What privacy....

By Fester:

Just passing along two more pieces of depressing news on the expectation of privacy and civil liberties in a scared nation...

Via Angry Bear is an effort to require credit card processing companies to reconcile all accounts to catch under the table payments (usually less than $600/individual/year)

In an effort to track down unreported small business income,
the U.S. Treasury is calling on Congress to create a sweeping new
program that would require all credit card companies to report the
income of all merchants to the Internal Revenue Service.

The
proposal, raised in President Bush's FY2009 budget, would require
credit card companies to report the aggregate transactions of all of
their merchants (that is, all the businesses that have merchant
accounts with the card companies and to whom credit card payments are
made). The reports to the IRS would have to be tied to the Taxpayer
Identification Number (TIN) of the merchant. Many small businesses use
their owners' Social Security Numbers as their TIN. A similar program
aimed at Internet "brokers," including eBay and Amazon, which raised
privacy concerns last year, seems to have been dropped from this year's
budget proposal.

And from Spork, the enemies of the state extend beyond the small scale merchants and includes eight million undersirables:

Say hello to Main Core:

According to a senior government official who served with
high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a
database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial
reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might
be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived
'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources
tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name
Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect.

In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to
everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct
questioning and possibly even detention. [emphasis added]