Snowdon is a dummy

Commerce do not have the authority to put you in prison.

Having said that, let me add, my Social Security number is given out for all my credit cards, Electric bill, Security Alarm for the home, and in so many other ways.

The Privacy Act regulates the use of Social Security numbers by government agencies. When a federal, state, or local government agency asks an individual to disclose his or her Social Security number, the Privacy Act requires the agency to inform the person of the following: the statutory or other authority for requesting the information; whether disclosure is mandatory or voluntary; what uses will be made of the information; and the consequences, if any, of failure to provide the information.

If a business or other enterprise asks you for your Social Security number, you can refuse to give it. However, that may mean doing without the purchase or service for which your number was requested. For example, utility companies and other services ask for a Social Security number, but do not need it; they can do a credit check or identify the person in their records by alternative means.

Giving your Social Security number is voluntary, even when you are asked for the number directly. If requested, you should ask why your Social Security number is needed, how your number will be used, what law requires you to give your number and what the consequences are if you refuse. The answers to these questions can help you decide if you want to give your Social Security number. The decision is yours.SSA

Our equivalent, the National Insurance number is only given out to employers and when applying for benefits. It is not required to open a bank account, apply for a credit card or pay for utilities.

Declassified Fisa rulings reveal a permissive approach to fourth amendment violations disturbingly at odds with supreme justices'
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The newly-released FISC opinion, the first to opine on the legality of the phone metadata collection program since the Snowden leaks brought the program to national attention, is based on two straightforward points.

First, in 1979, the supreme court held in Smith v Maryland that using "pen registers" that record what number called what other number, when, and for how long, did not violate the fourth amendment. The court in Smith reasoned that individuals have no expectation of privacy in information they knowingly hand over to the phone company. The FISC reasoned that even though the NSA metadata program collected more information than the program the supreme court upheld 35 years ago, the details did not make a constitutional difference. Individuals have no fourth amendment rights in their phone call metadata.

The second component of the FISC argument was that "grouping together a large number of individuals", no single one of whom has "a fourth amendment interest", "cannot result in a fourth amendment interest springing into existence ex nihilo". Adding up many zeros doesn't create a positive value; bulk collection of unprotected materials over a sustained period of years raises no special constitutional considerations.

Standing on its own, this logic may seem persuasive. But only until you think about how last year's Jones decision by the supreme court destabilizes this logic.
... ... ...
The Jones decision does not necessarily determine that the NSA metadata collection program is unconstitutional. Good lawyers can make excellent arguments about its implications for various aspects of the NSA surveillance programs, and argue both sides. Reading the tea leaves of how this supreme court would decide this case when directly confronting phone call metadata as the tracking activity, with national security as the interest, is difficult at best.

But there is no question that all three Jones opinions offer a very strong argument that the dramatically lower cost of pervasive, sustained surveillance of publicly observable data in bulk implicates the fourth amendment, and that whatever its statutory basis, this program may well violate that amendment. That the FISC opinion did not even mention Jones is as clear a sign as we have that without fundamental reform, Americans simply cannot rely on the Fisa court's lopsided process to protect our rights.

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and most of the countries on earth who have brainwashed their citizens to this way of thinking.

Hiya, Rabel. I am one of those who agree with you

I find it amazing that you and people like you do not think there is anything wrong about our government spending our money to do massive spying on the whole population.

Just become something is possible does not mean we should allow it and the SC had rule more then once that there is an imply right to privacy in our constitution beside the more narrow rights spell out in the bill of rights.

c) another reason stated in the declassified FISA rulings was that Congress reauthorized the program in 2011 with full knowledge of the entire voting body. THIS IS FALSE! Mike Rogers, chair of the House oversight committee chose not show the DOJ report that detailed metadata collection to the full House. No one from the class of 2010 ever saw the report unless they were on the Intelligence Committee. I can't tell you what his reasoning was, but for FISA to now say that it's ok because it was reauthorized by full disclosure of the program to everyone in Congress is bullshit.

Several European lawmakers are seeking to end an agreement that grants U.S. authorities access to bank data for terrorism-related investigations because of Washington's surveillance programs.

Three lawmakers said Tuesday that leaks by Edward Snowden alleging that the U.S. National Security Agency targeted a Belgium-based system of international bank transfers, known as SWIFT, means the agreement has been effectively voided.

But the EU Commission, the bloc's executive body, says sharing the bank data under the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program provides "law enforcement authorities a powerful tool in the fight against terrorism."

Still, Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told lawmakers she has not received sufficient answers from her U.S. counterparts regarding the spying allegations. She said if the agreement was violated, a majority of EU states could decide to cancel it in retaliation.

BERLIN — Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

“So much information, on so many people,” he said.

East Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.

Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.

“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

U.S. officials have defended the government collection of information since word of it broke in newspaper stories based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The records are used only to track down terrorists overseas, officials say. The collection has been carefully vetted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body of U.S. judges whose actions are largely kept secret. There is no misuse.


Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/26/195045/memories-of-stasi-color-germans.html#storylink=cpy