Last week’s story about a retired Texas school teacher who came under Homeland Security’s microscope for paying off a $6,522 credit card debt has been trumped by a similar case involving an amount of just $650.

Previously, Walter Soehnge made national headlines when he attempted to pay off debt on his MasterCard. The payment was rejected and automatically triggered an investigation by Homeland Security.

Now we have the story of Edie Booth, a community college professor in East Texas.

Trying to pay off her February credit card bill, Booth found her funds short and so asked to borrow $650 from her sister to avoid an interest overcharge of $140.

Booth made a $3,500 payment from her own account and then sent the other $650 with permission from her sister’s electronic account.

I watched the status of these two payments on line, since I am not the 'trusting' type, when it comes either to banks, credit card companies, OR government,” says Booth.

“The $650 was pending one day and then showed funded the next. All seemed fine. However, I continued to check the status on-line for the next 5 days.

“On the 6th day I found the extra $650 payment CANCELLED.”

Upon calling the credit card company, Booth was told that Homeland Security would not allow her to make two payments from two different sources in the same day.

Booth was then slapped with the $140 overcharge for causing the hard working boys at Homeland so much inconvenience.

This is a monumental waste of time and if there were any real terrorists out there Homeland Security is more interested in your spending habits than Al-Qaeda.

As Edie Booth points out, this is “such insanity, I mean, if you are paying your credit card, you have already obtained the explosives or whatever some time before."

“Where is the leadership? When will we get some relief from these morons?”

The very individuals that used 9/11 to force layer upon layer of increased state surveillance and big government bureaucracy upon us are the ones in business with Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. And yet it is law-abiding citizens that get hassled for the simple desire to pay off some debt.

Homeland Security targets toy store owners, t-shirt sellers and kindergartners while hiring former East German Stasi heads to spy on Americans and recruiting tattle-tale squads under ‘Highway Watch’ – a program that encourages truckers, toll takers, road crews and bus drivers to watch their fellow citizens and report suspicious activity.

It seems painfully obvious that the people trying to take away our freedoms are not wearing turbans and shouting Allah Akbar, but that the enemy is within the gates.