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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Friday, September 2, 2011

Big Brother wants to track your CASH

Now Big Brother government wants to track your CASH in order to "protect" you.


"They've got to find somebody to monitor"

"The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed--would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you."
- George Orwell  (1984)  Chapter 1

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FEAR:  The Big Brother government always tries to frighten the people into allowing more and more of their freedom to be taken away from them in the name of public safety.

Now the Treasury Department has identified drug smugglers and terrorists as the "fear" to be exploited in order to track your CASH and watch every move you make.  This "fear" is driving the federal government to change the rules for issuing and using prepaid cards, particularly high-value reloadable cards like the cash cards you might take with you on vacation.

The bold and brave patriot of 1776 is long dead.  Modern society is populated by millions of SHEEPLE demanding to be saved from the very fears implanted into their minds by Big Brother.

When the government refers to "prepaid debit cards," it's not talking about the standard bank debit card you probably have in your purse or wallet. Because such cards are attached to bank accounts, they're already closely monitored by numerous federal agencies. If you gave a bank debit card to someone to do something bad with, it and you would be easily traceable.

One of the new rules, in fact, is to rename prepaid debit cards, which also used to be known as "stored-value cards," to avoid confusion, reports MSNBC.

They're now called "prepaid access cards" because they're not tied to a bank account. They're just pointers to a sum of money you've already paid up (or been given) in advance. The money itself can be anywhere, including accounts outside the reach of government monitoring.

Instead of a free people guarding their Liberty, modern society has degenerated into SHEEPLE
who are frightened of the own shadows and bleat loudly for Big Brother to protect them.

A criminal organization repeatedly loads a prepaid card in increments just below the amount that would trigger a report to the government. (In the U.S., that threshold is $10,000, so if it were based here, the organization might regularly reload a card with $9,900.)

FBI Director Robert Mueller called the use of prepaid cards a "shadow banking system" that had "impacted our ability to gather real-time financial intelligence."

The new rules not only are supposed to make it easier for the FBI and other agencies to track prepaid cards back to the original purchasers; they also require issuers to alert the government to any large or otherwise suspicious transactions, like those multiple $9,900 purchases. That can all add up to a pattern of evidence that could tip off investigators to larger plans that are in the works.

69 new pages of Federal regulations on cash

The rules take effect Sept. 27. They fill 69 pages as drawn up by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a branch of the Treasury Department known as FinCEN, illustrating just how complicated the industry that manages prepaid cards really is.

"They've got to find somebody" to monitor, said Angel, of Georgetown University.

The rules include numerous exemptions to make issuing lower-value cards easier for those merchants, by excluding closed-loop cards — that is, gift cards and the like that can be used only at particular stores or service providers — of less than $2,000. They also exempt government-issued cards and many prepaid health care cards.

"It is important to recognize that public officials can sometimes take steps designed to 'protect' those who are disadvantaged when those steps may actually become barriers that actually restrict access to financial services," the task force said in an FDIC report in June. "For example, steps that add to the costs for prepaid products may make them less appealing to those living on the margin."



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