Watchdog group sues IRS for release of tax returns sought by the president

[markomalley]

From the Daily Caller:
If President Barack Obama has been looking at your taxes, the D.C.-based watchdog group Cause of Action wants to know about it.
The group filed a suit Tuesday morning against the Internal Revenue Service over refusing to release the names of businesses and individuals whose returns interest the president.
“We’re concerned with the transparency of the president’s administration. We think that the administration should have to disclose the names for individuals and companies that it’s requesting tax records for,” Karen Groen, chief oversight counsel at Cause of Action told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Aware of the fact that federal law allows the president to seek IRS information from tax returns, Cause of Action filed a Freedom of Information Act request this April to investigate whether or not the president has done this, and if so, whose taxes is he looking out.

I know that Nixon thought about doing this (not sure if he ever did or not). Does anybody have any actual proof that another administration has requested individuals’ tax records?

 

[markomalley]

And then this, from all places, the ACLU:


Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government’s surveillance power. (Our original Freedom of Information Act request and our legal complaint are online.)

Pen register and trap and trace devices are powerfully invasive surveillance tools that were, twenty years ago, physical devices that attached to telephone lines in order to covertly record the incoming and outgoing numbers dialed. Today, no special equipment is required to record this information, as interception capabilities are built into phone companies’ call-routing hardware.

Pen register and trap and trace devices now generally refer to the surveillance of information about—rather than the contents of—communications. Pen registers capture outgoing data, while trap and trace devices capture incoming data. This still includes the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing telephone calls and the time, date, and length of those calls. But the government now also uses this authority to intercept the “to” and “from” addresses of email messages, records about instant message conversations, non-content data associated with social networking identities, and at least some information about the websites that you visit (it isn’t entirely clear where the government draws the line between the content of a communication and information about a communication when it comes to the addresses of websites).
Hope and change, baby.

Remember folks, it’s not fascism when the correct people do it.

Yet, I’m sure some here will defend this.

 

[Nimzovik]

Indeed they will.