A Pair Of President Odubya Failures On Civil Liberties

Two stories this morning should send up massive alarms as the Obama administration continues its dismal Bushian record on civil liberties and terrorism.

First, the Obama administration wants to expand its National Security Letter system to acquire wiretaps on the internet by compelling internet service providers to comply as easily as it can obtain them by forcing phone companies to do the same.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.” 

The second item involves banks and money transfers and is nearly as pervasive in its depth:  requiring every single international money transfer, no matter how small, to be reported to the Feds.

The Obama administration wants to require U.S. banks to report all electronic money transfers into and out of the country, a dramatic expansion in efforts to counter terrorist financing and money laundering.

Officials say the information would help them spot the sort of transfers that helped finance the al-Qaeda hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They say the expanded financial data would allow anti-terrorist agencies to better understand normal money-flow patterns so they can spot abnormal activity.

Financial institutions are now required to report to the Treasury Department transactions in excess of $10,000 and others they deem suspicious. The new rule would require banks to disclose even the smallest transfers. 

The vast, vast majority of people who will be caught up in these two policies will be ordinary Americans with no terrorist connections whatsoever.  Considering the failure of the Obama administration to stop massive abuse of national security letters to compel phone wiretaps, nobody in the country should feel confident that they can trust the executive branch with this level of additional power.

The Obama administration essentially wants to make the entire internet available to wiretap capability, meaning encrypted internet communications would become effectively useless.  The Obama administration could simply demand anyone's internet communications, encryption free, if they so choose to, for no other reason than they say so.

In the same way, the vast majority of people who transfer money internationally are just people sending money home to their families in places like Mexico, India, Central America, South America and Europe.  Every single one of those transfers would be recorded under this new policy, and all it would do is be used to harass immigrants and working Americans.  Can you imagine what Republicans would do with this ability?

This is the one area where Obama told us he would be better than McCain, better than Bush, and better than Hillary Clinton.  Apparently that was a lie on all three accounts, and this is the one area where Obama is truly worse than Bush.