Senate passes security bill: “Giving President Bush a sweeping legislative victory, the lame-duck Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to create a huge new Homeland Security Department that backers hope will make Americans safer from terrorist attacks.”
6 thoughts on “Hello…This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER…”
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The New York Times William Safire Piece:
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.
Sounds a lot like that Total Criminalization thing…
It’s worse than the Central Scrutinizer analogy: the laws have already been passed…
If it looks like a bureaucratic smokescreen, it must be…
If anyone was that interested in you before, they have all this data anyway – don’t kid yourself. Targeted SPAM with your pop-up, anyone?
Don’t I remember something about, you know, a certain right to privacy? It was in some funny document; I think it was called the Contitution of the United States of America. I guess some consider it obsolete… Come to think of it, there are things that should be ratified, but I disagree with this one adamantly. Oh well, who gives a fuck anyway…
I remember another funny little word: Echelon, remember thatone? Wonder how long before us Euro’s are also being logged, watched, scrutinized, searched and stripped of our privacy…