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Congress Is Trying To Expand The Patriot Act (rare.us)
An anonymous reader writes: The house is scheduled to vote in an hour or so on expanding provisions of the patriot act, allowing massive financial information sharing to include dozens of new offenses ("specified unlawful activities"), including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The house bill is H.R. 5606. My quick read is that this essentially lets FEDGOV expand massive semi-secret databases of financial transactions without a warrant while protecting banks from liability for helping them. In 5 years from 2002-2007, for example, with a smaller ability this led to 35,000 suspects but there were only 21 search warrants. Call your representative. Rare.us reports: "The proposed bill, H.R. 5606, expands Section 314 of the Patriot Act to cover non-terrorism or money laundering related investigations. Critics claim that the bill is a threat to the privacy of innocent Americans and is being rammed through Congress without debate. Section 314 encourages law enforcement to share information with financial institutions on money laundering and terrorism. It also encourages financial institutions to share information with each other." The report says the House Liberty Caucus, led by Congressman Justin Amash (R-Mich.), opposes the bill, claiming that Treasury Department regulations will compromise the privacy of Americans as it will all but mandate financial institutions to share information with the government. The caucus also opposes the bill because it is being brought to the floor under a suspension of the rules, and is not being considered under "regular order." The bill's sponsor, Congressman Robert Pittenger (R-NC) described HR 5606 as an attempt "to stop the flow of illicit dollars to criminals and terror organizations."
That's right, it did not pass, but have you seen HR5607, which did pass?
www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5607/text
Particularly:
SEC. 5. Improving anti-terror finance monitoring of funds transfers.
SEC. 6. Sense of Congress
SEC. 7. Unified electronic stream.
SEC. 8. Adding the Secretary of the Treasury to the National Security Council
Not nearly as bad, but you can clearly see the direction they (congress) are intending to go. It will be the same as HR 5606, but it will, as is their usual M.O., implemented as a series of regulations requiring reporting to uncle Sam on various "suspicious" actions by you and me. Ultimately they will add regs to requires freezing bank accounts, credit lines, etc on any activity they wish. All of this will be the same result, but congress get to say they did not do any of it, as it will be done through regulations implemented by various fed. and state agencies like the SEC, the Treasury, the IRS, etc.
We will all be just as screwed and this way it will never make the 6 o'clock news
The bill failed to pass. It required a 2/3 vote and didn't get close: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/201...
They do. Here is an example. This family is under suspicion - note SUSPICION - of money laundering. There has been no trial. Nothing has been proven. Their name simply turned up in the "Panama papers" a few months ago, and the US Treasury department must have already had their eye on them so they simply issued a statement. Due to that statement, all the credit card companies immediately dropped their services to businesses owned by this family.
The result is a large, successful shopping mall is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because they owned both the mall and half the stores in it. The mall cannot collect payment from its customers. The stores can no longer accept credit cards. Oh they still accept cash, but I doubt stores the likes of Gucci, Prada and Luis Vuitton are going to walk to the mall and pay their rent in cash. It is a very high end shopping mall.
Since the mall almost went bankrupt, the US Treasury department struck a deal to allow the suspected family to "wind down" operations in an orderly fashion, so the mall now accepts credit cards again. So do pay attention to this. The UNITED STATES TREASURY is applying US law in Panama, telling Panamanian banks what to do, giving authorizations and citing US law, etc. And again I repeat this is merely "suspicion" on the part of the US government. There has been no trial, no sentencing. I'm not saying the Waked family are nice guys or 100% legit. What I AM saying is due process is out the window. Make no mistake, you cannot run and hide from US law even in another country.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
And remember next time you are about to call a Trump supporter an idiot, this is the sort of crap that Hillary has absolutely no problem with.
Sorry, but Trump supporters are idiots, regardless of whatever else is true. The man is unfit to be President.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Sorry, but Hillary supporters are idiots, regardless of whatever else is true. The woman is unfit to be President.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
My local paper recently ran an article on these abuses.
“We the Prisoners”: The Demise of the Fourth Amendment