George Orwell would Recognize This..

"The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot."  Washpost

So, basically, a field superviser in the FBI can issue a "national security letter" with your name on it, and on that basis they can go to anyone with whom you have had an information "transaction" and demand the record of that transaction or any others.  Having done that, the FBI can forbid their "informant" permission to ever tell anyone about it.

The "Patriot Act?"  This is patriotism?

Pat Lang

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/05/AR2005110501366.html

Comments

[Geoff]

But it says PATRIOT right there in the title!!!

I think we should refuse to call it the (USA) PATRIOT Act and refer to it as the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. Because what the act has to do with partiotism is beyond me.

[b]

The worst part is the databasing they are doing with this information.

If you wonder next year why they kick off a plane or revoke your credit line there is good chace that show you did land in their nets.

[Michael Murry]

From "The Devil's Dictionary," by Ambrose Bierce:

"Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone anxious to illuminate his name.

In Doctor Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first."

I have thought recently of starting my own philosophical school. I have tentatively decided to call it Ex-Patriotism: the idea and practice of living happily in someone else's country rather than dying miserably in one's own. Something like that. I think I know at last why Voltaire fled his native France and took up residence in Switzerland.

[Fred]

Just like the 50's. Of course then the FBI, CIA and Army intel (amonst others) had infiltrated a number of groups protesting US policy. As my father told me prior to his passing that on his last tour as a senior nco at jcs he had been asked by a number of senior officers about his opion of one protest or another, he opened the Washington Post, pointed to the photo and named 3 of the men in the front row and said when he had served with them on active duty and wouldn't it be better not to have our own government running the leadership of protest groups. As dad said, the response was "thanks sargeant" and the subject was never mentioned again.

[Sally Stropee]

As I have posted elsewhere, this is a Gestapo tactic by goose-stepping government agents in FBI clothes. It is horrific that so many Americans are willing to carry out the dirty deeds of this Administration, be it torture or surveillance or any of the other dastardly things that seem to amuse the goons in power. It was not that long ago that Hitler's countrymen intimidated and gassed their own people and slaughtered whomever they chose outside of Germany. As long as the Bush regime is copying Hitler's tactics, let's call them what they are. Surveille me, you ugly unAmericans.

[Sally Strope]

To add to my earlier post, Hitler's Nazi said they were "just following orders" when their depravity came to light.