LETTERS: GOVERNMENT KEEPS TABS ON EVERYONE

To the editor:

For those who are worried government will come to a screeching halt because of Y2K, you can put your fears to rest. Our government will soon be monitoring everyone's daily activities. After all it wants to protect us.

The FCC has mandated that all wireless providers be able to pinpoint the location of all wireless phone calls by 2001 in case you get lost and need to call home. Big Brother will be looking out for your welfare and will know exactly where you are at all times.

Thank goodness the FDIC failed in its first attempt to impose a regulation requiring banks to keep a computer profile of customers' deposits and withdrawals and report all "inconsistent" transactions to a federal database called the Suspicious Activity Reporting System. Thank God there was a comment period before enactment. This allowed the public to send in 250,000 negative comments about the idea. Since only 3,000 people thought it was a wonderful idea, the plan was dropped.

Guess what. Many banks are already making customer profiles and selling them to telemarketers. This was made possible by the banking lobby, which successfully blocked an amendment that would have required banks to get your consent before selling this private financial information.

Planning on taking a trip? The FAA has proposed a regulation that would give our government unlimited access to everyone's personal travel records. The FAA gave $3.1 million to Northwest Airlines to create software for a database of personal travel records, plus $7.8 million to all of the other airlines so that they could create their databases.

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act requires all employers to send the name, address and Social Security number of every new worker to the database called Directory of New Hires which has the ability to track every worker in America.

Not content to monitor all of this nation's employees, this database also monitors your children by being linked to the Department of Education. Did you know that your children in public schools are required to fill out a nosy questionnaire revealing all sorts of nonacademic information about attitudes, behavior, health and family privacy?

Don't worry about your health. The 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum Act authorized the Department of Health and Human Services to assign a "unique health care identifier" to every citizen so that the government can track us by entering our individual medical records on their database. And I thought that they didn't care.

The 1993 Comprehensive Childhood Immunization Act gave the Department of Health and Human Services $400 million to induce the individual states to create a database of all children's vaccinations. Thus the states are given rewards of $50 to $100 for each fully vaccinated child. Now we know why states are so very anxious to have every child immunized, even if it is against a parent's will.

The Centers for Disease Control is trying to link these state databases into a federal database containing every child's medical records.

Another government database, Healthy Families America, involves sending in a "friendly home visitor" to your homes if you are a first-time parent. Your friendly in-home visitor will be sending all of the information collected to the Program Information Management System, which will eventually be combined with the preschool and public school tracking systems.

The 1996 Immigration Act mandated each state to use Social Security numbers of all drivers on their licenses so the federal government could use our driver's licenses as a federal ID card. The government repealed this in 1999 after the outcry from concerned citizens.

Doctors beware. We senior citizens are being recruited to spy on you. We will get $1,000 for calling a toll-free fraud hotline and filing a report resulting in a monetary recovery. Imagine impoverished senior citizens, all 39 million of us, trying to collect our $1,000 reward because your office may have entered the wrong code number on a Medicare form.

The purpose of all of this monitoring is to pinpoint terrorists, money launderers, drug kingpins, welfare and student-loan cheats as well as deadbeat dads. I hope this information wakes everyone up to the totalitarian regime that our government is dreaming of. Wake up, America, this is your worst nightmare. Happy new millennium.

CHRISTINE E. STEPHENS

Cape Girardeau