This is how the world ends…
June 20th, 2008
This is how the world ends. Not with a bang or a whimper, but with bills.
The federal government is demanding detailed transaction reports from essentially every business that uses credit cards. What, how, and why this information will be used and whether or not the gathered information will be escalated to the individual purchaser in the near future (it seems like the obvious next step) are not questions the citizen has a right to have answered. What makes this worse, is that the bill in question is sponsored by Chris Dodd, a senator previously known for fighting tooth and nail against this very type of overreach by the federal government. Read more here:
Senate Housing Bill Requires eBay, Amazon, Google, and All Credit Card Companies to Report Transactions to the Government
If that weren’t enough, a bill designed to update FISA has stolen even more rights from citizens and handed it over to the attorney general, the Chancellor Palpatine of the federal government. This bill says that anyone (corporations, too, or perhaps especially) who broke the law because the President (read Executive Branch) compelled them to is immune from any litigation stemming from those illegal actions. All the attorney general has to do is say that the action was authorized between September 2001 and January 2007, that the action was related to preventing terrorism, and that the order to carry it out was written down. Now, I’ve used ‘say’ instead of ‘prove’ because to say the AG has to prove anything here would be misleading. He simply hands his documents to the judge and the judge, in turn, dismisses whatever case he happens to have in front of him. I hate to use the word ‘judge,’ since the merits of the documents aren’t actually in question. They simply need to exist. I hesitate to use the term ‘exist,’ though, since the bill gives the AG the power to declare the documents secret, meaning the only people that will ever get to see them are the AG and the judge. As a final insult, the judge isn’t even allowed to reference the documents in any way when dismissing the cases. His role is simply to toss out the trash. Judge and janitor start with the same letter, so I suppose it works out in the end.
Read more here:
George Bush’s latest powers, courtesy of the Democratic Congress
