Your Patriot Act at work, arresting US citizens with no connection to terrorism or corruption

Leno had a joke last night about what kind of progress the Democratic Party has made.

No, nothing about running a woman and a black man for President.

Nope. The progress revolves around Elliot Spitzer’s arrest.

Back in the day, Bill Clinton would have all these sexual trysts with ugly women, and there, look at Spitzer!

Spitzer got caught with a hooker, but hey, at least she is good looking!
Now, that’s progress!! (laughter)

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Laugh or not, it’s the fact that she IS good looking that’s at issue here. She is a good looking hooker, and as such can charge higher rates.

It was those higher rates that caught up with Governor Spitzer. Spitzer was caught because he paid large dollars for his hookers. He asked for quality, and he got it. But he had to hide the money he used to pay for it, moving it around. Since this was a frequent occurrence for the governor, it established a pattern of money movement that the banks flagged.

Who would have thought that the terror laws enacted after the tragedy of September 11, 2001 would have been used to oust a governor from office? That’s precisely what’s happened. [Newsweek]

The Patriot Act gave the FBI new powers to snoop on suspected terrorists. In the fine print were provisions that gave the Treasury Department authority to demand more information from banks about their customers’ financial transactions. Congress wanted to help the Feds identify terrorist money launderers. But Treasury went further. It issued stringent new regulations that required banks themselves to look for unusual transactions (such as odd patterns of cash withdrawals or wire transfers) and submit SARs—Suspicious Activity Reports—to the government. Facing potentially stiff penalties if they didn’t comply, banks and other financial institutions installed sophisticated software to detect anomalies among millions of daily transactions. They began ranking the risk levels of their customers—on a scale of zero to 100—based on complex formulas that included the credit rating, assets and profession of the account holder.

Another element of the formulas: whether an account holder was a “politically exposed person.” At first focused on potentially crooked foreign officials, the PEP lists expanded to include many U.S. politicians and public officials who were conceivably vulnerable to corruption.

There were 1.23 million of those Suspicious Activity Reports filed last year. Spitzer’s suspicious activity report was filed last year, after he asked his bank to transfer money in someone else’s name.

So, no crime was evidenced with the transfer of the cash. It was a private transaction that made a citizen subject to scrutiny that perhaps ten years ago would have been considered a breech of his rights as an American citizen.

If you don’t think that America has given up a level of freedom more than just having to take off your shoes before you fly, continue to cower under your bed covers.

This kind of government intrusion has to be reined in (or reigned in, depending on your view of the source of our problems).