from 28 May www.cato.org, worth reading, I submit

[alan]

GAO: Government Agencies Sifting through Personal Data

"Numerous federal government agencies are collecting and sifting through massive amounts of personal information, including credit reports, credit-card purchases and other financial data, posing new privacy concerns, according to the General Accounting Office," The Washington Times reports. In "More Surveillance Equals Less Liberty," Timothy Lynch, director of Cato's Project on Criminal Justice, writes: "The war on the home front also has been aggressive but in many ways misguided. The assumption has been that there was simply too much liberty and privacy in America--and that federal law-enforcement agencies did not have enough power. To remedy that perceived problem, policymakers rushed the USA Patriot Act into law."

 

[DMF]

Gee I wish the GAO would tell my agency how to get easier access to, "credit reports, credit-card purchases and other financial data" because we still have to have these silly things called warrants, and subpeonas. Come to think about every other agency I've worked with does too.

All this fear of the USA-PATRIOT law comes from people that haven't bothered to actually read it, or understand it.

 

[Waitone]

Shut down credit bureaus. Shut down credit scores. Shut down grocery store databases. Shut down airline databases and frequent flier programs. Shut down frequent stay and frequent drive programs. Shut down medical records exchanges. Shut down any non-governmental organization pimping information to other non-goernmental organizations.

Then I'll get upset about data mining by the federales. Feds ain't doing anything private enterprize ain't already doin'.

 

[alan]

Waitone:

Re your openning suggestions, I suspect that you have a point.

DMF:

While I cannot claim to have read the entirety of The Patrtiot Act, or even a large part thereof, it remains that while in theory, warrants might be required, then they might not be, how many times are requests for said warrants rejected? I might be overly suspicious, but I suspect that the answer is, damned few.

 

[DMF]

alan, taking the % of rejected warrants and jumping to the conclusion that is proof of too much government power under USA-PATRIOT is faulty logic. There is no evidence that more warrants get approved under the new law than they did before. Also, the reason that so few warrants get rejected is that cops, and prosecutors know that they better have PC if they are going to present things to the Magistrate. Get the Magistrate PO'd for bugging him with weak requests for a warrant and a cop or prosecutor will have great difficulty getting the Magistrate to listen when trying to get a warrant the next time.