Knock On Any Door
Dear A-Letter Reader:
If one day, with no prior warning, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation knocked on your door and asked to talk to you, would you be concerned?
Well, you might reply, "I haven't done anything wrong, so it wouldn't worry me."
What if the FBI agent asked you questions that made no sense, leaving you wondering what he really wanted. Would you be a bit nervous? Even if you had done nothing wrong, would you be concerned about whether the FBI might be watching you, maybe listening to your phone calls, reading your e-mail? Wouldn't you rack your brain trying to figure out why the FBI was interested in you, about your friends or associates that might be questionable? Wouldn't you be looking over your shoulder, trying to figure out what the heck was going on?
Well a few years ago, not long after 9-11, 2001, I returned from an offshore conference in Panama, to find a business card from an FBI agent in the Miami FBI field office left on my front door with a note asking me to call him. When I called, he gave me an unbelievable story about checking to see whether my phone number had formerly belonged to a woman whose name I had never heard, (not the person who once had my phone number, a name I knew from calls I got). Of course the FBI could easily find out who had any phone number, without calling me. Obviously, the FBI wanted to know something else, probably to confirm that I lived at the address they were checking, an address that I never use since I use a mail drop. Indeed, no phone is listed in my name.
To this day I don't know why the FBI contacted me and I haven't heard from them since. (Perhaps I will after this). So maybe I was one of the thousands of Americans caught up in the massive fishing expedition sweeps by the National Security Agency (NSA) exposed this week by The NY Times . That's the same NSA Pres. Bush illegally ordered to wiretap and eavesdrop on Americans without obtaining the search warrants the law requires.
The Times reports that in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the NSA sent a stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the FBI in search of terrorists. It soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. FBI officials complained to the NSA that this unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The NSA was collecting this data by eavesdropping on Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some FBI officials and prosecutors thought the checks were a pointless intrusion on Americans' privacy.
In my business, I make many offshore phone calls to many nations. Was I somehow caught up in this senseless NSA sweep? If so, were my constitutional rights violated? I'll never know -- and if I got a chance to ask George Bush, no doubt he would snicker and say, "We were just trying to catch terrorists."
OK, dear readers, (especially those of you who send e-mails accusing us of being in league with terrorists because of our concern about the growing Bush police state), just wait until the knock comes on your door. Read on to understand how you could be caught up in this senseless, illegal war on Americans.
Jay Bookman, writing an illuminating article in The Atlanta Constitution last week, noted that a lot of Americans respond with a shrug to the revelation that the NSA "may be tapping US phone calls and e-mails without court permission and in violation of federal law." He correctly says that many people are concerned because to them the threat of government amok is theoretical, while the threat of terrorist attack is very real.
But he also explains how the Internal Revenue Service is using similar NSA computer programs and data mining techniques "to sift through millions of tax refund requests and financial records" to analyze billions of phone calls, e-mails and other data. But while the NSA is looking for clues for terrorists, the IRS is mining data for fraudulent tax refund requests. And because this type of wholesale search turns up tens of thousands of "false positives" -- people who are innocent of tax evasion are suddenly put on a list of accused by a mindless computer. As Bookman says: "The IRS data mining program offersa chilling illustration of the danger. Under IRS policy, tax refunds identified as fraudulent are immediately frozen, sometimes permanently, based on no evidence except that their return matches the computer profile."
The same stupid computer approach is used to put scores of thousands of Americans on banned air travel lists including David Nelson (of Ozzie and Harriet fame), a 4-year-old boy, the police chief of Northfield, Minn., the co-author of the book Bush's Brain , US Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and US Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass). All are on secret "terrorist watch lists" compiled by the government. They have no idea how they got on these lists, and even though 30,000 have demanded their names be removed, the US government refuses to do so.
Wake up, folks. Open your eyes. All my long life I have been a political conservative, but it is plain America is sliding into a police state and most people are either too dumb to understand that, or they just don't care. Well, we do care, and even if we go down, it will be fighting all the way.
So FBI -- you know where I live and you know my phone number -- come and get me.
That's the way that it looks from here.
BOB BAUMAN, Editor
The Sovereign Society Offshore A-Letter
Friday, January 20, 2006 - Vol. 8 No. 15 |
