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Michael Snyder<\/strong> Were you under the impression that your credit card transactions are private? If so, I am sorry to burst your bubble. As you will see below, there are actually multiple government agencies that are gathering and storing records of your credit card transactions. And in turn, those government agencies share that information with other government agencies that want it. So if you are making a purchase that you don\u2019t want anyone to know about, don\u2019t use a credit card. This is one of the reasons why the government hates cash so much. It is just so hard to track. In this day and age, the federal government seems to be absolutely obsessed with gathering as much information about all of us as it possibly can. But there is one big problem.<\/p>\n What they are doing directly violates the U.S. Constitution. For those that are not familiar with it, the following is what the Fourth Amendment actually says: \u201cThe right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.\u201d Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment is essentially dead at this point. The federal government is investigating all of us and gathering information on all of us all day, every day without end.<\/p>\n Many Americans have never even heard of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but\u00a0Judicial Watch<\/a>\u00a0has discovered that they are spending millions of dollars to collect and analyze our financial transactions\u2026<\/p>\n Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained records from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) revealing that the agency has spent millions of dollars for the warrantless collection and analysis of Americans\u2019 financial transactions. The documents also reveal that CFPB contractors may be required to share the information with \u201cadditional government entities.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Judicial Watch was able to obtain some absolutely shocking documents thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request that it filed in April. The following is a summary of some of the things those documents show\u2026<\/p>\n – Overlapping contracts<\/a>\u00a0with multiple credit reporting agencies and accounting firms to gather, store, and share credit card data as shown in the task list of a contract with Argus Information & Advisory Services LLC worth $2.9 million<\/p>\n – An \u201cindefinite delivery, indefinite quantity<\/a>\u201d contract with Experian worth up to $8,426,650 to track daily consumer habits of select individuals without their awareness or consent<\/p>\n – $4,951,333<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0software and instruction<\/a>\u00a0paid to Deloitte Consulting LLP<\/p>\n – A provision stipulating that \u201cThe contractor recognizes that, in performing this requirement, the Contractor may obtain access to non-public,\u00a0confidential information<\/a>, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), or proprietary information.\u201d<\/p>\n – A stipulation that \u201cThe Contractor may be required to\u00a0share credit card data<\/a>\u00a0collected from the Banks with additional government entities as directed by the Contracting Officer\u2019s Representative (COR).\u201d<\/p>\n How do you feel about the fact that the government has contracts with \u201cmultiple credit reporting agencies and accounting firms to gather, store, and share credit card data\u201d?<\/p>\n How do you feel about the fact that your credit card data and other \u201cnon-public, confidential information\u201d may be shared with \u201cadditional government entities\u201d?<\/p>\n Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton\u00a0put it very well<\/a>\u00a0when he said that this \u201cwarrantless collection of the private financial information of millions of Americans is mind-blowing. Is there anything that this administration thinks it can\u2019t do?\u201d<\/p>\n But of course the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not the only one keeping records of your credit card transactions.<\/p>\n We have also recently learned that the NSA is doing it too. The following is from a recent\u00a0Time Magazine article<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n Networks are most likely giving the government \u201cmetadata.\u201d That is, the credit card issuers could provide the NSA details such as an account or card number, where and when a purchase was made, and for how much. Even though the exact items purchased aren\u2019t revealed, Brian Krebs, who blogs atKrebsOnSecurity.com<\/a>, says \u201cmerchant category codes\u201d in such data give clues about what was bought.<\/p>\n If the NSA is collecting data at the processor level, \u201cat that point the transaction gets cleared and posts to an account, so, yes, you can track it down to a person,\u201d Aufsesser says.<\/p>\n The NSA conceivably could \u2013 and probably would \u2013 be able get the names of individual account holders from banks issuing credit cards.\u00a0\u201dI don\u2019t see how you would anonymize it,\u201d says Al Pascual, senior analyst for security, risk and fraud for Javelin Strategy & Research.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n We are rapidly becoming a \u201cBig Brother society\u201d where the government tracks virtually every move that we make.<\/p>\n And don\u2019t think that you can escape this by not using credit cards or by staying off of the Internet. The truth is that we are being tracked in hundreds of different ways.<\/p>\n For example, have you heard of automated license plate readers?<\/p>\n They are being installed on police vehicles all over the nation, and the amount of information that they are gathering on all of us is frightening.<\/p>\n A computer security consultant named Michael Katz-Lacabe asked the city of San Leandro, California for a record of every time that these license plate readers had scanned his vehicle, and what he discovered\u00a0absolutely stunned him<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police cars, can log thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. Katz-Lacabe said it had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including one image from 2009 that shows him and his daughters stepping out of his Toyota Prius in their driveway.<\/p>\n That photograph, Katz-Lacabe said, made him \u201cfrightened and concerned about the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection.\u201d The single patrol car in\u00a0San Leandro\u00a0equipped with a plate reader had logged his car once a week on average, photographing his license plate and documenting the time and location.<\/p>\n At a rapid pace, and mostly hidden from the public, police agencies throughout California have been collecting millions of records on drivers and feeding them to intelligence fusion centers operated by local, state and federal law enforcement.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Most Americans do not even know that these devices exist, but they have been \u201ccollecting millions of records\u201d and feeding them into law enforcement databases all over the nation.<\/p>\n In San Diego alone, more than 36\u00a0million<\/strong>\u00a0license plate scans have been fed into a regional database\u00a0just since 2010<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n In San Diego, 13 federal and local law enforcement agencies have compiled more than 36 million license-plate scans in a regional database since 2010 with the help of federal homeland security grants. The San Diego Association of Governments maintains the database. Like the Northern California database, the San Diego system retains the data for between one and two years.<\/p>\n \u201cLicense-plate data is clearly identifiable to specific individuals,\u201d said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. \u201cThis is like having your barcode tracked.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Is this the kind of society that we want to become?<\/p>\n Do we really want the police to be taking millions of photographs of us?<\/p>\n Do we really want all of our financial transactions to be fed directly into federal databases?<\/p>\n Do we really want the government to track\u00a0every phone call we make and every email we send<\/a>?<\/p>\n As I wrote about recently, it has been documented that literallythousands of companies<\/a>\u00a0have been handing over customer data to the NSA.<\/p>\n Is this the kind of legacy that we want to leave for our children and our grandchildren?<\/p>\n Fortunately, it appears that at least some Americans are waking up to all of this.<\/p>\n According to a brand new\u00a0Rasmussen survey<\/a>, 56 percent of likely voters in the United States now believe that the federal government is a threat to individual rights\u2026<\/p>\n A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% of Likely U.S. Voters now consider the federal government a threat to individual rights rather than a protector of those rights. That\u2019s up 10 points from 46%\u00a0in December<\/a>.<\/p>\n While 54% of liberal voters consider the feds to be a protector of individual rights, 78% of conservatives and 49% of moderates see the government as a threat.<\/p>\n Overall, only 30% believe the feds today are a protector of individual rights. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording,click here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n If the American people do not stand up and demand change, the people that are constantly violating our privacy are going to continue to do so.<\/p>\n Sadly, the vast majority of the politicians in both major political parties seem to think that there is nothing wrong with the status quo. So I wouldn\u2019t expect any major changes in the short-term. But hopefully government surveillance will start to become such a major issue with the American people that the politicians will be forced to start addressing it.<\/p>\n <!– <\/p>\n –><\/p>\n This article was posted: Saturday, June 29, 2013 at 6:18 am<\/p>\n Tags: business<\/a>, domestic news<\/a>, economics<\/a>, financial<\/a>, government corruption<\/a>, police state<\/a><\/p>\n
The Economic Collapse<\/a>
June 29, 2013<\/p>\n\n
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