WWIII or Bust

Solid anti-Bush site seeks revival.
Retired school teacher Walter Soehnge and his wife Deana thought they'd do a fiscally responsible thing and pay down some credit card debt. Specifically, they elected to pay $6522 on their JC Penney Platinum Mastercard. And that's when Homeland Security got involved.

Apparently paying a large sum of money qualifies as suspicious behaviour these days, and I guess there was every possibility that a retired school teacher who shops at JC Penney could be an Al-Qaeda terrorist. Especially if he has a credit card. A Mastercard even.

The Soehnges checked online to see if his payment had been credited, but it hadn't. So they did what anyone would do: they called the credit card company (and probably sat on hold for a long time, got shifted from department to department, got disconnected a few times, spoke with rude people, etc). The credit card company explained that the amount of money they had sent in was a significant percentage higher than their minimum monthly payment, and that when the percentage reaches a certain point, Homeland Security has to be notified of a possible "threat." The money can't be credited to the account until the potential "threat" is cleared.

The root cause? Changes to the Orwellian-named "Bank Secrecy Act" of 1970 (incorrectly called the "Bank Privacy Act" in the source article). These changes were made by our old friend and Big Brother, the PATRIOT act. The Soehnges moved more than $5000 at one time, so the bank filed a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR). (Curiously enough, the way I read the changes to the law, the bank may not have needed to do that if there was a legitimate business purpose- like paying down a credit card- to the transaction, but I am not a lawyer, and it is possible that rather than subject themselves to any judicial burden of deciding what's suspicious, banks simply report every transaction over $5000.)

Eventually the Soehnges managed to get their credit card paid off, but not before Walter was "madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail" which is apparently really quite mad. He summarizes: "It's scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy."

---Nick