| | I mention again in passing the Anthony L. Hargis case, in which Hargis spent 6 months in jail for refusing to turn over his customers records without being presented a search warrant, subpoena or court order, under the new law (whose full contents are a state secret, BTW) which allows agents from a slew of federal bureaucracies to demand all customer records from just about any business, without any legal paperwork other than their demand, and no justification, either.
Hargis was financially ruined and ~1,100 customers lost all the money that they had invested in a gold account with his company, which had been in business for 25 years, and yet not one person was convicted of any crime.
A similarly chilling account of the fed's ability to destroy someone without recourse was told in an interview with the victim a day or two ago on NPR. A professor had the horrible start to his day on discovering his wife dead beside him in bed from heart failure, at which point he called the emergency number and the fire department responded. They discovered suspicious-looking laboratory apparatus (the fire dept. personnel were clueless about biochemistry) in the house and called in Homeland Security who arrested the guy and subjected him to hours and hours of interrogation, meanwhile seizing his wife's body for an autopsy and completely trashing his home, as well as closing his bank accounts, credit cards and access to any other personal assets, and also trying to have him fired at his university job.
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008Apr21/0,4670,BioArt,00.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/category/art_crime/
ALL the agencies involved have long since declared that they found no dangerous materials or any evidence of wrongdoing at the house or elsewhere. In fact, the professor and his wife were doing contract projects at home. Nonetheless, once the arrest and prosecution and trashing of personal property was done, it was then incumbant upon the feds to justify their idiocies somehow, in order to avoid potential damage claims as well as nasty publicity.
So, they went after the poor guy on wire-fraud charges, which he says are typically used as a last defense in order to force a penniless victim to sign off on a disclaimer for any damages. This is what is called "piling on." Police routinely file every possible charge in a case, whether or not there is any conceivable merit, in order to have a fall-back to cover their asses when the original charges are tossed out, knowing that the victim has limited resources compared to the authorities.
Fortunately, this guy had a lot of friends, who financed his defense, and he won, although the feds can appeal. He is the exception, however. Some 150,000 National Security Letters have reportedly been sent, in which the recipient is not allowed to notify anyone or tell anyone that they have even received the letter, on pain of severe penalties. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Letter
Without an actual victim, the federal courts will generally not hear a constitutional challenge to a law. However, under the Patriot Act, the victims who have their lives trashed from the demands of some National Security Letter are not allowed to even identify themselves or to tell any of the details related to the damages, and in virtually every case that the ACLU or other parties have brought, the feds have simply claimed that there was a "national security issue," and the judge has in response completely gagged the victims from presenting any relevant testimony, and, without any testimony, guess what the judge then has to do with the case? Catch 22.
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