I may be a terrorist

by Actual News Geezer | September 25, 2006 at 08:50 am

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Sometimes you have to look back over the past and ask some difficult questions. It's not easy to do, when the world moves blindingly fast, and my memory is not what it used to be.

Yes, the world is moving fast and the current US government is moving it in one particular direction, where all of us are now under suspicion.

The Terrorist Detainee Bill was just passed by the Senate and only needs US President George Bush's signature to become law, ending the absolute committment to the principle of habeas corpus, the right to trial and the prohibition of indefinite sentences.

The pretext is that the fact that if you were caught by US forces, you're almost certainly guilty.

Last December we learned that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to begin spying on Americans, US citizens, despite iron-clad legal prohitibions.

The pretext was that the war on terror requires this surveillance. Many Republicans said, "I have nothing to hide; what's the big deal?"

And now - now is when the memory kicks in.

Do any of you remember the Time Magazine article of last May which indicated that American police forces had begun "pretexting" themselves in order to illegally obtain telephone records of law abiding citizens?

We're not talking about Brown Shirts who have somehow emerged into the American heartland, like some twisted repeat of The Twilight Zone. No, these were ordinary cops in ordinary places all over the country. The pretext was that if the cops were suspicious, they had the moral right to use pretexting in the service of justice.

Yesterday before a congressional hearing, the disgraced, former chairman of Hewlett-Packard, Patricia Dunn, excused herself from all responsibility from the business spying HP conducted under her authorization. She called this program "pretexting", in which information is stolen by pretending to be someone you are not.

George Bush is pretexting that he has the moral standards to be president of the US.

It's a message that is sent far and wide. "If he can do it, why not me?", asks a cop in Topeka, Kansas, who really needs some phone record he cannot get legally.

Patricia Dunn said in her testimony that pretexting is ubiquitous in the upper echelons of big business.

All of this pretexting is making terror suspects out of all of us. And now that we have legislation that allows the president to throw someone in jail, potentially for ever, on his say-so, the boundary between being a suspect and a terrorist has never been more porous.

The pretext is, if we use phones, communicate over the Internet, we can fall into the net of Total Information Awareness.

Sadly, the surveillance net has become ubiquitous. It has a life of its own. It has a mind of its own, and it is a suspicious mind. The pretext is: if you get caught up in the net, you're probably guilty.

Who knows: I may be a terrorist. So might you.

Refresh your memory:

The National Security Agency may not be the only one looking at your phone records. As the agencyâs controversial program of collecting Americansâ calling data continues to draw heat, new questions have emerged about whether federal and local law enforcement officials are possibly skirting privacy laws by obtaining phone records from companies that get the information in a questionable manner and then hawk it over the Internet.

Since February, Congress has been investigating such so-called data brokers for the ways in which they gather their information. Some of them use people inside the phone company who are willing to divulge the data. But more commonly, these businesses obtain phone records through an illegal practice known as "pretexting," in which someone calls up the phone company and impersonates a subscriber to con the service representative into releasing copies of the records.

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