You Are a Suspect
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
 If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend -- all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you -- passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance -- and you have the supersnoop's
dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen. This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.
Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua...more [NY Times]
I've posted more of the article then usual since the Times requires a sign-up to read the whole article -- read it, this is a scary picture of what was elected into control of this country this month. We have handed the government to a group of people who have no respect for the Bill of Rights. They will go any length to meet their agenda of government control. Osama is winning if this is the way we react. Perhaps, if we have one more major terrorist act, we could suspend the Bill of Rights directly, rather then having to work our way around it. Don't laugh, who could have imagined something like the "Department of Homeland Security" eighteen months ago!?!...mj
9:47:32 AM 
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