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A Decade of Secret Tyranny
Ten years ago today, on Oct. 26, 2001, President George W. Bush signed into law the odious legislation known as the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, perhaps the single most unconstitutional enactment by the U.S. Congress since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789.
A panicked Congress, eager to be seen as “doing something,” overwhelmingly passed the law only weeks after the Sept. 11, 2011 terror attacks in New York and Washington.
In an atmosphere of palpable fear, with haste and secrecy, in the name of the “war on terrorism,” Congress adopted the Act without hearings, giving the U.S. executive branch and its police agencies sweeping powers that undermine both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The Act was passed with little debate by senators and congressmen — most of whom did not, and could not, even read the bill. When the vote was taken no final printed copies were available.
General Ignorance
Other than civil libertarians and those who have suffered under this law, a decade later, like the congressman who voted for the Act, most Americans still know little about how drastically the Act restricts their rights and liberties. (For a copy of my detailed expose of the PATRIOT Act Report, click here.) 
One of the principal reasons for this public ignorance is that the Act imposes enforced silence on those it touches with its operations, threatening them with fines and jail if they publicly discuss what happens to them.
Section 215 of the Act violates the Fourth Amendment by allowing government police to conduct searches without a warrant and without showing any probable cause and the FBI has used Section 215 to obtain financial and even medical records. This provision violates First Amendment free speech by prohibiting those who are served with the orders from disclosing that fact to others, even where there is no real need for such secrecy.
This secrecy is only a part of an alarming system of government mass surveillance that has been erected, about which most Americans know very little.
Watching You
The massive Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an unnecessary conglomeration of 22 agencies and nearly 200,000 employees, together with an out of control FBI and CIA, engage in massive surveillance of all of us, not just suspected terrorists or criminals.
Our phone calls, our emails and website visits, our financial records, our travel itineraries, and our digital images captured on powerful surveillance cameras are adding to the mountains of data being mined for suspicious patterns and associations.
In the last decade, civil liberties groups have criticized the PATRIOT Act as going too far by scooping up too much data and violating people’s rights to privacy.
One Man Challenge
Nicholas Merrill from New York may be one of the few people to fight a request for information from the FBI that came in the form of a “national security letter.” As I noted above, the Act made it easier for authorities to demand records from Internet service providers like Merrill’s company. But Merrill’s the only person who’s gone to court asking the right to talk about it.
Merrill says: “It’s time to have an open discussion about the direction that our country’s going in terms of all this secrecy and justifying everything with national security. I find it upsetting that there’s still so much secrecy surrounding these powers and their actual use, even to this day.”
20,000 FBI Violations
The record of the FBI in the last decade is one long list of abused powers and unconstitutional acts, followed by apologies and promises to sin no more — but only when they were caught.
In 2002, I reported that the FBI quietly had been asking offshore banks and other financial institutions to review their records for transactions involving scores of U.S. small businesses, organizations and people, none of whom had been charged with any crime.
In 2007 I wrote about a U.S. Justice Department’s Inspector General Report criticizing the FBI abuse of these national security letters in obtaining thousands of telephone, business and financial records without prior judicial approval.
The DOJ report said the FBI lacked controls to assure the subpoenas were issued properly. Although they citied the PATRIOT Act as their authority, the DOJ found the FBI issued illegally more than 20,000 NSLs.
The FBI’s supposed object was to find terrorists and their cash. The use of these “national security letters” marked a drastic change in the relationship between law enforcement and the financial industry, which used to surrender records to government agents only after official proof of probable cause that a crime had occurred, or was about to occur, and after a search warrant was issued by a federal judge or magistrate.
Sneak and Peek
Another part of the Act, the so-called sneak and peek provision, lets FBI agents search a person’s home or business with a judge’s warrant, but without telling the person they’re doing it.
“We’re now finding from public reports that less than 1% of these sneak and peek searches are happening for terrorism investigations,” says Michelle Richardson, of the ACLU Washington office. “They’re instead being used primarily in drug cases, in immigration cases, and some fraud.”
Obama’s Greater Surveillance Plans
Richardson, at the ACLU, says President Obama has even bigger surveillance plans in the works now. Obama’s cyber security proposal “…makes the PATRIOT Act look quaint,” Richardson says. “And the collection that it would allow would outpace anything that’s being done under the PATRIOT Act.”
Merrill, who wasn’t able to talk to his family for years about the FBI request or his lawsuit, still wonders how many other people have gone through a similar experience. Two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have demanded that the Justice Department go public with a classified interpretation of the Act that they say would surprise and anger the public.
“It’s time to have an open discussion about the direction that our country’s going in terms of all this secrecy and justifying everything with national security,” Merrill says. He hopes the courts agree with him, as do I.
P.S. As the U.S. government continues to enslave us, we are left with only one course of action…to employ every legal tool we can find to live our lives as sovereign individuals. Acquiring a second passport, legal residency in another country, establishing a global investment portfolio and forming a business in a tax-advantaged jurisdiction are all elements in the construction of a sovereign life. For additional solutions, click here.
Other Posts from the Author
- Are You Among the 23% Entitled to a Second Passport? - May 14th, 2012
- The Real Problem With the French Elections - May 4th, 2012
- The Life of a “Sovereign Individual” - April 24th, 2012
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Tags: Liberty, PATRIOT Act, rights
We truly live in a police state.
Consider also what just happened in a federal court in Texas. A Dallas business owner was involved in a civil dispute and paid millions of dollars to lawyers, and when he objected to additional fees after settling the case, they had a “friendly” judge seize all of his possessions, without any notice or hearing, and essentially ordered him under “house arrest” as an involuntary servant to the lawyers. The business owner has been under this “servant” order for 10 months and is prohibited from owning any possessions, prohibited from working, etc..
…and some quotes from the judge:
THE COURT: “I’m telling you don’t scr-w with me. You are a fool, a fool, a fool, a fool to scr-w with a federal judge, and if you don’t understand that, I can make you understand it. I have the force of the Navy, Army, Marines and Navy behind me.”
THE COURT: “You realize that order is an order of the Court. So any failure to comply with that order is contempt, punishable by lots of dollars, punishable by possible jail, death”
http://www.lawinjustice.com has an explanation of this case.
BOB RESPONDS: I went to the above website and read some of the record quoted from this case. While it does not say, I assume this case is being appealed, as it should be if the statements presented there are true.
[...] A DECADE SINCE THE PATRIOT ACT The massive Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an unnecessary conglomeration of 22 agencies and nearly 200,000 employees, together with an out of control FBI and CIA, engage in massive surveillance of all of us, not just suspected terrorists or criminals. Our phone calls, our emails and website visits, our financial records, our travel itineraries, and our digital images captured on powerful surveillance cameras are adding to the mountains of data being mined for suspicious patterns and associations. In the last decade, civil liberties groups have criticized the PATRIOT Act as going too far by scooping up too much data and violating people’s rights to privacy. Now, whether or not you have an opinion about the enslavement slant of this writing, it’s important to see how the construction of a sovereign life may be possible. HOW VISA’S “SECRET LOCATION” OPERATION CENTER FUNCTIONS – AND HOW 8,000 TRANSACTIONS A SECOND ARE SAFE-GUARDED This is all about how VISA protects your data (or doesn’t …we know that the “secret” building is in Loudoun County, VA). [...]
BOB SAYS: Here is an entry in my blog from August 31, 2007:
The news today reported that the Bush administration plans to use again a dubious legal tool, the “state secrets” privilege, to try to stop a lawsuit against a Belgian banking cooperative, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the United States government, court documents show. The suit alleges that Swift, in secret cooperation with the U.S. government, violated the privacy of an untold number of persons by allow the U.S. access to Swift cash transfer records.
Swift is a privately run cooperative founded in 1973 and headquartered in Brussels, Belgium that electronically transmits trillions of cash transfers every day to more than 200 countries. The network handles some nine million transfer instructions and confirmations a day with a value of about US$6 trillion. Swift is considered the nerve center of the global banking industry, routing trillions of dollars each day among banks, brokerage houses and other financial institutions. Its secret partnership with Washington, reported in The New York Times in June 2006, gave U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Treasury Department access to millions of records on international banking transactions by private individuals and others.
This massive access was part of an effort to trace money that government police claimed might be linked to financing of terrorism. The Justice Department claims that the suit against the Swift consortium threatens to disrupt the operations of a vital national security program and to disclose “highly classified information” if it continues. No doubt the Bush officials don’t want the world to know just how great a violation of the privacy of millions of people may have been.
In 2006 a news story got a lot of coverage in Switzerland, but was generally ignored elsewhere. But to those who advocate offshore financial activity, including recommending Switzerland as one of the world’s best asset havens, this was an important story. Datelined from Zurich, it stated that “the United States has confirmed it has been monitoring international financial transactions, including those in and out of Switzerland, for almost five years. The Swiss government remained quiet on the issue, but data protection experts and lawyers were and are concerned by revelations that the U.S. government had been tapping into records of Swift, supposedly looking for evidence of potential activity by terror groups.
In my opinion you better believe that the U.S. money snoops who say they are looking for terrorist cash are also looking for tax evasion, money laundering of all kinds and any other indictable offenses. And they are doing this in violation of the Fourth Amendment guarantees against illegal searches without a warrant. Naturally enough, the question arose as to whether the U.S. government having wholesale Swift access to hundreds of millions of wire transfers since Sept. 11, 2001 has compromised the Swiss banking secrecy mandated by law since 1934.
In Switzerland 99 banks and 254 institutions are connected to Swift, with a daily transaction value of some CHF200 billion (US$160 billion). Although the Swiss Bankers Association says that Swiss banking secrecy had not been endangered or violated, the Swiss Federal Data Protection Commissioner said he was alarmed. And well he might be. Switzerland cooperates in foreign criminal investigations.
But however much the U.S. money police may have seen in the records of Swift wire transfers, Switzerland still is home to fully one-third of all private wealth in the world. It has a centuries old tradition of confidentiality that will only be breached if someone is suspected of committing an action that the Swiss consider a crime. Tax evasion is not considered a crime in Switzerland, though tax fraud (falsifying documentation, for example) is.
The question now is whether the U.S. government money police will be allowed to hide behind the “state secrets” doctrine and conceal just how far they have gone in violating everyone’s privacy.