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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (12939)	6/3/2002 8:51:16 AM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

An interesting coincidence: Rumsfeld quietly mused last week "we need a domestic intelligence database, all other countries have them" Does this help meet the qualifications? Certainly helps out on the need for those nasty court approved subpoenas? In Terror War, Privacy vs. Security Search for Illicit Activities Taps Confidential Financial Data By Robert O'Harrow Jr. Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, June 3, 2002; Page A01 In the amorphous war on terrorism, government officials believe they have a new weapon: the growing number of financial institutions that use powerful technology to monitor confidential customer activity and report suspicious behavior to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Driven by little-known provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terror legislation that was approved after Sept. 11, banks, securities firms and other companies are deploying computer systems that draw together millions of transactions, sometimes automatically, in searches for money laundering, terrorist financing or other unusual patterns. "The Patriot Act is imposing a citizen-soldier burden on the gatekeepers of the financial institutions," said David Aufhauser, general counsel at the Treasury Department and head of an inter-agency task force on terrorist finance. "In many respects, they are in the best position to police attempts by people who would do ill to us in the U.S., to penetrate the financial systems." Federal regulators three years ago tried to impose similar monitoring requirements on financial institutions to combat money laundering but dropped their plan, known as "know your customer," after it caused an uproar among consumers concerned about their privacy. Now some specialists believe the scrutiny of consumers on the government's behalf is going even deeper. "Sept. 11 obviously made us totally rethink where to draw the line with respect to government access to customer information," said David Medine, a former financial privacy specialist at the Federal Trade Commission. "The question going forward is: Did we draw that line in the right place?" Medine said. "It is really a fundamental civil liberties issue." ........ In addition, it gives law enforcement and intelligence agencies greater access to confidential information without a subpoena while also requiring that credit bureaus secretly turn over credit reports to the CIA, National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies when presented with a request signed by a senior agency official..... washingtonpost.com