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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
..."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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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
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
From TFA:
Financial institutions file more than 15 million "suspicious activity reports" every year, according to Treasury. Banks, for instance, are required to report all personal cash transactions exceeding $10,000, as well as suspected incidents of money laundering, loan fraud, computer hacking or counterfeiting.
They've been able to get this data through the IRS since before any of us were born. If you've ever made a transaction over 10k, they make you go through a bit of a process sometimes. This is the database of that process. It won't have yesterday's starbucks purchase, but it'll have something like the deposit withdrawal you made to put a down payment on your house. So it's not quite entire lives type stuff, but I could've sworn the IRS already did what these agencies are proposing to do, maybe they just suck at it, but the title of the article is over-dramatized in typical slashdot fashion.
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.
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.'
They've been able to get this data through the IRS since before any of us were born.
Not quite. I sort of remember that $10,000 reporting law being passed when I was a teenager.
...the title of the article is over-dramatized in typical slashdot fashion.
Yup.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
We told you so.
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
From TFA:
Financial institutions file more than 15 million "suspicious activity reports" every year, according to Treasury. Banks, for instance, are required to report all personal cash transactions exceeding $10,000, as well as suspected incidents of money laundering, loan fraud, computer hacking or counterfeiting.
Keeping transactions below $10k is considered "suspicious," and can therefore result in an SAR filed against you.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
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.
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
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.
Rate of spending increase under Bush 43 wasn't nearly as big as Obama. You are reading leftist lying publications. They are lumping the $400 Billion Omnibus spending bill and $850 Billion stimilus under Bush's last year while both were proposed and passed after Obama took office. If you ACTUALLY follow when the spening increases took place and ignore the lies, it was all Obama, but I understand that viewpoint is unpopular.
Omnibus bill March 11, 2009 signed by Obama
Stimilus bill Feb 17, 2009 signed by Obama
Facts really suck when people try and bash Bush for overspending.
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.
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.
You're paying the price, but that's not the return you are getting. Like the PATRIOT Act it's not really going to be used against terrorists, even if there were any. Probably will be used mostly by the DEA for asset forfeiture. Best case scenario, you're losing privacy so government bureaucrats can live large ripping off drug retailers. Or possibly the IRS could hassle you over that extra $1000 in your account from selling something on ebay, or your ex could squeeze you a little harder during the divorce. Worst case: dystopia.
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