What About the Patriot Act?
Wasn't the Patriot Act supposed to be the ultimate invasion of privacy? Somebody tell Obama to back off on the computer monitoring thing or he will show up Bush as supposedly being the worst violator of privacy/civil rights in American history.
Here's what a car dealer has to agree to when he or she tries to take part in the Cash for Clunkers program. http://tinyurl.com/ngpsz7
Actually, I didn't believe this until I saw it myself. A friend of mine sent me photos of the TV screen when Beck had a segment on this a night or two ago. I thought there must have been some kind of phishing site set up, that the gov't would not honestly ask anyone to agree to such a complete invasion of their privacy. I grossly underestimated Obama's "audacity." There doesn't seem to be a lot of "hope" involved here, however.
Here's what a car dealer has to agree to when he or she tries to take part in the Cash for Clunkers program. http://tinyurl.com/ngpsz7
Actually, I didn't believe this until I saw it myself. A friend of mine sent me photos of the TV screen when Beck had a segment on this a night or two ago. I thought there must have been some kind of phishing site set up, that the gov't would not honestly ask anyone to agree to such a complete invasion of their privacy. I grossly underestimated Obama's "audacity." There doesn't seem to be a lot of "hope" involved here, however.
posted by Matthew Tod at 1:37 PM
5 Comments:
I found an article without much effort that explains why this is another of Beck's weird conspiracy theories. Apparently the "Terms of Use" statement to which Beck refers in this clip is not from cars.gov. Rather it is a login page for dealer transactions located at esc.gov.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/1/760538/-Beck-conspiracy-theory:-Cash-for-clunkers-site-lets-Feds-control-your-PC
Here is a better story, a little more clear. Though he never mentions it, what Beck is demonstrating only occurs on the dealer side of the website. The federal government is merely warning the dealers to whom it will be writing checks that their submissions are subject to scrutiny.
http://killfile.newsvine.com/_news/2009/08/01/3104801-glenn-beck-and-the-governments-fictional-plot-to-hijack-your-computer
You need to reread my blog entry. I already said the gov't invasion of privacy occurs on the dealer side. The end user license agreement is worded so that the feds can do what they want to a computer that is logged into the system, during the transaction and, quite possibly, after.
Then I guess you need to re-read the links since they clearly state that is it standard text used for a long time on multiple government sites, and "the disclaimer does not give the government permission to look at the files on the user's system but rather warns the user that the government will be looking at the files on the application's system, specifically those files submitted by the user."
If you read the license agreement, it guarantees the user no privacy whatsoever. What the agreement needs is to have specific terms capitalized and defined somewhere to avoid confusion. I will take the license at its word, as opposed to how newsvine wants to spin it.
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