[Shotimes] OT Privacy?

[Ian Fisher]

Personally, I find it very annoying. If the govt wants to step up and
enforce these things that they advocate and let us know how we are
supposed to, that is one thing.  I work for a financial institution.
With the recent passing of the patriot act and all of the paperwork and
filing we now must do for every single person that comes in and looks at
us, they need their own separate file. It is highly inefficient, time
consuming, as well as a waste of space. If said customer comes in to my
branch but his accounts were opened at another branch, that person is
only supposed to have one file. This means that I have to send
everything over to the branch of origin. So what happens if they open
multiple accounts between different branches? A lot of it is a bunch of
political BS that won't stop anything. All it does is create an absolute
mess and a waste of paper. Sure, there might be a paper trail, but its
not organized! 

Stepping off my soapbox for a few now...

Ian


-----Original Message-----
From: shotimes-admin@autox.team.net
[mailto:shotimes-admin@autox.team.net] On Behalf Of Ron Nottingham
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 6:12 PM
To: shotimes@autox.team.net
Subject: Re: [Shotimes] OT Privacy?


----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael S Wojton" <Mike.Wojton@owens-ill.com>
To: <shotimes@autox.team.net>
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 4:04 PM
Subject: [Shotimes] OT Privacy?


> For all you "government conspiracy", paranoid types: check out the 
> following link, and notice the image next to Homeland Security.  Are 
> they trying to tell us something?
>
> http://tinyurl.com/rrj
>
> (ps. I don't advocate em, I just report em.)

The following was discussed at length on the ALE list (Atlanta Linux
Enthusiasts):

Just read this (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html)
article about the Homeland Security Act and everything that is being
tacked onto it.

If you can't read this article, the following is the text from the
article:

You Are a Suspect
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON - If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage,
here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription
you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and
e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank
deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend - all
these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense
Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial
sources, add every piece of information that government has about you -
passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial
and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your
lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance - and
you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about
every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to
your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the
unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval
Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security
adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of
secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with
the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading
Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned
the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony.
He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White
House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful
decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more
scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office"
in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter
is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to
snoop on every public and private act of every American.

Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the scope of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws,
raised requirements for the government to report secret eavesdropping to
Congress and the courts. But Poindexter's assault on individual privacy
rides roughshod over such oversight.

He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and
secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such
necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has been
given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million
Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in
defense of each person's medical, financial and communications privacy.
But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight drew the
Reagan administration into its most serious blunder, is still operating
on the presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights, the
buck ends with him and not with the president.

This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In the past
week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow of The
Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's operation, but
editorialists have not grasped its undermining of the Freedom of
Information Act.

Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the
combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar
overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and
Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and
postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate
should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear.

The Latin motto over Poindexter"s new Pentagon office reads "Scientia
Est Potentia" - "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite
knowledge about you is its power over you. "We're just as concerned as
the next person with protecting privacy," this brilliant mind blandly
assured The Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before.

=======================================

Even more fuel for the conspirasist's fire :-)

Ron N. - Dalton, GA
90 SHO
_______________________________________________
Shotimes mailing list
Shotimes@autox.team.net http://www.team.net/mailman/listinfo/shotimes