If anyone here is selling books on Amazon be very careful. The Feds are monitoring and subpoening buyer records which in turn means they probably will be contacting the seller as part of an active investigation. This is crazy now people cant buy or sell books without being labled as a terrorist ?
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
Jeff Rense Program 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.
Learn more:
Big Brother U.S. Government Subpoenaed Amazon.com to Obtain Book Purchasing Records of Customers 
