“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”

Jonathan Swift
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"The Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital." - Bill Maher
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"The city is crowded my friends are away and I'm on my own
It's too hot to handle so I gotta get up and go

It's a cruel ... cruel summer"

Friday, April 29, 2005

every breath you take

Isn't it ironic? No, I mean, really, it is. The phrase now eliciting more terror than any other group of words: "anti-terror law".

Coupladaysago, Wired magazine posted an interesting/scary piece about anti-money laundering (AML) software. Due to those anti-terror laws, banks will soon be throwing billions of dollars at the development of such software. AML will supposedly make "intelligent use of data" to determine when strange patterns of deposits, withdrawals, and other activity suggest that a bank customer is probably a terrorist instead of the neighborly Wal-Mart greeter you thought he was. According to Wired

Even small transactions may be flagged as suspicious. Terror funds are known to be small, as the withdrawals and deposits of 9/11 terrorists showed. Being small does not mean being invisible.

Geez. Problem is, I can't use a freakin' credit card out of town without the issuer's computers calling me to make sure that I'm really who I say I am and not an identity thief. Most of us don't complain about that minor inconvenience, maybe even appreciate it they're only "looking out for us," after all but now, like all such minor inconveniences, it's in the process of ratcheting up to a major civil rights violation. Soon, if you do something out of the ordinary, you could get locked up in Gitmo and denied due process under the Patriot Act.

I sure would feel better if Scott Henson over at Grits for Breakfast would weigh in and tell me I'm being needlessly paranoid and overly alarmist.

SPACEDARK