The Surveilance State.

One of the interesting pieces of evidence used in the OK bombing trial was
phone records of calls that Timothy McVeigh made with a calling card, which
linked him with lots of other people.  The police now routinely use phone
records to find out whom suspects talk to and in turn whom they talk to.  

If a drug smuggler calls someone and they call you, a computer can flag that
as a possibly suspicious activity, even though it's quite coincidental.  

They also use electric usage records to determine if someone is likely to 
have an indoor growing operation.  Credit card statements are routinely 
looked at too.  Airlines were recently forced by the Federal gov't to put
in place a computer profiling tool (specifics not mentioned in the paper) in
order to catch possible terrorists.

So if we put all of this together, you could easily have a strange combination
of phone calls, spending patterns, electric usage, and travel habits.  This
explains why we sometimes read in the paper where a family of 4 was awakened
in the middle of the night by having their door blown down by the SWAT team,
while men in black masks held them at gunpoint and ransacked their house. 
Out of a country of 250,000,000 the statistics indicate that there have to
be a lot of people living ouside the norm.  You can bet that those black-
masked guys are going to look good and hard to find at least a joint or
SOMETHING suspicious before they leave, lest they be tarred as harrassing
innocents.  

Do we really want to live in a surveilance society?  I for one don't want to
allow the gov't to so easily get such records and conduct no-knock raids 
based on such evidence.  The police should be required to get a warrant
before ANY search (phone, electric bills, credit card, travel history), and
the searched party should be told that they are being searched.

The "tough on crime" crowd will say that this will thwart the police in
finding real criminals.  Doubtful.  The vast majority of the really 
dangerous criminals are not smart enough to conceal their tracks, and 
flagrantly do a lot of things that would be real evidence.  Even if it is
politically unrealistic to inform suspects before searching them, we should
be informed soon after the search, say within a month.  

How many times do you think you have been considered a suspect?  


Feel free to send me your comments, and if they're fairly lucid I'll include 
them as rebuttal/support on the pages below.       

email Mike Burns