From the town where I used to live, Springfield Missouri, the home of the Patriot Act, is this report from TV station KY3 abut bank spying. I call Springfield Missouri the home of the Patriot Act because that's where John Ashcroft and Roy Blunt are from and the headquarters of the Assembly of God Church who all want total government control of everything. Here's the story:
SPRINGFIELD -- The revised Patriot Act just passed by Congress has provisions that might bring your banking practices under scrutiny. The checks you write and the deposits you make are all are under a microscope as a way to try to keep America safe from terrorists.
"We're automatically at high risk,” said Empire Bank vice president Cindy Harding, a fraud investigator.
Banking with a federally insured bank means you're now being monitored under the Patriot Act.
"Everybody in southwest Missouri, in Springfield, in Christian County, is considered high risk because it’s designated like that by the feds for drug trafficking,” said Harding.
Under the new Patriot Act, Harding says, most banks will have to have one person working full time to monitor customers and their money.
"They risk assess all of our customers as to what is the likelihood they could be involved in terrorist financing and money laundering,” she said.
Each and every customer will be classified based on his or her perceived risk threat: low, medium or high risk.
"Then we have to monitor everybody’s accounts to make sure they stay within the bounds of what was determined would be normal activity,” said Harding.
Certain companies and certain people will draw more scrutiny.
"Any cash intensive business, restaurant, convenience store, gas station," she said. "Doctors, lawyers, Accountants."
If a large amount of cash appears in an account, or a large amount of money is moving through an account, that could trigger concern
"If we can't determine why, we're required to fill out a suspicious activity report," said Harding.
That report contains a customer’s personal information and what he or she is suspected of doing. The bank is also forbidden under the Patriot Act to tell a customer that he or she was flagged. The information is then turned over to federal investigators.
In this monitoring, you can look at banks as the middlemen. They're being monitored, too.
"The feds look at us,” said Harding. “They’re monitoring everyone's activity."
Does it come as a suprise that our Government is willing to snoop in on such personal information as your finances? For years they have tracked email, snail mail, phone conversations, library activity, major purchase activity, excessive spending activity ... the list goes on and on. While we're not to the point of obvious police state we're moving towards it daily. The government uses excuses like 9/11, Oklahoma, even tragedies such as Columbine to tighten the grip of control they have over it's citizens. This is just another example of governmental control in our everyday lives.
Posted by: Cynical Patriot at March 9, 2006 09:16 AM