Put Your Cash In A Mattress

JOHNSON: Violating privacy one bank account at a time
Democrats want to pay the feds to watch every penny you spend

Sen. Christopher Dodd's "regulatory reform" bill, S. 3217, the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010, has many contentious proposals that have members from both political parties on edge.

The bill cauterizes "too big to fail" by establishing a Financial Stability Oversight Council that would indentify politically important institutions, sending the signal that some companies are indeed too big to fail.

It creates a permanent bailout authority by authorizing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to "make available ... funds for the orderly liquidation of covered financial institutions."

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However, one specific component that would make George Orwell say, "I told you so," is the establishment of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP). If the name of the agency is not enough to conjure up images of black helicopters, the description will certainly do the trick.

Established in Title 10, this new autonomous agency will be sheltered within the Federal Reserve, but will function independent of the currently established, traditional regulatory framework. Congress or any other agency will have no veto power over the BCFP.

This new agency's budget will be 12 percent of the 2009 Federal Reserve System operating budget, or approximately $646 million. In 2008, the Federal Reserve's operating budget was $2.5 billion but it increased $600 million to $3.1 billion for 2009. The 2009 budget baseline was used because it was the most inflated baseline in recent history. Rather than trimming the fat like many state budgets are forced to do in the current economic crisis, Mr. Dodd used the most inflated budget baseline
he could find to fund this agency.

This bureau is given the unprecedented authority to monitor personal bank transactions and uses personal financial data to regulate consumer choice.

Established in Section 1022 on Page 1028, the BCFP is given the authority to monitor consumer financial patterns and, "implement and, where applicable, enforce Federal consumer financial law." Specifically, Subsection C gives this agency authority to
"gather information and activities of persons operating in consumer financial markets."

Further, Section 1071 allows the BCFP to "use the data on branches and [individual and personal] deposit accounts" and "shall assess the distribution of residential and commercial accounts at such financial institution across income and minority level of census tracts; and may use the data for any other purpose as permitted by law." Never before has the federal government actively sought to aggregate data on every single personal and business financial transaction in the U.S. until now.

SSL Certs, White House and Privacy

Huge H/T to my bud Bigg Bill in PA for sending out the email. Hand salute to SWWBO over at Castle Arrghh for taking the initiative.

This is serious stuff, friends, if its true.

Glen Reynolds had a short post that the White House is looking to harvest personal data from Social Networking Websites like Twitter and Facebook. He doesn’t think that’s as scary as it sounds.
I do.
In fact, I wonder if someone at the White House has already been fiddling around with trying to insert SSL Certificates on unsuspecting users’ computers.
Last week, I made a somewhat disparaging remark about the Obama White House (not at all an unusual thing for me to do). I shut down Twitter, then about an hour
later, reopened it and saw this warning:

You'll have to click this link for the images.

Who watches the Watchmen?

"Shouldn't recording your own police interrogation be a constitutionally protected right, like the right to an attorney? If not, why not?"

Many privacy and civil liberty advocates (shouldn't this be everyone of us?) have protested the increasing amount of surveillance in society. Everything from "traffic cameras" to federal wiretaps have grown with our apparent hunger for increased law enforcement and security. We have forgotten that power granted to a government agency is rarely given up. While our government agencies are supposed to be working for us, to protect us, invariably, the respective agencies always, always, act as de facto "rulers" that are above the same accountability expected of us. The legislature and police forget that the primary purpose of their agencies is to uphold and protect the rights of the citizen, not just be enforcers of government policy.

I say that if an entity has the right to record us, we have the right to record them. While private citizens should have a reasonable right of privacy, no public entity, or their agents, should be exempt from recording or surveillance.

Fingerprinting our kids at school?

But, this does get them used to using their fingerprints for ID. Now that's even more disturbing. Just because something is convenient, does not mean that it should be done. As I said earlier, this was probably going to show up in the US. Watch England and so goes a socialistic USA.

Excerpt:

With the federal government lagging behind on its plans to implement the use of electronic passports, identification cards and driver's licenses, biometric vendors are targeting a new market: schools.

But the use of biometric technology in schools, such as a system being used by Stayton Middle School's cafeteria, has some parents and privacy advocates condemning the move as outright Orwellian.

"This is biometric data collecting," said Jann Carson, the associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Portland. "It's the 'Big Brother' theory. The last thing we should do is teach parents and their young children to be casual about turning over personal data, like a fingerprint, just for the sake of speeding up a lunch line."