Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
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A Fast One
Posted on November 24, 2003 in Accountability Citizenship Human Rights
You sopped the sweat off your forehead and thought “Well, a little pressure does still work in this day and age. We stopped Patriot 2.”
It got grafted onto an intelligence spending bill. Item by item, the Libertine Republicans are getting the police state that they want:
A provision of an intelligence spending bill will expand the power of the FBI to subpoena business documents and transactions from a broader range of businesses — everything from libraries to travel agencies to eBay — without first seeking approval from a judge….
The new provision in the spending bill redefines the meaning of “financial institution” and “financial transaction.” The wider definition explicitly includes insurance companies, real estate agents, the U.S. Postal Service, travel agencies, casinos, pawn shops, ISPs, car dealers and any other business whose “cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax or regulatory matters.”
“On its face, it’s a cryptic and seemingly innocuous amendment,” [James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology] said. “It wasn’t until after it passed both houses that we saw it. The FBI and CIA like to try to graft things like this into intelligence bills.”
Read that carefully. The FBI can subpoena the records of your ISP. Suddenly lose service for no explicable reason? You’ve paid your bills? You’ve kept within your bandwidth? You’ve not posted pornography on your site? Big Brother might be fishing because they don’t like what you say about them. And in no time, you’re a fish out of water, suffocating.
This is tantamount to legislative date rape, carried out by the Libertines (I don’t call them conservative because they squander our taxes and run up a huge deficit) Republicans, for the purpose of tightening their hold against limits on their power. It gets very tiresome to keep repeating the same warnings over and over. But it comes down to this: you are losing your rights as a citizen.
The inalienable citizenship that you had on January 19, 2001 is rapidly disappearing. We are turning into a corporate jungle, a banana republic where rights are limited.
Michael Doss caught the news item upon which this rant is based.
