Invasion of Your Privacy

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee called yesterday for criminal prosecution of The New York Times, saying that its report Friday on U.S. government surveillance of confidential banking records “compromised America’s anti-terrorist policies.”

Interviewed on Fox News Sunday, Rep. Peter T. King, a New York Republican, accused the newspaper of compromising national security when it exposed a Treasury Department program that attempts to track terrorist financing by secretly monitoring worldwide money transfers. The program, instituted after the Sept. 11 attacks, bypasses safeguards put in place to ensure against government abuse. [...]

According to the reports in both newspapers, the program was part of an effort to gain intelligence data by tapping into bank transfers from the world’s largest financial communications network. The network - run by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT - carries up to 12.7 million messages a day. Those messages typically include names and account numbers of bank customers - private citizens and huge corporations alike - that are sending or receiving funds.

To gain access to the information, the Bush administration used an obscure power known as “administrative subpoenas,” which are not subject to independent governmental reviews. [...]

Yesterday, Specter indicated that Congress and the White House were nearing agreement on a proposal to submit all such eavesdropping to a secretive federal court that considers intelligence matters. “We’re getting close with the discussions ... to having the wiretapping issue submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” he said. “That would be a big step forward for the protection of constitutional rights and civil liberties.” (source) - Highlighting my own

You didn’t really think that our current government was going to stop with illegal wire tapping, did you? Anything you do right now - absolutely everything you do - can be picked up and heard by an outside source.

You go to the keyboard to send an email to a friend, it’s likely being read by some computer program that is parsing your information to try to determine if you are some kind of threat to national security. Everyday, I look at the traffic logs on this site. Those logs tell me that I am being watched carefully on what I write about and the content of that writing. I can tell from the logs that these are not just people, but I am being scanned by government computer programs, probably because I have been highly critical of this government.

When someone is talking to me on the phone, I can hear an occasional click. I know what it is and what is going on.

And all of this, without my knowledge (supposedly) and without a warrant. Why? Because the President of the United States feels that he has that power. And when Specter states that, “We’re getting close with the discussions ... to having the wiretapping issue submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” what he is really saying is that the U.S. Government is “getting close” to abiding by the law - laws that require the review of a court before these actions are taken in the first place - laws that have been on the books since 1978.

So just remember, when you pick up that phone, when you send an email, when you post to your blog, when you place a bank transaction, when you go to a U.S. Post Office to buy that money order, it’s all being recorded for who knows what reason.

And if that’s not bad enough, I keep hearing about breaches in security involving “private” records - although, if the government is collecting these at will, how “private” are they? First, it was the Veterans Administration, when someone took computer records home that were stolen. The information contained sensitive information such as date of birth and social security numbers. You can do a lot (assume an identity) with that information.

And just a few weeks ago, I received a letter from Mortgage Lenders Network (our mortgage lender) informing me that I “may” have been included in information that was “potentially” leaked that included our private mortgage information - where we live - how much we paid for our home - what’s left on our mortgage - along with our legal names, date of birth, social security numbers, credit report information, annual salaries, place of work, and on and on. Their suggestion is that we request an annual credit report to “make sure” that no one is using our identities for anything unapproved, and to also put a “fraud alert” on our credit report, which would require that we be called every single time a new account is created in our name. This, they said, had to be renewed every three months.

I guess I can understand why the government wants this information, although they should go about getting it legally. My big beef is that there is apparently nothing in place to prevent this information from getting out in the open. We are all vulnerable here.

Meanwhile, the President of the United States and Congress, while kind of talking about it here and there (when they aren’t talking about an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to prevent “gay marriage” and “flag burning”), are really doing nothing about it - other than threatening the New York Times for exposing what the government is up to.

Our government at work.