homeland security?
I was reading slashdot this afternoon and came across this interesting thread. A retired schoolteacher from Texas paid off his credit card debt in a lump sum, and it got flagged by Homeland Security. This isn't really new news - large financial transactions have been flagged and subject to scrutiny by government agencies for years. Since 9/11 however, the threshold for "suspicious" dollar amounts has been lowered, and the number of investigations (pdf) have increased considerably.A few of my friends who play poker for a living have had some increasing difficulty with taxes and even simple banking due to the large amounts of cash they use for their chosen career. I know 2 people that were audited in 2005, and even with all of their paperwork fully documenting their profits, they were subject to harassment and undue scrutiny by the IRS. If this kind of Orwellian monitoring is already commonplace, how will citizens ever regain some semblance of privacy from the government?
Like it or not, our society is far past the point of no return. Everywhere you go, you leave a data trail. Living off the grid is almost impossible at this stage. I wouldn't want to - I am a (mostly) law abiding citizen, and in some aspects the benefits of a truly open society improve the quality of life for everyone. As Americans, however, we did not enter into any contract granting the government full access to our lives, and the government is clearly overstepping their defined legal boundaries lately.
This is just the most recent example of the violation of privacy in America. Unconstitutional laws that have been passed radically overstep personal rights in the name of "security" and "fighting terrorism". But are we really safer today than five years ago? Does the U.S. have some secret force field that I don't know about? Or did we simply squander the world's admiration and respect for our supposedly reasonable actions in Afghanistan by invading Iraq in violation of international law...?
posted by c_peligroso @ 4:38 PM
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