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(NewsTarget) Newly unsealed court records have revealed that the U.S. government issued a subpoena to Amazon.com seeking to obtain the identities of customers purchasing books through the Amazon marketplace. The snooping attempt was blocked by U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker who wrote in a recently-unsealed ruling, "Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon's customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases." Is the U.S. government trying to profile the psychology of its citizens by secretly data mining their book purchasing habits? Since 9/11 and the passage of the ill-designed Patriot Act (which, if anything, is traitorous, not patriotic), it seems that the U.S. government is aggressively expanding its powers to search records, tap phones and surveil electronic messages, all in an effort to conduct Gestapo-like profiling operations on its own citizens. It is now a well-known fact, for example, that domestic phone calls and e-mails are now tracked and recorded by the U.S. government, then mined for "dangerous" words which are linked back to those callers. "The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission," Judge Crocker wrote in his ruling. "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else." Welcome to Police State Amerika This News.com story by Declan McCullagh documents how AT&T opened up its massive telecommunications network to U.S. government security agents who used it to profile the telecomm behaviors of AT&T customers. Curiously, the Bush Administration jumped in and classified key AT&T documents, preventing them from being presented in federal court (so we'll never know what they really said). For years, the FBI has been operating its ultra-secret Carnivore program that surveils emails, capturing keywords in e-mail communications across the internet. You can read about it on this Wikipedia page. There's also the Total Information Awareness program from DARPA which sought to create a massive domestic surveillance system that would keep tabs on virtually every electronic transaction made by Americans. Congress defunded the project once its existence was made known by a New York Times reporter. In response, the Feds simply renamed it, refunded it from other "shadow" funding sources, and continued to build the project. It is now up and running behind the scenes here in America. (You can keep tabs on this program and other shadow government operations at the ultra-popular www.Rense.com website, which posts daily headlines on this topic.) Increasingly, the U.S. government is operating in secret, using greatly expanded police state power to spy on its own citizens. This attempt at acquiring Amazon.com book records is just the latest round in an ongoing campaign of secret police tactics being used against the American people by its own government... a government that was once created "Of the People, By the People and For the People" but now seems a lot more interested in terrorizing the people through fear-based politics and war mongering propaganda. This is no conspiracy theory, it's present-day Amerika None of this is "fringe" information or conspiracy theory guesswork. Every statement made in this article is a matter of fact that's easily verified through publicly-available records and news reports (not to mention common sense observation skills of what's really happening). It's not even a secret anymore: The U.S. government openly admits it is spying on U.S. citizens through various programs, but claims it's all necessary to protect the public from "terrorism." Remarkably, most U.S. citizens actually agree with the government on these points, and they happily surrender their privacy and freedoms in exchange for the (empty) promise of security. These people claim, "If you haven't done anything wrong, there is nothing to be afraid of when it comes to domestic surveillance." In doing so, they firmly establish themselves as the reincarnated ghosts of Nazi Germany war criminals, who used the same distorted logic to justify police state laws and round-em-up policies that eventually led to the mass murder of millions of innocent civilians. Why governments are more dangerous than terrorists Speaking from historical fact, there is no entity more dangerous to the safety of human beings than a government. More people have been murdered, tortured and imprisoned by governments than by any other definable group (including those involved in the religious crusades). This is precisely why the founding fathers of the United States of America were careful to place the People in charge, establishing a system where the government answered to the People, and where power was never centralized in any single government office or department. Examine this list of the worst genocides in the 20th century, and you'll notice one fact that stands out: Almost all of them were committed by governments against their own people! Even more importantly, these were all committed by governments where power became too centralized and the People were stripped of their freedoms, rights and privacies. Do you notice the pattern throughout history, and do you see where the U.S. is logically headed? The stripping away of the power of the People is, historically, a consistent prelude to mass genocide. That's why keeping power distributed throughout society was crucial to the engineers of the original United States of America. Shared power is safe power. A government with checks and balances that actually work is a much safer government than one where the President, for example, can bypass the legislative process by issued Executive Orders. (How many executive orders has Bush issued? Click here to see the list yourself.) Concentrated power is almost universally dangerous, and the use of executive orders to bypass Congress and create whatever laws one person wants to create is a dangerous sign of a growing dictatorship. Shared power is essential in any free society. But today's U.S. federal government has long since abandoned any ideas of shared power. Today, it steamrolls over the People of this country, tapping their phone lines without warrants, searching them without probable cause, arresting and imprisoning them but not charging them with any crime, arbitrarily adding their names to "no fly" lists used by commercial airlines, and engaging in other serious transgressions. This example of the U.S. government attempting to acquire customer records from Amazon.com is not any real deviation from the consistent behavior of the U.S. government today: It wants to gather information on the People, surveilling everyone and then selectively declaring who is a "criminal" and who isn't. Could it really be true? Many people, when faced with these facts about domestic surveillance and the dangers of a police state society, simply cannot believe any of it is true. They naively think their government would never violate their rights. The U.S. government is here to protect the People, right? It's an incredibly naive belief. To get the facts on how the U.S. government really treats its people, step back a few decades and look at the U.S. Civil Rights movement. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as local government police and law enforcement personnel, repeatedly engaged in heinous crimes against the "Black Power" leaders of the day. They planned and carried out literally hundreds of attacks, bombings and executions of black leaders. (This is not conjecture: It's all on-the-record testimony from former FBI agents.) And when the Freedom Riders boarded buses and drove through the American South to protest the accelerating violence against the black people, law enforcement personnel took part in the beatings, shootings and violence perpetrated against these innocents. And the FBI? It said that it would do nothing to protect the rights of these black civilians against racial violence, but that if black people were actually killed in the attacks, it would "investigate." The history of the Civil Rights movement is a damning indictment of the State. It shows, in gruesome detail, the way in which the U.S. government protected itself at the expense of the freedoms of its people. Even U.S. Congresspeople, Senators and Presidents stood by and did nothing while blacks were being shot, stabbed, beaten and bombed all across the nation. For decades, the U.S. government passed empty laws making racism illegal then did absolutely nothing to enforce those laws. (Read more gruesome historical details in the eye-opening book A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.) Can a government really treat people in this way? The answer is a resounding YES! And it's not just any government, it's the American government. Today, the U.S. government stands as the only first world government on the planet that openly condones the kidnapping and torturing of civilians from other nations, neither charging them with crimes nor declaring them war criminals under which they would be protected by the Geneva Convention (which the U.S. openly ignores). Today, Guantanamo Bay holds prisoners who have been held for six years and never charged with a crime! It is a violation of both domestic and international law, and that's why the Bush Administration chose to kidnap and imprison these people on non-U.S. land -- it was a way to attempt to avoid adhering to U.S. laws establishing the basic rights of those charged with criminal acts. (Yes, even criminals have basic rights, like the right to legal representation and the right to know what crime they're being charged with.) The behavior of the U.S. in these matters is very much like Nazi Germany and is nothing less than a series of war crimes being perpetrated against not just men from Middle Eastern nations, but also U.S. citizens. The U.S. government is also the only government in the world to have ever dropped nuclear weapons on predominantly civilian populations (Japan, World War II), and today, the U.S. government is openly engaged in the widespread use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan through the use of depleted uranium shells. They will irradiate the Iraqi soils for generations to come, destroying the genetic code of an entire race. This is a case of mass genocide against civilians being carried out right now by the U.S. government, with the full awareness of the President, the Congress and the mainstream media. The long sought-after Weapons of Mass Destruction have finally been found: They're being used by the U.S. military! Heard enough? We've barely scratched the surface. As far as the crimes of the U.S. federal government go, tapping into Amazon.com's records is little more than a drop in the bucket. It's just a tiny glimpse of the outright betrayal of the U.S. Constitution and the American People that's going on every day in our nation's capitol. More to this article here: Big Brother U.S. Government Subpoenaed Amazon.com to Obtain Book Purchasing Records of Customers
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