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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=19&story_id=9106Why the US can't be trusted with our personal data Recently, the European Commission announced over vocal objections by the European Parliament and its own advisory group that it will permit the United States government direct access to airline passenger data. This means that before you fly to or via the United States, details of your reservation, including credit card number, flying history and even meal preferences, will be transmitted to the US government for "screening" and will be retained in a database for a minimum of 3.5 years up to an indefinite period. This is not the time to be turning over the personal data of European residents to the American government. First, there is no evidence that collection and monitoring of personal information does anything to stop terrorism. The next terrorist is more likely to be an undocumented student from rural Pakistan than a convicted criminal. He is not going to have charges from Osama's Live Bait and Fertiliser Shop on his American Express card or a subscription to Terrorist Weekly. Second, and more seriously, is that the United States has a long very long history of abusing personal information and surveillance powers for political purposes to the detriment of the entirely innocent. Whether we are talking about FBI surveillance and intimidation of suspected communists in the 1950s and 1960s or physical abuse of French journalists arriving in the US in 2003, America has a problem distinguishing real threats from imagined ones. You will recall the Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who was imprisoned for two weeks in May because his fingerprints matched an object found in the Madrid bombing. Except they didn't. The FBI made a mistake, and even then a judge had to intervene to get the man released. How did the FBI get Mayfield's fingerprint in the first place? He was in the military, and all soldiers are fingerprinted. So will all visitors to the United States, including you your biometric data (fingerprints or retinal scan, for example) will be in your passport, or you will be printed on arrival. Or perhaps you know of the case of Jose Padilla, another American citizen, who has been held incommunicado and without access to lawyers as a so-called "enemy combatant". The Supreme Court is now deciding if he can be held indefinitely without charge, if the President can on his whim throw out the centuries-old principle of habeas corpus, the right to appear before a judge before being imprisoned. We don't have to wonder how non-Americans are treated. For that we have Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, plus an archipelago of gulags around the world which are accountable to no one. People are being disappeared a term which evolved from government kidnappings and murders under the old Argentinean dictatorship. In 2002, a Canadian engineer was detained at New York's JFK airport, en route to Montreal from visiting his wife's family in North Africa. He was held incommunicado, without trial or lawyer and deported to Syria where he was tortured and imprisoned for a year until his wife could get him out. The US has long had a problem respecting other nationalities. Its conviction that it alone holds the ideals of truth, justice, freedom and democracy is both wrong and dangerous. As part of this lack of respect, official degradation and humiliation of foreigners by those in positions of authority seems to be an important ritual, whether it's Najaf or New York. Border guards are often young, uneducated and eager to press their authority. Just one small and pretty minor example is the JFK immigration clerk who when faced with a Dutch passport demanded, "Why don't you go back to Belgium, or wherever you came from?" And we want to give these people are credit card details? If youve every tried to have your credit report corrected, youll agree that software and bureaucracy can create a disaster waiting to happen. Except this time its not a loan youll be denied when a mistake is made it will be your liberty. By stealth, the US is building vast databanks of personal information on citizens and non-citizens, criminals and the entirely innocent. When investigating a murder recently, the FBI had 1.5 million relevant DNA samples to search. How did they get so many samples? Get arrested or even detained legitimately or not and your fingerprints go into the system, maybe your DNA. Join the military or certain agencies, same thing. These records will be combined with those of millions of visitors, immigrants and citizens; tens of millions of files on people who have committed no crimes and pose no threat whatsoever. Just like the Stasi used to do. If this isn't state surveillance, what is? We whether US citizens or not did not elect the American administration to watch over the world and collect this information. It is neither accountable nor in any way transparent as to its methods, objectives and results. Information is power, and the US is grabbing fistfuls of it to our peril. And the trust-me rhetoric doesn't cut it. The United States administration has made it patently clear that it does not consider itself bound by laws domestic or international when they conflict with its interests. All it takes is for somebody, from the President on down to a lowly border guard, to say so. As if in a dictatorship, the President has made himself prosecutor, judge and jury. After all, Bush told us that the prisoners in Guantanamo are "bad people" and therefore, according to him, worthy of indefinite detention and abuse. Never mind that the Red Cross says that 70-90 percent of those rounded up are innocent of any crime; the United States has stated in words and deeds that it's OK to lift human rights for the "war on terror" and OK to torture human beings, especially those who are non-white and non-American. Read that again: it's OK to torture. Not just criminals, though that's bad enough. These are people who have not been charged with any crime. So much for the presumption of innocence. Say goodbye to your rights to a lawyer and a hearing. Being a suspect is enough to get you the full welcome package. And guess what? When your plane takes off for the US, you're a suspect too. The European Commission is putting the safety and dignity of every traveler at stake by giving the US information with which its border security personnel can wreck havoc on personal lives. In case that isn't perfectly clear, the US had an escape clause built into the agreement on how the data will be used, saying that it couldn't be held to it in any case. Europeans may sit silent when they think it will only be Muslims and dark-skinned people being harassed, just as they did when Jews and Gypsies were taken into the night. We all know what that silence begets, and it is ugliness in the extreme. Terrorist, journalist, protester, liberal, writer, dissident they all look the same to the Bush administration. Remember: anyone who is not with them is with the terrorists Bush's words, not ours. Which are you? Sorry, that's not your decision a border guard will make it for you on your next trip to the land of the free. Simply put, the United States cannot be trusted to respect any law or international protocol, and cannot therefore be trusted with the personal data of Europeans. For once, the European Parliament tried to look out for our interests, and an unelected and unaccountable Commission overruled them. Europeans should now press their representatives to take this ill-advised decision to the European Court, where it can be overturned for the dangers it poses to the privacy and security of all of us and for its clear violation of EU law. 2 July 2004 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <FONT COLOR="#000099">Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. 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That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
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