Topic: I Have Seen Big Brother – And He Is Us

[Dunrobin]

I Have Seen Big Brother – And He Is Us
by Andrew S. Fischer

Having been recently appointed Anti-Money Laundering Officer at my investment firm, I now have the official, government-sanctioned power to scrutinize our clients' account activity and report almost anything I deem "suspicious activity" to the federal government. Be worried, friends – be very worried – since every bank, every brokerage house, every financial institution in the U.S. is required by the Patriot Act to appoint an AML Officer, enact procedures to combat money-laundering, and file Suspicious Activity Reports on U.S. citizens. (You can view the 4-page SAR-SF form here.)

The Act's definition of a financial institution is disturbingly broad. It includes dealers in precious metals, stones, or jewels; pawnbrokers; loan or finance companies; insurance companies; travel agencies; telegraph companies; sellers of vehicles, including automobiles, airplanes, and boats. Essentially, it means your financial transactions are subject to investigation if you purchase an engagement ring, insure your home, take a vacation or buy a car.

According to the statute, if I simply should have become aware of suspicious activity and fail to report it, I may have broken the law. So, if I have a head cold one day and miss a $5,000 wire transfer on a client's brokerage statement – which is clearly suspicious activity since this client is a 90-year-old widow living on fixed-income investments, who has never made a wire transfer in ten years – I could be in trouble. (Don't laugh – this applies not just to the AML Officer, but to every employee in a financial organization in a position to view client transactions. So, if you make an unusually large deposit at the bank one day, your teller must report this potential "suspicious activity" to higher ups or face possible sanctions.)

As AML Officer, I am required to report a client's activity as suspicious if it merely fails to make business sense or appears to be without economic purpose. So, if a client transfers $10,000 into his investment account and breathlessly says "Buy gold stocks!" an hour after Alan Greenspan and Fox News proclaim "Scientists Prove All Gold on Earth is Iron Pyrite," I have to turn him in.

If a client is a young school teacher and deposits, say, five $2,000 checks over a period of ten days, she must be questioned about it. Since this might be perfectly normal for a middle-aged, high-income surgeon, however, I wouldn't have to question her at all – thus lower-income clients will necessarily suffer more intrusions into their privacy than those who earn more. By the way, as AML Officer I'm safe-harbored against violations of privacy laws I may be forced to commit while adhering to the regulations of the Patriot Act.

It gets worse. As I've noted, clients are to be questioned – and then reported to the feds on Form SAR-SF if I don't like their answers – if their transactions indicate suspicious activity. But it does not end there – I'm also required to be on the lookout for potential tax evasion (as well as check fraud, embezzlement, theft, identity theft or mail fraud). So, if a client deposits $1,000 which he states he won by betting $1,000 on the Super Bowl, and wants to buy his daughter a Treasury bond with that money, I'm obligated by federal law to rat him out. Of course, all of this is just the tip of the Patriot Act iceberg; see, e.g., "Outside View: Patriot Act Problems."

I find this situation repulsive in the extreme. It is Orwell's 1984, slightly delayed. It will result in a paranoia explosion reminiscent of Nazi-era Germany. What if the Super Bowl bettor in the above example later hears from another person that I will probably file an SAR-SF about his $1,000 deposit? Will he then, out of fear, report it on his tax return – the government's secondary desired end? Or will he just phone me and say he made "that betting thing" up? Then what do I do? Will he contact me and beg or threaten me to keep silent? Then what do I do? What if the bettor is my own father? Then what do I do!?

I'm already an unpaid tax collector for the federal government, since I prepare my firm's payroll, and now, without my consent, I'm also its unpaid law enforcement agent and informant. I can only wonder, fearfully, what comes next.

August 6, 2005

Andrew S. Fischer is a controller for an investment advisory firm in Pennsylvania.

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com

SOURCE:  http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/fischer3.html

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[Dunrobin]

No reactions to this at all?  Does that mean none of you give a damn that you are being spied on continuously?

[Pilsner Panther]

Maybe it's that we're just all getting used to it...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/30/BAG7HE07481.DTL&hw=Newsom&sn=018&sc=382

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[Dunrobin]

Well, I concede that you've got a point there about people getting used to it, and that's what makes all of this so insidious.  The government has been gradually stealing our Natural Rights and replacing them with phony "rights" that they claim to "grant" (and can thus withdraw whenever they choose.)  They snoop here, there and everywhere, and teach our children to be government snitches (the D.A.R.E. program comes immediately to mind) - although they do little about teaching them to read, write or do math.

They herd us like cattle in the airports, to be groped and probed, search us without warrants, spy on us with their cameras mounted everywhere (now with sound, so they can eavesdrop too), and now they have spies everywhere to report anything "suspicious" that they might have missed themselves.

And barely a peep to be heard in protest.  "Land of the free and home of the brave" my ass - we are now the "land of the sheep and home of the cowed."

I'm disgusted.   

[Pilsner Panther]

But this is nothing new, Rob. In 1925, H.L. Mencken wrote an essay about how the proliferation of traffic laws (and traffic cops) was turning the once fiercely-independent American citizens into sheep. So, there was creeping Big Brotherism going on long before Big Brother was even thought of!

If I can find a copy of "Traffic" on the web, I'll copy it and post it here... it's much too long (about 2,500 words) for me to type out the whole thing. However, here's a relevant quote; Mencken is describing the increasingly busy Baltimore Traffic Court of 1925:

"The situation is made the more intoxicating by the fact that nine-tenths of the of the criminals are persons who would never fall into the toils [of the courts]— that the traffic regulations tap whole new categories of victims. Time was when the cops seldom got a chance to nab a white woman, and never a respectable white woman. Now they take them by the hundred. It is almost Utopia.

"But of course, not quite. The ideal of the Polizei, at all times and everywhere, is to get their hands upon every citizen at least once a day. Merit is apparently measured among them by the population of the jails, prisons and hoosegows."

So, (this is no news, of course), some things never change, and that most definitely includes the law-enforcement mentality. Nowadays, it's not the growing number of cars on the roads that serve as a pretext for the extension of police/government authority into new areas, it's the terrorist threat. Which is absolutely real— but it's also true that the Patriot Act and other measures that the authorities have taken go way overboard. For example, this proliferation of surveillance cameras everywhere, indoors and out.

I'm not surprised to see Gavin Newsom endorsing the cameras; I have a number of other reasons for disliking the man, and here's one more. If you put them in a gang-ridden neighborhood, it might seem a reasonable use of the things, but it's also a "thin end of the wedge." Where will they go up next? It's also not hard to hide a TV camera, since one the size of a cigarette pack can provide a perfectly sharp image, with today's technology.

I don't know where this is all leading, but speaking for myself, I've never liked being ordered around and snooped on and put under a lot of unreasonable restrictions— which got me into a lot of trouble when I was a kid!

By the way, the eyes in that creepy illustration of mine are George W. Bush's... which is perfectly appropriate, I'd say.

[Dunrobin]

Believe it or not, I recognized Bush's eye, but it is especially creepy how insane they look repeated over and over again like that.

You're right, of course, that this has been building for a long time.  If I had a time machine, I'd go back and knock some sense back into our ancestors.

It's particularly appropriate that we are emerging into a full-blown police state under the aegis of the Republicans, as they are the ones who destroyed the principles of the original Republic and laid the foundations of this Empire when they wrecked havoc upon their fellow man rather than recognize their natural right to go their own way.  Lincoln and the Republicans did not "free the slaves"; they enslaved all of us instead.   George W. Bush is a true son of Lincoln.

[Pilsner Panther]

Believe it or not, I recognized Bush's eye, but it is especially creepy how insane they look repeated over and over again like that.

I used a "tiling" plug-in for Paint Shop Pro to produce that thing. I've had it sitting around for a while, but I've never found a use for it before. Nightmarish, isn't it?

You're right, of course, that this has been building for a long time.  If I had a time machine, I'd go back and knock some sense back into our ancestors.

But— and this is a theoretical question that I've pondered myself— to what point would you go back? The passing of the income tax law (1912, I think that was)? That would be a likely choice.

It's particularly appropriate that we are emerging into a full-blown police state under the aegis of the Republicans, as they are the ones who destroyed the principles of the original Republic and laid the foundations of this Empire when they wrecked havoc upon their fellow man rather than recognize their natural right to go their own way.  Lincoln and the Republicans did not "free the slaves"; they enslaved all of us instead.   George W. Bush is a true son of Lincoln.

What's ironic is that if you told him that in person, he'd break out in a big grin and slap you on the back!

There's a fair amount of Mencken material on the web, including all of his brilliant coverage of the Scopes trial, but I couldn't find "Traffic." The print version is in "The Impossible H.L. Mencken" (Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1991). Here are some quotes that are really germane to this subject, though:

"The great masses of men, though theoretically free, are seen to submit supinely to oppression and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts. Have they no means of resistance? Obviously they have. The worst tyrant, even under democratic plutocracy, has but one throat to slit. The moment the majority decided to overthrow him he would be overthrown. But the majority lacks the resolution; it cannot imagine taking the risks. "

"It is a politician's business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground."

"The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe."

Hence, he puts up with the financial spying and the Patriot Act and the surveillance cameras and the like... old H.L. had a pretty good crystal ball, and he would have recognized the social ills of 2005 immediately, if someone had put him in a time machine and brought him into the present.

[Bruckman]

I'd say it was the passage of the income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve banks in order to control the currency, events which piggybacked on one other (1912-1913). Monkeying with the currency is the surest way of bringing citizenry to heel.

And you know, it's bitterly ironic to me that we citizens are snooped on, recorded, filmed, in almost any so-called "public" space, yet people like Karl Rove and Cheney and Ashcroft are apparently above these standards, so much so that they don't even deign to offer explanations of their questionable actions to us. They aren't accountable to citizens; if Cheney makes a profit through Halliburton, it's unpatriotic to query his motives or how much he's receiving. The snafu surrounding the recent announcement of John Roberts to the Supreme Court is a good example: here his record - which is a public record, he's a public servant and his records are a matter of public information and cannot be sequestered as a threat to national security - were hidden from scrutiny. The whole mindset seemed to be "How dare you question a decision of the President?" It's like the Politburo under Stalin or Khruschev (sp). In fact what we're going thru now seems the closest thing to 1950s era McCarthyism than we've had since the 50s. It's like the atmosphere surrounding the purges carried out by Stalin in 37-38 which branded Bakunin a traitor to the "party". Is that where we're headed?

[Dunrobin]

I'd say it was the passage of the income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve banks in order to control the currency, events which piggybacked on one other (1912-1913). Monkeying with the currency is the surest way of bringing citizenry to heel.

Yes, the Wilson era was definitely the main launching point for a lot of the problems we are seeing today (although the roots go back further.)  In addition to the unconstitutional "Federal Reserve" system (which has stolen 95% of the value of the dollar in just 90 years) and the immoral income tax (also of extremely dubious legality), that same period saw the final elimination of any real influence from the States over Federal legislation, with the passage of the 17th amendment.  From that point on there has been no question that the States are merely agents of the Feds, instead of the other way around (as the Republic was originally created.)

It's like the atmosphere surrounding the purges carried out by Stalin in 37-38 which branded Bakunin a traitor to the "party". Is that where we're headed?

Headed?  No; we are already there.  The media rarely reports on a lot of what the Feds pull, so most people don't have a clue, but intelligent monitoring of the Internet reveals an awful lot.

After all, the Bush administration has succeeded in kidnapping citizens and holding them incommunicado for years, without any criminal charges ever being brought against them.  Jose Padilla was grabbed when he got off a plane in Chicago over 3 years ago.  He has never been charged with anything, but the military has been holding him prisoner - without access to a lawyer, or his family or friends.  He's not the only one who has been "disappeared", either.

If you search for it, you'll discover that there have been many dozens (if not hundreds) of innocent citizens who have been gunned down in their beds in the middle of the night, all in the name of the government's "War on Drugs."  No one has ever been punished for any of these murders.  (Just as no one was punished for murdering over 80 innocent citizens in Waco, nor for murdering Mrs. Weaver and her son in Idaho.)  The government quite literally gets away with murder on a regular basis.

The government claims the right to steal your home, your car, and your bank accounts, etc., merely by claiming that you are involved in the drug trade.  They don't have to prove it, or even have to bring criminal charges against you to do so, and it is up to you to prove in court that your property is innocent before they (might) give it back to you.  (Property that gets seized in these "civil forfeitures" gets divided between the police, the prosecutors and the courts, so there is little incentive for them to play fair with you.)

The government claims the power to harrass us whenever we dare stick our noses out of our homes, too.  You don't even have to do a thing.  Montana, for example, recently announced a policy requiring their State police to stop at least one car every hour while they're on patrol.  The drivers don't have to be doing anything wrong to get pulled over, they just have to be the unlucky one who got picked at random.  Montana claims that this isn't setting a quota, though, since the cops aren't required to issue a ticket,  but rather they just have to pull someone over to check on them.  I'm quite sure that the other States will soon be following Montana's example.

Virtually every agency of the Federal government has their own SWAT teams, including the National Park Service and the Social Security Administration.  Why?  (It's even more disturning when you realize that the Constitution does not grant the Feds any police powers at all.)

Of course, there are many other equally disturbing things going on throughout the US, but you probably get the point already.  We are already dealing with a Stalinist-style government, and it's quickly going beyond that into a complete Orwellian "Big Brother" police state.  Give them a few more years, and they're be requiring that everyone has cameras installed in their homes as well.  For our own good, of course.