People are now worried that Congress might have gone too far in granting widespread surveillance powers to the executive branch with its most recent legislation. The implications of the law were so far reaching, that critics say many of the legislators who passed the law had not had enough time to examine its ramifications. Among the new things that the Bush administration can likely do theoretically under the new law are:
–Look up your wife’s dress in a Wal-Mart dressing room, but not at Bergdorf Goodman’s.
—Infiltrate your book club and repeatedly suggest to the group that you read James Joyce’s unreadable classic “Ulysses.”
—Send you phishing messages saying “You’ve got a new MySpace friend” to determine if you’re making friends in Qatar and The United Arab Emirates.
—Check your business records to see if you have really saved 15% on your car insurance by switching to Geico.
—Avoid wiretapping altogether by hiring informants among your friends and neighbors in the fashion of the classic East German Stasi.
—Find out all of your buying habits by encouraging your credit card company and health insurance carriers to compile as much information about you as possible and keep it in a secret … oh, yeah … been there, done that.
—Broaden the definition of electronic surveillance to include having secret agents tail you around town in an electric car.
—Watch you closely for those $30,000 worth of calls to Saudi Arabia, because we don’t believe that anybody could really hijack your wireless carriers Verizon and T-Mobile like you said they did.
—Collect any information from you it wants as long as the real object of the investigation is someone overseas or the sales tax you’re avoiding by having your Jimmy Shoo strappy sandals shipped to a sham address in New Jersey.
—Spy on you in any way the government wants as long as you’ve already forfeited all your right to privacy by creating a MySpace Web log.
(Originally posted August 18, 2007)
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