In the words of Benjamin Franklin "Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Liberty at Risk In the 1970s, the U.S. Senate's "Church Committee" revealed that the CIA and the NSA had been conducting illegal surveillance on American citizens for years. In response, Congress enacted a series of reforms, notably the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan, the CIA is permitted to secretly collect "significant" foreign intelligence within the United States ONLY if the collection effort is NOT aimed at the domestic activities of U.S. citizens and corporations. Now the head of the National Security Agency has told Congress openly that they should aim "Echelon", the super secret and most powerful surveillance system in the world, directly at American citizens. The vast international global eavesdropping network Echelon is said to be able to monitor ALL, as in EVERY one, of the world's telephone and fax transmissions and sift out messages it finds interesting. According to published reports it is alleged that computers are now automatically analyzing every phone, fax, and data signal, and can also identify calls to say, a target telephone number in Dallas, no matter from where the call originates. Originally designed to snoop on the Russians the system has been expanded to eavesdrop on domestic citizens of all nationalities and it is now believed that much of the work appears to be focused on commercial and private civilian targets. Concerned over the loss of privacy and the rights of U.S. citizens, the retiring House majority leader, Dick Armey recently said, "I told the president I thought his Justice Department was out of control. Are we going to save ourselves from international terrorism in order to deny the fundamental liberties we protect? It doesn't make sense to me," he told USA Today. Armey is also on record, in a speech to the Federalist Society, as saying that the federal government has a dismal record when it comes to safeguarding private information: "We have no credibility on the issue if we cannot clean up our own act." His comments come only two months after he and the ACLU criticized government use of technology that digitizes video images of faces and checks them against photos of people wanted by police, and they coincide with the ACLU's new $3.5 million advertising and lobbying campaign accusing Attorney General John Ashcroft of eroding personal freedoms in the application of the USA Patriot Act. Further complicating the privacy issue, the Central Intelligence Agency announced this week that it is expanding its domestic presence, placing agents with nearly all of the FBI's 56 terrorism task forces in U.S. cities. The CIA officers work in special parts of the larger task force buildings, behind walls impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping. In Oregon, Portland Police Chief Mark Kroeger said there remains a deep distrust toward giving law enforcement or the CIA expanded powers. Although he approves of the CIA presence, he said he purposefully stays clear of the CIA officers. "I know very little about them and I choose to keep it that way," he said. Complications from the hurriedly passed USA Patriot Act abound, another wrinkle is that banks, broker/dealers and insurance firms will be forced to spend a total of $10.9 billion on anti-money laundering initiatives orchestrated under the umbrella of catching terrorists, according to a new report published by Celent Communications. However, terrorist activities account for less than 1/4 of 1% of what the Treasury Department considers laundered money, according to the report. The real focus for these procedures is revenue collections and citizen control...certainly not terrorism. The USA. Patriot Act was passed directly after 9/11 in the US Senate with only on dissenting vote. The dissenting vote was cast by Sen. Paul Wellstone from Minnesota who was also the only person in the Senate to have read the bill before it was voted on. He pleaded with his peers to read the bill prior to the vote to no avail. He was killed October 25, 2002 in a private plane crash just two weeks prior to the elections. The erosion of personal privacy coupled with the alarming increase in citizen control laws has been achieved under the cover of fighting the "war on terrorism" and the "war on drugs." The assault on personal rights, including privacy, is justified with convincing arguments about the common good and how the State is "improving" the quality of the protection it provides its citizens. On closer examination one may observe that the "common good" always happens to benefit the political concepts of those in power and that the individual's loss of personal power is quickly transferred to the bureaucracy. ---------- "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer every man." (Colossians 4:6) http://www.InnGlory.org If you do not want to receive posts from this list, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and you will be unsubscribed. If you have a friend who wants to join, tell him to send an e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and he will be subscribed.
