Nevada Confidential

    While what happens here may stay here (that is, if you can escape U-Tube, cell-phone cameras and busy-body friends/colleagues) – but your trip here – particularly if you’ve traveled outside the U.S. – is likely to end-up in the permanent files of our self-righteous protectors in the Department of Homeland Security.

    A new survey documents that the U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have read.

    The documents obtained by the Identity Project most likely are but the tip of the iceberg when analyzing the degree of invasiveness perpetrated by DHS on an unsuspecting American public. The government stores the PNRs (Passenger Name Records) for years and typically includes destinations, phone and e-mail contact information, meal requests, special health requests, payment information and frequent-flier numbers. The Identity Project filed Privacy Act requests for five individuals to see the data stored on them by the government. The requests revealed that the PNRs also included information on one requester's race, the phone numbers of overseas family members given to the airlines as emergency contact information, and a record of a purely European flight that had been booked overseas separately from an international itinerary, according to snippets of the documents shown to Wired News.

    By keeping tabs on what individual citizens read and with whom they associate, the Department of Homeland Security is collecting data on the free exercise of 1st Amendment activities. DHS is violating the fundamental right to travel, a right elemental to the free exercise of so many other rights, by requiring American citizens to get permission from DHS in order to leave or enter the United States, or to travel by air within the United States.

    Congressional action is urgently needed to investigate and defund all DHS surveillance programs that create this creation of records on "suspected terrorists" - meaning you - that violate the inalienable right of all Americans to travel freely, without governmental interference.

    And one further thought: why do so many conservatives whine that the government would be incapable of running a healthcare system and yet are willing to put their total trust, personal freedom, and individual rights in the hands of an power-hungry bureaucracy like Homeland Security?