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Spitzer a Patriot Act victim?

The USA Patriot Act, which was initially rammed through in the post-9/11 frenzy with virtually no debate, truly is a law of unintended consequences. The government is using it to gather a ton of data on citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism. For example, Eliot Spitzer.

    by Will Bunch | Columnist
    Published 

The USA Patriot Act, which was initially rammed through in the post-9/11 frenzy with virtually no debate, truly is a law of unintended consequences. The government is using it to gather a ton of data on citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism.

For example, Eliot Spitzer:

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.

Interestingly, the New York Times has a fair and balanced -- seriously -- piece out on the legal dilemma posed by the Spitzer case. To boil it down, the feds pretty much never go against a prostitution client with the massive barrage, including full-blown surveillance -- used on Spitzer -- BUT they do have different standards from wrongdoing by a high-ranking public official, which Spitzer was.

The Patriot Act info is a little more disturbing, to me. Hopefully the next president will sit down with the new Congress and restore a proper balance, because when the government's involved, there is such a thing as too much information.