Wednesday, June 12, 2013

PATRIOT ACT - AMERICANS ARE TAGGED

Two times the government used its anti-terrorism powers to target Americans not engaged in terrorism
Daily Caller – Jamie Weinstein – 6/11/2013

The powers granted in the Patriot Act aided law enforcement officials in uncovering former New York Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s dalliances with high-class prostitutes, which isn’t exactly a terrorism-related offense. Mark Hosenball explained how in Newsweek magazine in 2008:
The Patriot Act gave the FBI new powers to snoop on suspected terrorists. In the fine print were provisions that gave the Treasury Department authority to demand more information from banks about their customers’ financial transactions. Congress wanted to help the feds identify terrorist money launderers. But Treasury went further. It issued stringent new regulations that required banks themselves to look for unusual transactions (such as odd patterns of cash withdrawals or wire transfers) and submit SARs — Suspicious Activity Reports — to the government. Facing potentially stiff penalties if they didn’t comply, banks and other financial institutions installed sophisticated software to detect anomalies among millions of daily transactions. They began ranking the risk levels of their customers — on a scale of zero to 100 — based on complex formulas that included the credit rating, assets and profession of the account holder. …

The new scrutiny resulted in an explosion of SARs, from 204,915 in 2001 to 1.23 million last year [2007]. The data, stored in an IRS computer in Detroit, are accessible by law-enforcement agencies nationwide. “Terrorism has virtually nothing to do with it,” says Peter Djinis, a former top Treasury lawyer. “The vast majority of SARs filed today involve garden-variety forms of white-collar crime.” Federal prosecutors around the country routinely scour the SARs for potential leads.

Spitzer’s transactions were tagged, which ultimately led to suspicions he was accepting bribes, according to ABC News.


“We had no interest at all in the prostitution ring until the thing with Spitzer led us to learn about it,” a Department of Justice official told ABC News. 

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1 comment:

  1. Hello!...is there anybody in here??
    Testing..testing.

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