Are Your Credit Card, Banking, Internet Usage and Home Ownership Records Already in the FBI's Databa

[babylonsister]

http://alternet.org/rights/52220/

Are Your Credit Card, Banking, Internet Usage and Home Ownership Records Already in the FBI's Database?

By Frances Madeson, TomPaine.com. Posted May 23, 2007.

Think surveillance is for terrorists? Think again. Under the terms of the Patriot Act, a ton of your personal and financial information may already be in the FBI's database.


Thanks to Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine's March 9 audit report detailing the FBI's handling of expanded surveillance powers granted under the USA PATRIOT Act, subsequent media reports and congressional hearings called to probe the findings, we now know that the FBI's been doing the same "heckuva job" with respect to information gathering and storage characteristic of other sectors of the Bush administration.

Though the toothpaste is out of the tube, I wonder if people generally grasp the enormity of the damage done. There is in existence an electronic database with over a half-billion records containing information collected via extrajudicial requests made in National Security Letters, the majority of which pertain to U.S. citizens. Your banking and credit activities, telephone and internet usage records, insurance policies, post office box rental, and car, boat and home ownership records could already be in the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse. If so, no one need inform you. If the information is incorrect, there's no way to fix it. It is shared among 10,000 government employees at multiple agencies and is stored for 20 years even if you have no connection whatsoever to a crime. In fact, only 65 convictions correlated to information obtained by the FBI from over 143,000 NSL demands made from 2003 to 2005.

When the Patriot Act was reauthorized in March 2006, I asked my senators why they voted in favor of such obviously heinous legislation. Schumer's office promptly sent an auto-reply message thanking me for my inquiry. "It makes me proud to know that my constituents take an active role in our government by corresponding with me, and I look forward to responding to your concerns in greater detail." Fifteen months later, that would make two of us.

snip//

We look to Congress hoping it will soon find remedies. While days, weeks and now months have passed since the issuance of the inspector general's audit report, how many thousands more NSLs have been delivered accompanied by their repugnant gag orders? How many additional unjustifiable intrusions into our privacy will be tolerated by our representatives in Washington? Combined with NSA illegal wiretapping, everexpanding definitions of "domestic terrorism" and initiatives to promote national identity cards, a truly horrifying and wholly un-American landscape is on the immediate horizon.

None of this is inevitable; it happens only if we let it happen. The more this administration and their would-be successors celebrate the savagery of Guantanamo and call for its expansion (Romney), sanction waterboarding (Giuliani) and lay Baghdadian waste to our desire for an enduring American democracy, the more we must and will morph from our mundane selves into mini-Jeffersons and Betsy Rosses stitching our homespun flags and stoking the fires of liberty.

Personally, I'm resolute. I'm not a child, slave or extra in their video game fantasies. I'm a grown American woman -- hale, hearty and up for this fight for my nation's soul -- and try as they will to debase that, it still means something beautiful to me.

[Daphne08]

1. How will this information be used in the future?

Why does the word Stasi come to mind?

[tom_paine]

5. Stasi, Nazi, Commie, Bushie...they are all members of the same totalitarian family

At bottom, they all want the same thing...total 100% doimination and control over their citizens and the world, if possible. At bottom, they all are willing to do ANYTHING in order to achieve their goals.

At bottom, they all feel the way about their own citizenry and even their duped followers.

Ar bottom, they all seems to have the ability to lie shamelessly, crazily, Orwellian-ly, and care nothing about being caught. At bottom, all view their enemies as subhuman.

Your suspicions, I am afraid, are correct.

[Missy M]

2. As if it isn't bad enough they have the records.....

they don't even have to inform you that they do. All of this makes me so angry and disgusted.

[Joe Bacon]

3. What happens when somebody hacks these FBI databases?

Everyone becomes a victim of ID theft!

[tom_paine]

4. Of course they are. No totalitarians worth their Bushie salt would rule for 6+ years

and NOT compile dossiers on all their subjects.

It is either a done deal, or very close to done.