By Bob Bauman, JD
Privacy is an inherent human right.
Most
of us accept the obligation to report certain designated information to
the government, and we will abide by those rules in the understanding
that this is essential to the orderly management of our society, and
thus to our own prosperity. That concession emphatically does not mean we have surrendered our right to privacy.
For
that reason, all of us should champion privacy, both personal and
financial, even when we have nothing to hide. All of us should be
appalled and angry at the current behavior of the U.S. government,
regardless of our political leanings. Consider some of this "official"
behavior:
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The
U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) routinely abuses laws
designed for immigration enforcement purposes to extract private
information, including passwords, from U.S. residents before they have
officially crossed into U.S. soil at airports and land borders.
Customs
and Border Protection, part of the DHS, conducted electronic media
searches on 4,957 people from October 1, 2012, through August 31, 2013—15 a day—close
to the average for the previous two years. Ominously, U.S. lawyers,
journalists and political activists who support the right to personal
privacy and political dissent have been deliberately targeted for border
searches and seizures of electronic information.
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The NSA has
worked for years to force purveyors of cryptographic software to build,
in secret, "backdoor" keyholes that allow it to access encrypted data.
Almost all of the major encryption products developed and produced in
the U.S. should now be assumed unsafe.
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According to the German daily, Der Speigel,
the NSA developed a system called TRACFIN to hack into VISA’s
credit-card transaction network to target customers in Europe, the
Middle East and Africa, and has also hacked into the Society for
Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system, which I
have exposed in the past.
Although there are no
reports—so far—that this TRACFIN system has been deployed inside the
U.S., there is no reason to think it hasn’t been.
A serious commitment
to liberty requires us to dispense with the notion that we have nothing
to worry about if we have nothing to hide. Even if you’re personally
willing to allow the government to rifle through your finances,
communications and personal records, you should care that it is doing
this to people who do mind and are protected by the Fourth Amendment.
But the U.S. government is completely out of control when it comes to respecting the right to individual privacy.
Both
parties are guilty of supporting abominations such as the 2001 PATRIOT
Act, and of neglecting Congress’ core oversight duties in respect of the
NSA and other intelligence agencies. Republicans and Democrats are
equally guilty in the destruction of our constitutional liberties, and
have applied their energies to bait-and-switch tactics designed to get
Americans to vote for party "brands," rather than for what is right.
Sadly, no matter how
unhappy we may be at these violations of our constitutional liberties,
there is little prospect that they will be addressed politically anytime
soon.
And then there’s the
horrendous Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA)—a way for the
government to invade U.S.-held bank accounts across the world. This
attack on personal and financial privacy was, in part, a smoke screen
for more state taxes.
But
for these anti-freedom ideologues, abolishing privacy is only the
start. They also want to end lawyer-client privilege, expose all forms
of private-property ownership and they are well along in imposing a
global system of automatic tax information exchange among all nations.
Under the
unconstitutional PATRIOT Act, financial privacy in America is already
dead. The government has the power to obtain financial information in
secret about anyone and to confiscate your wealth. The real choices in
this debate are personal freedom, liberty versus government control of
our lives and our fortunes.
Tyranny,
whether it arises under threat of terrorist attack, solutions to
alleged tax evasion or under any form of unrelenting domestic
authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny.
Widespread
surveillance, whether by police or bureaucrats, in whatever form it
takes, is the very definition of a police state. It’s time to start
protecting your privacy in the ways that are still possible.
