Sybase Advertises 'PATRIOTcompliance'

xmtrx writes "While everyone is rabidly pouncing, pounding and going pundit on Palladium, little-to-no attention is being paid to enterprise-class spyware such as Sybase's PATRIOTcompliance Solution. Their ad includes such gems as "Non-compliance is not an option" and "...helps you satisfy the many integration requirements of the USA PATRIOT Act by... filtering your customers, employees and suppliers against known suspects, and then... continuously monitoring their future activities." No punchline." The laws passed which affect financial institutions are mostly opaque to Joe Citizen. Sybase's press release sheds a little bit of light on what is going on behind the scenes.

Comments

Don't buy it......

[mickwd]

If your don't like this sort of stuff, stop buying (or considering) stuff from Sybase.

And let them know your doing this.

And why.

Re:Open Source could be next

[blowdart]

OK how would open source help here?

The banks and brokers are being forced to do this by October. They don't have a choice.

So, what, if they use open source they won't have to? Is that your point? It may be more difficult to put that crap in, but
a) Sybase arent hiding it
b) That crap HAS to go in.

Not So Bad

[m_evanchik]

While theoretically troubling, this really isn't that horrific. The Federal Government just doesn't have the resources to persecute a lot of people. There have been various reporting requirements on financial transactions for quite a while. These new requirements are not coming out of the blue.

People also tend to forget that we are fighting a war. It's fine to be snide and cynical, but American troops are in combat abroad right now.

That all being said, I doubt these reporting requirements will do much to stop terrorism. The evidence is mounting that our failure to stop past terrorism was not due to a lack of power or resources, but due to ineffective leadership and incompetence. All the information in the world won't help our government agencies who in the past have shown a frightening lack of intelligence.

And I don't trust Ashcroft. He's grandstanding to score political points without actually achieving any worthwhile results. Of all the thousands of suspects rounded up and detained on suspicion of terrorism, only a handful have been charged with anything terrorist related, and all of those charged are pretty much low-level dupes (Lindh, Massaoui (sp?), etc.).

Let's face it, anyone competent enough to pull off a real terrorist attack is also probably competent enough to know about and know how to circumvent these reporting requirements. The only people caught by these new rules will be the stupid and the uninformed, both of which may be up to no good, or more likely just unaware that they are doing anything wrong.

Our country is at war and it is deadly serious. I just wonder if our biggest impediment to victory might be certain political hacks like Ashcroft who now find themselves in positions of unexpected power, with the ability to further agendas beside winning the war on terrorism.

Maybe we all ought to start exercising our Second Amendment rights, which seems to be the only ones he finds sacrosanct.

Come and get me coppers!

(Huh? What's that knocking on the door?) = ^ &

Re:Not So Bad

[Lordfly]

1) We're not at war. Congress never declared war. Congress MUST declare an act of war against a country in order to be in a state of war. Simply saying ad nauseum in speech rhetoric about the "war on terrorism" does not make the nation at war.

2) Ashcroft is quite possibly the scariest person alive, in my opinion. He might be grandstanding, but his actions since taking office has shown to me that he would rather just throw away the Constitution; makes his life easier.

3) American troops have been in "combat" for like the past 20 years, doing "peacekeeping" missions. That doesn't change the fact that the PATRIOT bill infringes upon your privacy hardcore.

I'm really quite sick of people saying that "dammit, we're in a war, stop badmouthing the government or else." Who are we fighting, exactly?

Too bad everyone's too busy following the government's lead to really do anything.

*reads post over*

Man, I sound like a conspiracy theorist at 8 in the morning :)

Lordfly

Re:Not So Bad

[be-fan]

Death is preferable to moral bankruptcy. The minute we decide that security is preferable to ethical behavior, we lose the right to say we are the greatest democracy in the world.

This is starting to get out of hand...

[ivpiter]

Although in troubled times restrictions are necessary I fully believe that "In times of emergency, restrictions on the freedom of the individual and imposed in the real or assumed interest of the community. We hold it to be essential that such restrictions be confined to a minimum of clearly specified actions ; that they be understood to be temporary and limited expedients in the nature of a sacrafice ; and that the measures restricting freedom be themseles subject to the free criticism and democratic control . Only thus can we have a reasonable assurance that emergency measures restricting individual freedom will not be degenerate into a permanent tyranny." - sec. 7 of the manifesto of the Congress for Cultural Freedom published in 1951 In was true then and it is true now. The steps of government and corporations that seek to influence the gov be be in the light, and not hidden, espically under the guise of "protecting the people". Peace folks,

Re:This is starting to get out of hand...

[Angry Toad]

Indeed. That's what I personally find so scary about all of this. Of course we have to be more vigilant right now - anyone who doesn't think there's a truly serious threat is deluding themselves, and it is pretty hard to come down against the government for making changes that allow them to more easily track down the bad guys.

That being said, where is the out? The War Against Terror will never be over, because terror (read: asymmetrical warfare) is the weapon of the disempowered against the powerful. As long as literally billions of people on the planet don't have clean drinking water, let alone access to education and so on, then there will be an endless supply of rage to feed the other end of the process.

They have us between a rock and a hard place - it is very hard to argue against harsh measures to weed out the terrorists ("but why do you want to make things easy for them?") but on the other hand that means we're supporting the creation of a de facto police state (and I don't think that's entirely hyperbole) with no discernable way of ever getting things back to normal again.

After all, politicians just love to give up power once they have it.

Free World (tm)

[Otis_INF]

Reading this and putting the 'vision' (if you can call it that) of the USA's government in perspective, you start to wonder why the USA still are calling themselves "Leader of the Free World". Must be a different definition of 'Free' than I have...

Re:Free World (tm)

[kadehje]

The USA focuses on freedom because it's how the government pushes its agenda on the masses. The USA, like every other nation, has never been a truly free country. Instead, the US picks an evil contrary to the government's desires and urges its citizens to attack it by saying that eliminating that evil will lead to a Free(tm)-er America.

In 1775, residents of the "13 colonies" began to take up arms against Great Britain. At the beginning of the war, the gripes against the British Crown were primarily commerical, such as being allowed to buy tea only from one Crown-backed company and having to pay what they felt were ridiculous taxes on this tea and many other goods traded throughout the colonies. In April 1775, things like freedom of speech weren't a very important issue; those in North America just wanted the Crown to get the fsck out of of affairs that were previously left to the colonies to deal with internally.

When it became clear that it would be useless to extract these commerce-based concessions from the Crown, by the middle of 1776, the colonists began to move towards secession from the British Empire. They knew that they would not be able to sucessfully fight the war by themselves, so they needed help somehow. They drafted the Declaration of Independence, which detailed a set of ideals that the newly created United States would aspire to. In addition to solidifying the patriots' side (many in the would-be U.S. were sympathetic to the Crown at the beginning of the war), they managed to gain support from British people and companies who felt that the Crown's hunger for power was once again out of control (Britain's "Glorious Revolution" against royal tyranny had taken place 90 years previously). Ultimately, these ideals, along with existing distate for Britain, encouraged France to enter the war on the side of the colonists. So, it can be argued that the Declaration of Independence was as pragmatic a device as it was idealistic.

Did the newly created United States become a free nation? Largely so, provided you were a wealthy white male. Women and the poor were judged to be unqualified to handle the responsibilities of democracy; and blacks, almost all of whom were slaves at that time, were judged to be so lowly ranked in the animal kingdom that in addition to not being worthy of participating in the "democratic" government, counted as only 3/5 of an oppressed white person in the decennial census.

Fast forward 75 years to the Civil War. This time around, even wealthy white males weren't spared the shaft of tyranny. You may recall that self-determination was one of the major rallying cries in the Revolutionary War. So South Carolina, along with about a dozen other states, determines that its time to secede from the Northern states, just as the United States seceded from Britain. Well, we all know about how the folks in Washington D.C. felt about that decision. Especially the Maryland legislature, who were ordered to be arrested by President Lincoln without being accused of a criminal act (blatantly violating the "habeus corpus" provision of the Constitution) before they could convene and vote to secede from the Union. That's Freedom(tm) at work.

Northern opposition to slavery was again a largely pragmatic belief; the climate of the northern states wasn't very conducive to the slave-intensive agriculture found in the South and the new industries in the North required educated labor that would not tolerate the idea that they would be bound to the whims of a single master for their entire lives. So, Northern factory owners were forced to give a few crumbs and a few liberties to their employees; these factory owners were upset that they could not keep 100% of their factories' profits as plantation owners did. So, they led the crusade to "free" the slaves on these plantations in order for Northern and Southern businesses to run in the same set of economic rules. As in the Revolutionary War, the peddling of these ideas was also important to ensuring a favorable external political situation. In the early part of the Civil War, Great Britain seriously considered coming to the aid of the Confederacy. But then, the U.S. government managed to convince London that this war was not about economics; it was about bringing Freedom to oppressed slaves on plantations. Britain stayed out, allowing the North to take two years to get its military together (the South had nearly won the war by 1863) and rout the Confederacy.

As you all know, the years since 1865 have also been a sham in terms of giving true freedom to Americans. I just wanted to point out that the United States has always, from the time of its founding, been hypocrital regarding freedom. The hypocrisy predates the Red Scare, McCarthyism, Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No!" campaign, and it certainly predates September 11, 2001.

Hopefully these examples illustrate the true meaning of the concept of Freedom(tm) and how it differs from true freedom.

Re:Is this really news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Making life hard for everyone and adding new regulation does not stimulate the economy by anyone's imagination.

The economy is stimulated by people doing productive work. Guys writing software that does nothing other than snoop on us isn't a net increase in wealth. And in the absence of this requirement, these guys could be writing code people would actually want.

Re:Laws are Passed by Congress

[jd142]

Actually all presidents have used the power of the Executive Order. It bypasses congress and allows the president to a law. For example, Bill Clinton executed an executive order lowering the allowed level of arsenic in drinking water. Bush changed that order. President Bush issued an executive order that contradicted the 1978 Presidential Records Act, a law passed by congress. The law would have required records of the Reagan White House to be released 12 years after that president left office. Bush also used an executive order to establish the office of homeland security. So parts of Bush's "anti-terrorism" package were enacted through what amounts to presidential fiat, the executive order. The next president will obviously be able to undo any and all presidential orders, just each congress can repeal the laws passed by the previous congress. I believe executive orders can also be ruled unconsitutional.

I am sure Clinton signed some executive orders I disagree with and I'm sure Bush must have signed some I agree with, but these examples were both in the news at the time and they are the ones I remember.

For more information about the checks and balances of the American government, check out your local library or go on-line and visit:

• http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa121897 .htm
• http://www.infoplease.com/ipd/A0431503.html
• http://www.loc.gov/law/guide/usexec.html
• http://www.sonic.net/sentinel/gvcon5.html - for a view opposing the executive order power

And that's One to Grow On.