Barack Obama has declared limits to surveillance and has championed privacy concerns.
“The bottom line is that people around the world — regardless of their nationality — should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into account.”
It would be nice if Obama would treat us as “ordinary people around the world” who simply have ordinary bank accounts where we live, work, earn an income, raise families, own homes and pay taxes. Oh wait there’s that pesky little detail that the United States of Arrogance has declared our nationality to be “US person” so we’re fair game for financial spying.
No financial privacy for us!
I understand Barack Obama also has shares in a wonderful bridge in Brooklyn NY he’d be delighted to sell to you at a bargain-basement price.
Or as some Brits might say, “pull the other one, it has bells on it.”
“The United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into account” says the president of the US. It must be that he, like most US politicians, do not have a clue of what FATCA is about and they passed this extraterritorial part of the bill that was buried in some job making bill not knowing it was there (FATCA was supposed to make money to make up for the spending of the HIRE bill). Nobody knows this in the “homeland”.
My comment to the CBC NSA article awaits moderation. I am now (if not before) surely in the NSA database after http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/u-s-fatca-tax-law-catches-unsuspecting-canadians-in-its-crosshairs-1.2493864.
Who would think? I would never realized that all in my family were other than pretty ordinary persons who are Canadian. I guess those now to be identified as US Persons cannot be ordinary?
@kermitzii, I believe that absolutely that FATCA was not a well thought out law- that they did no analysis and had zero idea of the unintended consequences. However, I also believe that once those consequences came to light they just saw it as a way to bring in more money, and don’t care about the effect on US persons not living in the ‘homeland’ , because, of course, if a person was a real, true American, they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else but in the US.
@Outraged: I agree with you, with one exception. FATCA isn’t about bringing money in to U.S. It’s about control through information and intimidation.