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Privacy.....NOT!

By Rob Lambert - Email Editor

Date: May 18, 2006

In this newsletter I want to talk a bit about privacy. Last week the talk show hosts and TV newscasters (remember when they were anchormen!) have had a field day with the so-called-shocking disclosure that the U.S. Government has been listening to our phone calls! Oh my, what a shock. …. All my readers, of course, know that I am being sarcastic.

In the good old USA, privacy, at least where the government is concerned, is a myth. It does not exist. I have been reminding readers for years that the era of the secret bank account is dead. Face it, the government knows about each and every bank account you have. It is only a matter of time until the IRS will start utilizing the information, already gathered, to nab tax cheaters.The bottom line is that all significant money transfers go through the fed fund system, and the Patriot Act requires all offshore banks to make available all depositor info to the Federal Government.

Uncle Sam is not only all-powerful... he is now all-knowing.

It is no secret that the government is listening to all of us. I have always assumed it. Almost 8 years ago (well before 9/11) I was standing on the top floor of a building near Washington D.C. with its owner. He pointed to the building next door that he also owned. It was rented to a federal agency. The building had only one door with several heavily armed guards. It had two distinguishing architectural features: The first was housing for an 8 or 10 foot wide bundle of fiber optic cables connecting this building to one of the backbone nodes of the internet, and the other a huge structure, almost the size of the building itself, housing enormous air conditioners for the super computers in the building. Gee, I wonder what that was for? If you don’t think all Internet communications are monitored, think again.

The government sees and hears all. It just can’t digest and process it all….yet.

This creeping intrusion is something that won’t be stopped in the near term. It probably doesn’t matter much to most people who are more worried now about filling up their bellies and their gas tanks.

The people it should matter to are either principled and care about the Constitution (and these guys aren’t normally a threat and normally they don’t break the law) or crooks. I point this out because the era of the tax cheat with the offshore account and the debit visa account is done. That guy is toast. Remember, Asset Protection disguised as a secret unreported bank account is criminal tax fraud.

In short, the government intrusion into what you once incorrectly thought was your personal sacred cocoon of privacy will only hurt you if you are a crook.

The second important point is that our government’s hegemony over your privacy will not impact the ability of you to protect yourself from normal third party civil creditors. Why? Simple: The USA does not readily admit that it has collected vast amounts of your personal info. In addition, the people and agencies that have this life-ruining information have strict procedures to keep their ill-gotten (and sometimes not so ill-gotten) information confidential. You can still rest easy knowing that your personal information is safe (albeit stolen) with Uncle Sam.

The third important point is that there are some third party peddlers of watered down information similar to what the government has gathered. These guys seem to know where you go and what you do. It is pretty easy for any decent private eye to track down almost anybody. With that said, it is NOT easy for the same private eye to track down your assets if you have structured your affairs with Asset Protection in mind. WHY? Again simple: Most Asset Protection has a foreign flavor for at least part of the planning, and most foreign countries do not agree with Uncle Sam that they are entitled to know everything about all of their citizens. To the extent that this gumshoe (who has no problem finding somebody in the USA) wants to look abroad, he is likely to hit nothing but brick walls.

Somehow it seems that those of us who live in the “land of the free” have less real freedom than our less enlightened neighbors.

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