Interesting, and just one of the reasons many did and still do oppose the
extra powers invested in givt by the patriot act.
Isn't there something about "the intent" of the legislation as being
important in regards the use of it?
Anyway, seems to me the main issue about all this, isn't how he was tracked,
isn;t that the owners of the ring were arrested , it;s about how there was
such a hig emphasis on the details of Client 9, and that it was leaked to
the public for apparent political reasons.
Hard to escape "political" reasons when he was already being targetted by
the Republicans immediately for impeachment if he didn't resign.
Now this sort of thing to take advantage of political opponents at any time,
but there is a question or two hanging over what justifies the extent of the
details disclosed in the affidavat about Client 9 vs the others, and then
the fact it was leaked to the press even before it hit the Court for an
arrest warrant. Mmmmmmmm
Seems to me Spitzer has paid a very high price for his misdemeanor, and yet
who would sympathise with him? Deserved what he got, I suppose.
But the question then goes to what kind of Justice and Political system do
people really want to live under? What is worse? Spitzer getting laid, or
the whole system including the use of the Patriot Act provisions suppoesedly
for tracking down Terrorists that exists and that enabled him to get
publicly rolled for a very private tryst?
At what cost this level of Government involvement and scrutiny in peoples
private affairs?
1.23 milion SAR reports last year?
How many Terrorists or financiers were found, and what is the *actual
intent* of the Act?
That to me are the important ethical and philosophical questions needing
attention by wiser folks. cheers
"Immortalist"
yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:f78887d7-d648-4844-9ed3-aa66eef0b9d8@s12g2000prg.googlegroups.com...> Unintended Consequences
> Spitzer got snagged by the fine print of the Patriot Act.
>
> When Congress passed the Patriot Act in the aftermath of the 9/11
> attacks, law-enforcement agencies hailed it as a powerful tool to help
> track down the confederates of Osama bin Laden. No one expected it
> would end up helping to snag the likes of Eliot Spitzer. The odd
> connection between the antiterror law and Spitzer's trysts with call
> girls illustrates how laws enacted for one purpose often end up being
> used very differently once they're on the books.
>
> 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.
>
> The new scrutiny resulted in an explosion of SARs, from 204,915 in
> 2001 to 1.23 million last year. The data, stored in an IRS computer in
> Detroit, are accessible by law-enforcement agencies nationwide.
> "Terrorism has virtually nothing to do with it," says Peter Djinis, a
> former top Treasury lawyer. "The vast majority of SARs filed today
> involve garden-variety forms of white-collar crime." Federal
> prosecutors around the country routinely scour the SARs for potential
> leads.
>
> One of those leads led to Spitzer. Last summer New York's North Fork
> Bank, where Spitzer had an account, filed a SAR about unusual money
> transfers he had made, say law-enforcement and industry sources who
> asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the probe.
> One of the sources tells NEWSWEEK that Spitzer wasn't flagged because
> of his public position. Instead, the governor called attention to
> himself by asking the bank to transfer money in someone else's name.
> (A North Fork spokesperson says the bank does not discuss its
> customers.) The SAR was not itself evidence that Spitzer had committed
> a crime. But it made the Feds curious enough to follow the money.
>
>
http://www.newsweek.com/id/123489
> referrer
http://drudgereport.com/
>
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HmktDd7O0pI 
