by Vernon K. Jacobs -
In some correspondence with a close friend, I challenged him with the argument that many people in the U.S. regard a concern for privacy as a presumption of guilt. i.e., ?Those who want privacy must have something to hide.? I really hit his hot button with that memo because he wrote back with the comment that in a free society, what we do with our money is, nobody's damn business!
According to Mark Nestmann, author of How To Achieve Personal and Financial Privacy in A Public Age, the right to privacy is not explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Nonetheless, this document provides several implied privacy protections, including the right to free association (First Amendment); the prohibition against illegal search and and seizures (Fourth Amendment) and the Fifth Amendment, which protects individuals from being forced to testify against themselves ... ?.
Privacy is not a crime, but there are many people who seem to believe that anyone with an interest in privacy must have something to hide.
We now live in a society where there are an abundance of people who want to make our financial affairs as public as possible. The government can?t control us as easily when they don?t have complete details about where we live and work, how we make and spend our money and even what we do in our leisure time. The IRS wants to have every possible scrap of information about how we make and spend our money. If possible, they would prefer to have all of our income and expense information on their computer so they can prepare our tax returns for us. Every government agency with a mission seeks information in order to accomplish that mission, without regard to how that might impinge on our privacy. Government controls over the movement of money, over prices and the use of foreign trusts or foreign bank accounts all require that they take away some of our privacy in order to enforce their rules.
Marketers are also insatiable users of information. The more information the marketers can acquire about you, the better able they are to send you sales materials on products or services that are likely to be of interest to you. They don?t want to send you letters that you don?t want to read any more than you want to receive them. But a cost for this increasingly customized marketing process is a huge loss of privacy. The marketers can easily sell (or rent) any part or all of the information they have in their files about you, without your explicit consent as to whether they sell or rent that information, and if so, to whom. (However, you can now require the companies to refrain from renting or selling your name and related information.)
But perhaps the worst of the lot are the lawyers who hire investigators to seek as much information about a potential plaintiff as possible before proceeding to sue the plaintiff. The investigators are primarily hired to determine if the potential plaintiff has any liquid assets or liability insurance. Some lawyers are using this information to identify promising litigation targets before they attempt to locate potential plaintiffs. Instead of ?chasing ambulances? they first search deep pockets and then they look for former patients, clients or customers (of the potential target victims) who may be willing to sue for some exaggerated grievance. For example, they hire investigators to identify local surgeons and the hospitals where they work. The investigators then track down information about former patients of the surgeon. Then someone calls on the former patient to ask if they are "really, really, really" satisfied with the outcome of their surgery.
Extensive information is also available to government agents (at all levels) who are now strongly motivated to use asset forfeitures as a source of funding for their agency. With few exceptions, all human organizations seek to perpetuate their existence to provide a livelihood for those who work for the organization. President Reagan opened ?Pandora?s Box? when he agreed to confiscate money from drug dealers and use that money to pay for the ?war? on drugs. Now, with the ongoing pressure of the public to cut back on government services and on taxes, many government agencies will turn more and more to asset forfeitures for revenues to fund their activities. What better way for some desperate or unscrupulous government agency (or police department) to get money than to look people up in one of the readily available information data bases and to then target the most promising prospects for some easy entrapment procedures?
Privacy is simply one of many ways to protect your assets from these kinds of opportunistic predators. For help on creating a low profile and protecting your privacy, here are some resources. By the way. If you enter the word privacy in a major search engine, you will get millions of "hits" because almost every web site now has a web page to describe their privacy policy.
Privacy 2000 by Mark Nestmann. Copies are available for $75 from the author at http://www.nestmann.com/bookstore.cfm Mark also writes and publishes 97 Ways to Protect What's Left of Your Privacy and Property Rights, which is available for $25.00 from his web site.
The Privacy Alliance is an organization to help businesses comply with an assortment of federal privacy laws. www.privacyalliance.org
The Privacy Forum is a moderated public discussion list on a wide range of privacy topics. www.vortex.com/privacy.html
The Orlando Mail Drop. This company provides private mail forwarding services and has a section of their web site that is devoted to the subject of privacy. www.orlandomaildrop.com/privacy.html
Join the Yahoo Group of Vernon Jacobs, author of the Jacobs Report on International Financial Planning -- by visiting http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/JacobsReport/
Note: Reprinted with permission from Global Asset Protection. This article was first written in 1996 but has been revised in 2001 to ensure that the content is still applicable. (Vernon Jacobs)
Copyright, 1996, 2001, Vernon K. Jacobs.
Vernon Jacobs is the Editor/Publisher of Global Asset Protection, an email newsletter about how to legally protect your assets from excessive lawsuit judgments in the U.S. A free "e-book" on the subject is available at www.offshorepress.com/protection Jacobs is a CPA who has worked as a free lance tax and financial author/editor since 1977. Details about his credentials and experience are online at www.offshorepress.com/vkjcpa
