[MAPC-policy] Federal legislation
Title
[MAPC-policy] Federal legislation
Source
born-digital
Media Type
email
Date Entered
2001-10-23
September 11 Email: Body
It is disturbing when the same government that is encouraging all of us to get on with our normal lives is hard at work making sure that things will never be the same in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent anthrax scare.
Disturbing, not surprising. Some of the changes would erode our sense of privacy and freedom, and some would have real economic impacts on businesses that folks have fostered on the Internet and elsewhere.
Deep in the heart of the 'Oxley bill' is a provision to allow law enforcement to open and inspect any international mail without a warrant.
A couple of weeks ago, a colleague joked that it wouldn't be long before the government decided that it needed to open our personal mail to "protect us." At about the same time, a proposal to do pretty much that was making its way through our House of Representativesthe workplace of the good folks who asked us to get on with our lives while they quit early and high-tailed it out of D.C. at the first hint of anthrax in stone city.
Deep in the heart of the "Oxley bill"which is the short name for the Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001are provisions to allow law enforcement to poke around in heretofore personal and private financial information; to take cash from anyone who can't immediately explain where they got it; to eliminate any expectation of privacy in any international monetary transaction; and to, gasp, open and inspect any international mail without a warrant.
In addition to raising the hackles of folks such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the proposal gets a thumbs-down from U.S. Postal officials. "For the first time in America's 225-year history, [this] would allow sealed, outbound international mail to be stopped and searched at the border without a warrant. There is no evidence that eroding these long established privacy protections will bring any significant law enforcement improvements over what is achieved using existing, statutorily approved law enforcement techniques," postal officials wrote Congress in regard to the Oxley bill.
If that weren't enough, the Oxley bill, as proposed, would take a bite out of one of the few enterprises making money on the Internet today. Now I understand that casino gambling on the Net already violates federal and most state laws, but the impossibility of enforcement has made it one of the Web's entrepreneurial bright spots. And with gamblers reluctant to jet off to Vegas or Atlantic City, online gaming was poised to have a banner year, even if most of the money is being collected on small, rocky islands in the Atlantic.
But the Oxley bill would put a major kink in the ability of these offshore to accept credit card and wire-transfer funds. Without them, they're cooked. No surprise that in addition to the gamers and the tech companies that support them, the Oxley bill is being met with vocal opposition from the credit card companies.
Vice is vice, but like the Post Office's argument against tearing open international mail, nobody has yet connected the dots between the legislation and the terrorism we all loathe. How will nixing online gambling make us safer?
The Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 breezed through the House and reportedly has strong support in the Senate. If it were the only attempt to change our definition of a free and open society, it would be bad enough. But it isn't. As eWEEK has reported, the euphemistically titled Uniting and Strengthening America Act of 2001 encapsulates the best of lawmakers' intentions with the worst of law enforcement expansions. With it, the FBI would have access to just about anything it wants as long as investigators say it has some foreign intelligence value. Judges will be powerless to do anything but issue an order when asked by federal investigators. Scary.
I expect I was one of many persons who received last week a revised copy of my employer's policy for use of their computers and networksalong with a rundown of how they would check on me to make sure I was complying. I don't have a big problem with the warning that I'm about to be Carnivorized, but it did give me pause to think about what's been lost since the world changed six weeks ago. I never spent much time thinking about the search terms I plugged into my Google toolbar. Now I do. A second or two. Multiplied by 7,500 times a day, that comes to... a change in my life I could have done without.
Maybe I can relax and unwind with a little online blackjackwhen I get home, on my own computer, of course. If I can only find a Web casino that'll take a check.
E-mail eWEEK Department Editor Chris Gonsalves
Disturbing, not surprising. Some of the changes would erode our sense of privacy and freedom, and some would have real economic impacts on businesses that folks have fostered on the Internet and elsewhere.
Deep in the heart of the 'Oxley bill' is a provision to allow law enforcement to open and inspect any international mail without a warrant.
A couple of weeks ago, a colleague joked that it wouldn't be long before the government decided that it needed to open our personal mail to "protect us." At about the same time, a proposal to do pretty much that was making its way through our House of Representativesthe workplace of the good folks who asked us to get on with our lives while they quit early and high-tailed it out of D.C. at the first hint of anthrax in stone city.
Deep in the heart of the "Oxley bill"which is the short name for the Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001are provisions to allow law enforcement to poke around in heretofore personal and private financial information; to take cash from anyone who can't immediately explain where they got it; to eliminate any expectation of privacy in any international monetary transaction; and to, gasp, open and inspect any international mail without a warrant.
In addition to raising the hackles of folks such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the proposal gets a thumbs-down from U.S. Postal officials. "For the first time in America's 225-year history, [this] would allow sealed, outbound international mail to be stopped and searched at the border without a warrant. There is no evidence that eroding these long established privacy protections will bring any significant law enforcement improvements over what is achieved using existing, statutorily approved law enforcement techniques," postal officials wrote Congress in regard to the Oxley bill.
If that weren't enough, the Oxley bill, as proposed, would take a bite out of one of the few enterprises making money on the Internet today. Now I understand that casino gambling on the Net already violates federal and most state laws, but the impossibility of enforcement has made it one of the Web's entrepreneurial bright spots. And with gamblers reluctant to jet off to Vegas or Atlantic City, online gaming was poised to have a banner year, even if most of the money is being collected on small, rocky islands in the Atlantic.
But the Oxley bill would put a major kink in the ability of these offshore to accept credit card and wire-transfer funds. Without them, they're cooked. No surprise that in addition to the gamers and the tech companies that support them, the Oxley bill is being met with vocal opposition from the credit card companies.
Vice is vice, but like the Post Office's argument against tearing open international mail, nobody has yet connected the dots between the legislation and the terrorism we all loathe. How will nixing online gambling make us safer?
The Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 breezed through the House and reportedly has strong support in the Senate. If it were the only attempt to change our definition of a free and open society, it would be bad enough. But it isn't. As eWEEK has reported, the euphemistically titled Uniting and Strengthening America Act of 2001 encapsulates the best of lawmakers' intentions with the worst of law enforcement expansions. With it, the FBI would have access to just about anything it wants as long as investigators say it has some foreign intelligence value. Judges will be powerless to do anything but issue an order when asked by federal investigators. Scary.
I expect I was one of many persons who received last week a revised copy of my employer's policy for use of their computers and networksalong with a rundown of how they would check on me to make sure I was complying. I don't have a big problem with the warning that I'm about to be Carnivorized, but it did give me pause to think about what's been lost since the world changed six weeks ago. I never spent much time thinking about the search terms I plugged into my Google toolbar. Now I do. A second or two. Multiplied by 7,500 times a day, that comes to... a change in my life I could have done without.
Maybe I can relax and unwind with a little online blackjackwhen I get home, on my own computer, of course. If I can only find a Web casino that'll take a check.
E-mail eWEEK Department Editor Chris Gonsalves
September 11 Email: Date
Tuesday, October 23, 2001 11:39 PM
September 11 Email: Subject
[MAPC-policy] Federal legislation
Collection
Citation
“[MAPC-policy] Federal legislation,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed September 27, 2024, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/1061.