for the government to spy on anyone. Maybe make all transfers part of the public record (especially that of public officials), or maybe not. Make part of the public record who has looked at whose account information. Maybe involve the US post office for PIN number resets where ID is presented in person. The transparency of funds transfers may deter some fraud and identity theft.
* All account holders have US$1500 a month deposited in that account. This replaces all forms of government welfare. There is no needs test, so everyone gets it, and this reduces overhead. This also replaces all forms of public education (since a kid's money can be used for schooling if the parents want it to). This also replaces social security for the elderly. If people need more than this, tough -- charity can handle that. :-) It would be illegal to borrow against future earnings there or to enforce any such deal. This monthly amount would vary depending on Congress and price fluctuations. Services might spring up to supply a good life on just the basic stipend for intellectual types. Industrial productivity would go up as no one who did not want to work would apply for a job. It is possible one could phase in the amount in this account over a few years to give the economy time to adjust. But maybe it would be best to just do it all at once.
* Medicare/Medicaid for all. Congress sets the limits similar to other countries health care systems. People want more, they buy private supplementary insurance. Nursing homes are available for all, but they require handing over most of the monthly stipend. There might be government plans for in home round the clock nursing care too (again, costing about a monthly stipend); if you want something better, you buy private long-term care insurance.
* Either one or both of a flat transaction tax (3%?) or a wealth tax (0.25% monthly on balances and real property of any US account holder) to pay for
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
I realize facts are anathema to attempting to spin something away from Obama, but this is the OBAMA administration doing this. This is the same OBAMA administration that was dragged kicking and screaming to answer the question "Can you drone strike kill a US citizen within the US?". This is the same OBAMA administration that still hasn't answered Congress' questions about the murder of over 200 Mexicans in Fast and Furious. This is the same OBAMA administraiton that hasn't answered Congress' questions on the killing of ambassador Chris Stevens.
I realize you want to protect your hero, but your hero is crap. All that I listed above has nothing to do with Congress, or what is being proposed in the article. You are just trying to get another free pass for the dictator and I'm calling you out for it.
There used to be laws baring the sharing of that data. For some reason the neither party (or the Republicrats) has any desire to prevent the very kind of abuses this government has suffered through in the past, all in the name of national security.
you have such a short attention span that you do not see trends if they advance slowly enough.
This nation is already NOTHING like what it was in the 1960's.
And let me tell you, it isn't what you think it is. This is not access to your financial records.
This is a completely separate system that already exists under existing laws, and it's got some weird ass stuff in it.
If you're in that system, likely you are trying to finance a car with a briefcase of 20s; you don't get it even by accident. You have to do something quite bizarre involving a bank and a lot of cash. You really don't want to be in that system to begin with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act#Suspicious_Activity_Report_.28SAR.29
I didn't realize CIA had to ask to get access. They really _should_ have access, it's a per-incident reporting framework as it is by banks, and it's all wasted data entry unless someone looks at it.
Obama Treasury dude Jack Lew knows where to hide his cash
DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz knows where to hide hers
Obama's pal and advisor Valerie Jarrett seems to like Bermuda for her cash
Nancy Pelosi Seems to like hiding her money in asia (see: Matthews International Capital Management LLC)
And then Obama himself seems to like parking cash in the Cayman Islands
The truth is that the political class lives by a very different set of rules than the rest of us and if you think Democrats are any more "for the people" than Republicans then you're just another "useful idiot". Many of the richest politicians in the US who hide cash offshore to avoid taxes are Democrats.... and it's worse when they do it because they are being hypocrites; Republicans at least call for everybody to have lower, flatter taxes...... but Democrats are always trying to fool the public into liking them by yelling "Tax the Rich!" while quietly hiding their personal fortunes from those very taxes they endorsed.
Total agreement. There is only one party in Washington DC and that's the Money Party.
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.
Im really confused about the ambassador thing. If a biker gang in the US, with 125+ heavily armed assailants attacked ANY embassy on US soil its a good chance they are going to get in and kill the ambassador. I would genuinely like an answer as to why everyone thinks its the current administration's fault he died.
Good-bye
Funny, I thought he was a Constitutional lawyer at some point...and yet the laissez-faire approach he has taken to enforcing many of its rights, as per the individual (also known as the smallest minority), seems to speak to the contrary.
But then, this is common in politics. Those with the loudest voices tend to drown out those with softer ones.
I am John Hurt.
The embassy was under attack for over 8 hours before the ambassador was killed. Military troops were put into action to help long before the killing, but before they got to the area the generals that sent them were relieved of their command and the troops were called back, two sets of troops. Obama never called to find out if he could order anything to help or if anything could be done.
Your comment leads me to believe you have no idea what happened there.
With ALL the information available, the NSA could come up with a credit scoring system WAY better than FICO. No more getting into a he said/she said with creditors; the NSAs computers just check into their records of everyone's transactions (and emails and phone conversations and...) and get to the bottom of it. Of course the down side is they'll know that American Express transaction for fancy drinks at a certain Washington D.C. bar is for hookers, and they'll calculate in an "expected alimony" penalty... but at least it'll be accurate.
I wish I could live in the utopia that you live in. Everyone cares about each other, everyone is polite, everyone tries to work together. Do you live in a kindergarten? That is about the only place outside of Church that I see any type of cooperation. Every other human transaction is M.A.D. When everyone has something to lose, no one wants to lose what they have. As soon as Sandy hit, we had to have armed guards at the gas stations and at the banks and super markets. Tell your lovey-dovey stories somewhere else. When shit goes down, people panic like animals. You probably don't remember the Watts riots. Tore up Paterson NJ and Newark NJ pretty good. They are still slums because all the real people didn't want to live next to animals anymore. Those cities have collapsed in on themselves. Going to work at a state university in Newark, I see the level of trust and compassion that humans have for everyone else (NOT in a survival situation). The campus police blotter is hysterical. Students get robbed at gunpoint at this one corner and they still hang around there at 3 AM. Fascinating how everone cares for each other, right? Come on. I want to see a bleeding heart like you actually deal with a nice riot and let me know how much the poor shop keeper deserved to have his place looted and torched. That is why South Central LA and Newark and Patterson are devoid of real jobs. The real businesses with location options LEFT because they didn't need to deal with that crap. Riots only hurt the ones that participate. The jobs and businesses that are affected don't need to have the dog bite their hand when they feed them. There are others who are perfectly content to behave in a civilized manner. They go serve them.
If they look at my financial records they could be so overcome with laughter that they are unable to continue doing their jobs.
Or breathing.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
This is great from an intelligence standpoint and horrible from a privacy standpoint, understandably. But the real potential is the grey market. America has a HUGE grey market, in part resulting in an unfair system (i.e. by staying outside the law people save money--both individuals not paying taxes and employers without compliance costs) and in part a result of an insensible system (child support obligations are so prohibitively expensive to many (and don't recognize that two residences cost more than one) that they incentivize larger gray markets, which decreases the tax base significantly).
The more centralized tracking of people's finances, the easier it becomes to detect gray market activity.
The fan boys for Obama are in league with the Apple fan boys from the looks of it. I've covered quite a range in score.
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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
Give every spy access to US financial data. Even give access to underpaid subcontractors. Wait a year. Get a new tasty wikileaks scandal.
I say go for it.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Socialists, both the nationalist type (aka NAZIs as-in "National Socialist Deutsche Arbeit Partei") and the internationalist type (aka Communists as-in "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics") will happily get in-bed with BIG Business. BIG business loves piles of regulations (they have armies of paper-pushers on payroll to deal with the regs and they know that no small upstart with a great idea will be able to handle the overhead, so the regs actually suppress the potential competition from nimble smaller competitors). In national socialist Germany in the depths of WWII there were big businesses making all the war machines. Even in "Communist" Russia, at the peak of the cold war, there were big companies (like the Mikoyan-and-Gurevich Design Bureau - maker of MIG jets) working hand-in-hand with the bureaucrats and politicians. Obama is not "in bed with business almost as tightly as Mick and Ron were" as you put it.... he has always been MORE in bed with them. GE/NBC/MSNBC is practically grafted onto Obama; Obama took more money from big Wall St banks in his 2008 run than any politician in US History. He actually got the big drug companies to give him money AND he got them to pay for and run pro-Obamacare ads while he was running abound the country denouncing them!!!!!! Have you SERIOUSLY LOOKED at who contributed to his two campaigns and his inaugurations?????? Obama has spent more money running for President than any other man in history.... and he did NOT get it from street people or recipients of free "Obama Phones"..... he got huge stinking piles of filthy lucre from big big businesses.
Start thinking about how you can keep your neighbours alive during any sort of crisis, and I promise you will live much, much longer.
Survival of the fittest. Not a chance I'll help those out. Poor planning on your part does not constitutes an emergency on mine.
Suddenly that XDM I carry around all the time seems useful, doesn't it?
If this country were ever to go sideways, I can assure you currency won't be stocks and cash. It will be brass and lead.
Obama did not lie about his agenda, but no one bothered to pay attention to what he said he would do. They chose to see what they wanted, not what was really there.
He is doing exactly what an unmasked man does when he walks into a bank, and "jokes" with the security guard that he is "...here to rob the bank. Hyuk Hyuk.".
True. It's a representative government and the leadership reflects the values of the people.
You must not live in NYC. A twenty barely buys one drink at nice places.
So swap it out for some fertilizer for your garden.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
That's fine. You don't see my silver and Bitcoins, and also fuck you. These corporate butt-plugs have been illegitimate fascists since they murdered JFK, and Obama is no better, if anything he might be the worst of the lot.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
This is true, and a reason I always chide those who go on about the President controlling things like gas prices. However, in the case of laws, President Obama is slightly different: When he was campaigning for his first term, he was against immunity for telecos on warrantless wiretapping. But, while still Senator Obama, he voted for immunity, and has done many things since to keep it in action (like arguing against the journalists in the SC that they can't even challenge the law when there's no way to find out who can, IIRC).
So, yes, the President doesn't write or vote in laws, but he has the power to veto them. According to Wikipedia, he's used this power twice, once in each of his first years in office. He certainly hasn't used it on anything that should have been veto'd, like FISA extensions/renewals. Even if it were certain that whatever he vetoes would get the necessary overriding votes in Congress, it would still send a message.
As things stand, he's no better than the driver of the get-away van for a bank robbery who spends the whole time thinking/saying "this is wrong", but doesn't hesitate to drive for a moment.
I do thank President Obama for one thing, though: His actions have opened my eyes to how the Democrats are just as shitty as the Republicans, and that our two-party system is horrible.
But, the merchant and the payment processor usually have a big transaction ID number that ties these databases together. While I don't know that some law enforcement agency has automatic simultaneous access to the databases of all the national chain merchants and payment processors, I can imagine them wanting such access. I can also imagine that a large national chain merchant in the country that's #3 in the world for overall population will get enough requests that come with warrants (for specific instances similar to "We know this escaped felon is using this specific credit card. We've gotta have anything that helps us find him.") that they might eventually tell law enforcement, "Here's your permanent logon ID and password. Please enter the warrant number when you do your search so we'll have it if we get sued."
The "R" and the "D" don't actually matter. The control conduits for the owners of our secret overlords are the parentheses, themselves. The contents are just there to distract attention from the presence of the packaging.
Jews. Where are you hiding the jews.
So much for that "populist" crap. The 4th Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures & probable cause for a search warrant is dead. And for my loyal Democrat friends-the media would have been all over this like flies on crap if a Republican had proposed this. Both parties think your a serf. I don't deny the differences on social issues, but fo G-d's sake, Obama was a Constitutional law prof. Hope Rand Paul filibusters THIS!
From: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Money
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Picard tries to explain to Ralph Offenhouse from the 20th century that there would be no need for his law firm any longer: "A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of 'things'. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions." (TNG: "The Neutral Zone")
When Lily Sloane asked how much the USS Enterprise-E cost to build, Picard tells her "The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity." (Star Trek: First Contact)
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That said, we likely will always have a mix of different types of economic transactions in any society (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft). The question is, what should the mix look like to meet what goals?
Whatever may have been true in centuries past, with the rise of AI like "Watson" and robotics like "Baxter", I'm just not too worried about the issue of people being motivated to "work" in dull jobs. And interesting jobs are generally their own motivation.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.