Millions of people around the globe now recognize the name of Jean Charles de Menezes, the 27-year-old Brazilian living in London who did not live to celebrate his 28th birthday because he was "acting suspiciously" while wearing clothes the London police deemed "too heavy" for London's summer weather.

Unfortunately for the young Brazilian, that sartorial error bought him more than half a dozen bullets to the head at close range from trigger-happy London bobbies in the wake of the attempted bombings in the British capital on July 21.

While such a tragedy has not occurred here, our government continues to overreact to terrorist incidents — real and perceived — in ways that threaten to erase our liberties if not our lives.

It was not so many years ago that Americans could open a bank account and rest assured its contents would be free from prying government eyes unless federal agents could establish to the satisfaction of a federal judge that the bank customer had violated the law. While the Internal Revenue Service was exempted from this prohibition on routine disclosure of a law-abiding citizens' financial records, even that agency was severely limited in how it could use the tax-related data and with whom it could share the information. In other words, as a man's home was his castle, so too his finances were his secret. No more.

Thanks to the USA Patriot Act — versions of which were reauthorized recently by both houses of the U.S. Congress — and the ease with which "sneak and peek" warrants may now be issued to the government, a man's home is the government's play box. And, also thanks to the Patriot Act, a person's bank accounts are now routinely analyzed and reported to government agencies for little or no reason whatsoever.

Banks are under increasing pressure to file more and more "Suspicious Activity Reports" or "SARs" with the feds; at the current rate of some 800,000 per year (nearly triple the rate of just three years ago). Until recently SARs were limited to instances in which truly unusual banking activity triggered a legitimate suspicion the customer was engaged in money laundering or some other illegal financial activity. Now, thanks to both the Patriot Act — which greatly expanded the category of "suspicious" activities that would trigger an SAR filing — and as a result of "defensive filings" by banks, the types of transactions that are coming under scrutiny are often routine and not indicative of any unlawful activity. In effect, this reporting represents little more than just plain snooping by bank officials eager to curry favor with federal regulators, and reflects the federal government's increasing desire to gather data on all of us for no reason or any reason.

It has gotten so bad that one banker recently told me his bank has set quotas for increased numbers of SARs to be filed each reporting period. (Weren't quotas in issuing speeding tickets at one time considered unlawful?)

While you might to some degree sympathize with the banks, since the federal government is now prosecuting banks for not filing enough SARs, filing a report with the feds on a customer simply because he or she engages in heavy use of an ATM seems to be a bit of an overreaction (but it is happening).

What is happening to all this information the government is gathering thanks to banks filing more and more SARs? Not much, beyond gathering and maintaining the data in its massive computers. Of the nearly 700,000 SARs filed in 2004, fewer than 900 were actually passed on by the collecting federal agency to a law enforcement agency for follow-up. Someone's idea of what is "suspicious" needs a bit of refining. Lost in all this is the notion of financial privacy, something that used to be important in America but which now appears to have been discarded as "quaint" and outdated.

Meanwhile, other government "watch lists" abound —

although the error rate, if judged by the number of completely innocent and law-abiding citizens denied the right to travel, seems not to have improved at all.

Random (read "arbitrary") searches of people's briefcases, purses or grocery bags by machine gun-wielding transit police, based on nothing more "suspicious" than a desire to ride a commercial vehicle, are becoming accepted intrusions.

What hope for freedom still beats in America's soul is found in the occasional opinion of a lonely federal judge. Audrey Collins, a U.S. district judge in Los Angeles, ruled late last month that at least some provisions of the Patriot Act were unenforceable because they were overly — therefore unconstitutionally — vague.

While the government probably will appeal the judge's ruling and try to snuff out the flicker of freedom it represents, at least for now that small flame casts a wide and welcome glow.


—Former congressman and U.S. Attorney Bob Barr practices law in Atlanta.

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