Life Behind the IRon Drape: Privacy: Customs Officers Have Nothing on the Powers of the Tax Surveillance State. #LeftContradiction

Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Privacy: Customs Officers Have Nothing on the Powers of the Tax Surveillance State. #LeftContradiction

I see statists of every hue, from Left to Right, deservedly up in arms about this appalling piece reported today:

A senior Customs official told colleagues in charge of highly personal information they could earn "brownie points" if they passed secrets to the FBI.

The offer was made by a Customs executive whose job was to oversee one of the organisation's most sensitive units.

[Snip]

The unit prompted privacy fears when it opened as the first outside the United States to actively harvest massive amounts of information from everybody arriving at or leaving New Zealand.

Prime Minister John Key opened it saying: "Anyone who is innocent has nothing to fear."

Just weeks after it opened, Mr Davis wrote to Immigration NZ's intelligence unit, which also holds highly personal information, telling staff there of the FBI's interest in the internet tycoon Kim Dotcom.

In an email released under the Official Information Act, Mr Davis told an Immigration NZ intelligence officer that Customs' Washington liaison was after information about Dotcom.

This was that email:

Continuing:

At the time of the request, no New Zealand agency had formally been engaged under legal assistance laws with the US. Dotcom's status at the time was the same as any other public citizen.

A spokeswoman for Customs refused to comment on the email. She also refused to say if any information was passed to the FBI by Customs.

She also refused to say whether doing so would have been legal - and again refused to comment when asked to clarify the law regarding sharing information with the United States.

Trouble is, as far as the complaining statists are concerned, there’s an elephant in the room, sitting atop every taxpayer, and its equipped with every sort of privacy busting law and the technology to carry out its mandate: it’s called variously IRD, or IRS, HMRC, whatever. It’s the tax surveillance state, built upon a population having no privacy, nor any individual a right to be left alone. This was the only outcome possible from the minute state dictatorians, looking down on us from their fortresses of legislation, decided they could better spend your money than you can, and by bribes to their electorates, and promises no one could keep, usurped for themselves a fraudulent morality to do so.

And it’s the true one world state: no conspiracy theories here. New Zealand has double tax agreements with every major jurisdiction: US, UK, most countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Those double tax agreements have two aspects to them: to determine in any instance which country has the right to tax, but also, as importantly, to implement the legal sanction of information swapping between the taxing authorities.

New Zealand has even signed up, as the world has, to an appalling tax agreement with the US called FATCA under which every New Zealand financial institution must by law pimp the private financial information of every US citizen banking with them to the IRS, on sanction of penalty. Even US citizens whom have never lived, nor are likely to, in the US. This surveillance paid for not by the US, but by the Kiwi bank user.

So for those who damn Customs in this story, as you should, because what’s happened here is disgusting, where is your protest against the taxing authorities and their unparalleled intrusions daily into our lives, our bank accounts, our wallets, and their virtually unfettered swapping of information about ourselves?

It’s the fatal contradiction, and hypocrisy, of those who have chained us to this theocracy of state; especially the Left, whose belief in the theft of redistribution has necessitated the abandonment of our privacy before state officials, and then each other. This Customs brief is merely a side show, bureaucrats such as these, upon the sanction won to run the tax surveillance state, live in a culture where privacy from the state is unknown to them. Why would you be surprised at their casual disregard for an individual's private information? I wasn’t.

When will we wake up and take back the free West which has been voted away from us by a tyranny of the majority seeking a free lunch that is only served up along the road to our serfdom?