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Pentagon to Track American Consumer Purchases?
Anonymous Nerd writes "I was looking at Fox News today and came accross this gem of a story . It seems the Pentagon wishes to create a massive database of every transaction made in America. I wonder how they plan to track purchases made with cash?"
I wonder how they plan to track purchases made with cash?
Outlaw cash transactions..... Credit Card/Debit from now on only.. or else the terrrorist have won (tm).
(just a joke...)
A way to tax internet transactions!
Yeeeeeehaw!
What are you, a terrorist?
I don't have that big a problem with that, providing all the politicians get their transactions logged and screened as well. That'll probably clean up a lot of problems...
(I also pay in cash alot, so nyeh!)
=Smidge=
then the right thing isn't necessarily to pay cash, or barter or start your own currency. Jam there databases with useless information. Buy paper towels and toilet paper with cash, subscribe to 2600 with your credit card. Leaving no trace isn't realistic for most people, even if you only use cash chances are you withdrew that cash from a bank, or a bank cashed your check. Instead concentrate on leaving a wide swath of purchases that indicate you're a "subversive" for them to discover when they mine their data.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
This was already reported on slashdot eleven days ago, though the link in this one seems to work better.
see also the "Scientia Est Potentia" ("Knowledge Is Power") article at kuro5hin.org. It's been there for two days already. It covers the same story, but without the anonymous coward troll comments.
The IRS? Wouldn't this be a good one in tracking down tax evaders.
Ordinary law enforcement? Obviously someone with any sort of transaction at a known head-shop must be handling illegal drugs.
Deranged crackers? After all, it's aggregated data, and could be useful for stalking, or other purposes.
Terrorist crackers? Find themselves, learn how they were found. Teach the next batch how to avoid those mistakes.
Collecting the data is bad enough. Creating this aggregate is even more dangerous. Making use of it for other than protection from terrorists seems to me to be downright unconstitional. Some would argue that the whole thing is. OTOH, now that it exists we're unlikely to be able to find out how extensive it is, or what uses are being made of it, terrorism related or not.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
pay in cash (until cash transactions are outlawed)
make random, sudden, large withdrawals and deposits in your accounts
(large being a relative term in my case)
barter. I'd like to see them track "traded three chickens for a
bale of hay and running some CAT-5" &until barter becomes illegal)
Most terrorists will use credit cards and checks without a second thought. Most necessary purchases for any terrorist can be placed without giving the slightest indication of terrorism such as gasoline, nails, backpacks, household ammonia, hexamine, car batteries, SUVs, glassware, growth media, gas masks, firecrackers, food, shelter, and prostitutes. Most of what would be tracked could be easily stolen from a low security University laboratory, libraries, by killing the owners of a gun shop (tricky), hospitals, stealing large trucks, or by killing Air Marshalls and taking their guns. Terrorists can easily build a scrapnel bomb or a culture of bacteria with less than a thousand dollars and perhaps a trip to the laboratory. The terrorists already have the policing under control, its you citizens who don't.
Fox News can go to hell.
SHHH...the thought police will hear you...
it just gets worse and worse ever day...
Also, look who is working on it...someone really really trustworthy with all of my information:
Rear Adm. John Poindexter, former national security adviser to President Reagan, is developing the database under the Total Information Awareness Program. Poindexter was convicted on five counts of misleading Congress and making false statements during the Iran-Contra investigation.
--"The revolution will be simulcast..."--
What else will be done in the name of the war terror? /. has already posted articles about the home land security bill making "hacking" (typical media lingual misuse) a very serious crime. I mean here's activity that the article quoted the Govt. guru as saying "sudden and large cash withdrawals, one-way air or rail travel, rental car transactions and purchases of firearms". Cause normal people don't have financial emergencies, or move, and CERTAINLY od not excercise their 2nd ammendment rights.
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
I would trust a database such as this, if it was truly anonomous and only released names when there is really a genuine cause for alarm. (i.e. John Doe buys 20 gallons of kerosine, 100 lb. of fertilizer, and rents a truck...) Assuming the government is trustworthy (and I'm not sure, there) the system would be used only to alert authorities to potential terrorist activity.
Of course such a system would have to be connected to the rest of the world through some medium, to be able to collect data, and if it's on a large network, it can and will be cracked. So perhaps it's not such a good idea after all...
I know lots of things. Most of them are wrong.
If it were up to them, we'd have national ID cards witgh a central database of fingerprints, retina-scans. Phone tapping would simply require they type your name in. Privacy Shmivacy.
It's a good thing they're not in charge.
What I want to know is, could this Information Awareness Office have possibly chosen a worse logo for discounting the paranoid fears of conspiracy theorists?
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
This is now old news, it was a part of the Homeland Security bill which just passed.
In the past two weeks there has been talk of this in the New York Times (registration blah blah blah), The Washington Post and
Harper's weekly review, to name a few. NPR's All Things Considered had a commentary on this (RealAudio) the other night.
Last week was the time to prevent it, now it's probably too late -- it's law.
Bin Laden has done exactly what he set out to do. All he has to do is pop up from time to time and our half-witted "leaders" will do the job of destroying everything that makes America..America.
Yahoo has good summary article of nation wide editorials on the issue.
Quote from the article: "A massive database that the government will use to monitor every purchase made by every American citizen is a necessary tool in the war on terror, the Pentagon said Wednesday."
...
Do you think they're going to limit it just to American citizens, or was that just a weird inaccurate description used by the reporter?
Hrm. If we're so worried about foreign terrorists (as well as domestic), you think they'd broaden the scope of the database
Hi all, im surprised that slashdot didnt post this sooner but the bill for the Homeland Security carried a provision to make
4 SAFI.h tml
every transaction
1. credit card
2. phone call
3. email
4. vacation
5. any bought
go into a massive database.
From what I understand this has now passed into law!
The funny part is that the sponsor of this part of the bill is the same dude who master-minded the iran-contra affair.
Anyway, what's funny is that there was a small outcry in the nytimes "You are suspect"
you can read it here
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/1
anyway, I'm surprised no one else has mentioned. Perhaps it was one of those 'They couldn't, could they?" reactions to the whole idea that know paid serious mind to it and now its law.
Sigs are dangerous coy things
This is related, I believe: http://www.aclu.org/Cyber-Liberties/Cyber-Libertie s.cfm?ID=11332&c=58
--Ben
My paycheck is direct deposited, but other than that I deal almost entirely in cash, so I make "large" withdrawals every week. Three times this year I've purchased a one-way rail ticket for a 300 mile journey to meet up with friends and travel back with them by car. I've rented a car once this year. I have a collection of firearms.
Yep. Terrorist.
Super-saving Dillons/King Soopers cards that give the cardholder a discount. Free to get the card, but will track all purchases made.
Using information from the new consumer database, the ATF raided hundreds of terrorists around the country. Posing as farmers, they had purchased ammonium nitrate claiming that it was fertilizer. President Bush said, "We will destroy these rural hayseed terrorists with the same extreme prejudice we would use on those Ay-rabs. Everyone knows ammonium nitrate has only one use: Making bombs." Bush said a cyberterrorism raid was in the works as well. "We will round up anyone who bought a computer with Linux. We all know only cyberterrorists use Linux."
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Oh, brother.
Big Brother, that is.
assert(birth_date<time-86400)
How do they plan to track all of the drug dealers?
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
Writing our representatives is rather futile. Most people are apathetic and dont care/know what is going on with their rights/privacy. Is there absolutely anything that can be done, short of revolution, that can get our point across that we do not want the government monitoring us and treating us all as terrorist??
The Total Information Awareness program will not, in fact, gather any information. Nor will it change who gets to see the information that the government already collects nor how long that information is maintained. All that this program is, is a way to gather together the information that the government already collects, in a form where data can be mined between elements which are currently not linkable. The press is getting it wrong, as usual, and the rash posters on slashdot are taking the press, oddly, at their words, then putting on the tinfoil hats and heading off into conspiracy theory heaven.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Screw this, I'm moving to Mexico, or the moon or something. This is absurd. Nobody seems to care about privacy anymore, and I think these lyrics sum it up best:
When they took the Fourth Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the Fifth Amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the Second Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
Now they've taken the First Amendment and I can't say anything.
I have a friend who has this in his signature:
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison
No, no.. we dont need justification for these things any more. I remember quite clearly that laws have recently been passed stating that we dont need probable cause. That means "We can pass anything we want now and we dont need to explain our reasoning"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I'm a big fan of the "cash your whole paycheck (after paying rent and bills), stick it in your pocket, and fritter it away on amusements" school of money management. Oddly enough, this makes me relatively hard to track this way. The shit about Radio Shack and the stupormarket was just gratuituituitous.
aren't they allready tracking me when I borrow 'mein kampf' written by A.H. from a library?
As information is linked together the potential of that information is raised exponentially. It is only the fact that there is relatively little collaboration between the various government and corporate entities. The implied intention in linking our data together is that one will be able to predict who will be a terrorist and who will not. This is the stuff of Orwell, folks. Public libraries know I'm reading "Civil Disobedience" by Thoreau. The government knows I'm registered with some leftist party. I have a registered gun. All of those pieces of data are currently kept with people who need to know them to do our job. Political organizations need to keep mailing lists. Credit card companies need to keep their bills. Libraries need to keep track of their books, and so on. However, it is the mere combination of those pieces of data that causes us to transgress into the realm of oppression. Now, we have men or machines trying to connect the dots, to presume me guilty before I even commit a crime. That's one of the fundamental beliefs of our country, isnt it? Innocent until Proven Guilty? That is totally incompatible with the type of terror we are facing. This war on terror, although it started off with the gunning down of a few hapless, pissed off fundamentalists, must by nature totally consist, from here on out, of catching criminals before they commit crimes. That is the common theme of the government's reaction to 9/11: we should have caught them before they comitted the crime. That means that all advances in this war on terror must come about by knowing more about YOUR life, what YOU buy, and trying to determine whether or not YOU are a terrorist. Unchecked efforts to capture criminals before they commit crimes is the cornerstone of oppression, the very mechanism by which all political distopias create their horror in the reader.
The parent post is totally missing the danger in this advancement. It's very easy to point and laugh and make dumb cracks about tin foil hats, but your liberties are being steadily eroded.
Those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
--the dotcom boom of the 2000's is biometrics-well one of them anyway. You ask how they'll track cash purchases? Well in stores they'll use facial recognition, body language recognition, walking styles recognition, monitor your pulse rate, whatever. I've seen all these articles linked from slashdot already. could be an electronic fingerprint required to finalise the purchase. all that stuff is here already in test areas. And I'd say some huge numbers of stores have vid cameras already, might not be very hard to pass another one of those laws. They already are doing it all over in public places. No stopping that action now, the goons DIG on that big brother "command and control and surveil" action. they can't get enough or roll it out fast enough. and they got all the grunts they need wiling to do the work, from camp executioners to scientists, shell out the cash, you can hire all the goons with no conscious ya want to.
In the works for US currency soon:
Next year, the phase out of old greenbacks and new "colored" money. One of (several of the) the scams being promoted is cash that "times out". That's right, spend it by a certain date or it gradually loses a % of value down to zip.
In the works for US people soon, the implantable chip, pretty soon mandated. They'll do prisoners first, dangerous released felons on parole, "sex offenders", etc. then high risk medical patients. then normal prisoners. then "the chidrenz" so they don't get kidnapped. Proly need a few more high interest media feeding frenzy staged "kidnappings" for this to take hold. Then the military in general. The goal there is total robot cyborgs, this can just be seen now, they aren't even hiding it. Then, everyone gets the chips with no saying "no" because "we need good universal ID that can't be faked" (easily),most likely combined with a massive (again, staged on purpose for effect) bioterrorist attack so they can "keep track of who got the shots (and implants) and not.
government works on these three principles, create a problem, get the reaction you expect, off the solution. They'll have people lining up begging them for the chips(with the medical 'cure' and food and etc that will go with it), with few exceptions. Tracking cash is not going to be that hard, IMO. they don't have to track all of it, just most of it, like they track most of what happens now or have the ability to do so.
And they just voted "yes" yesterday to start doing all this stuff, more or less, I mean, they aren't being coy about it.
...story from last week. Jesus fucking christ on a biscuit. Do the editors even READ Slashdot? If they did, they'd know this was reported Nov 9th and by the same fucking editor.
So whose more retarded - Michael or Timothy?
Dear Pentagon,
Rear Adm. John Poindexter is going to spend a buttload of money to build a supercomputer when a phone call would do - yep, I dig porn. I hope that satisfies your curiousity. I stop in the adult book store occasionally. And he's going to log all of my web hits? Mostly porn sites. You want a back door to my computer? Just to save you the effort it's full of porn. Go figure.
So by everyone just speaking up and admitting they dig porn, perhaps we won't need to build this computer. Maybe we can save some tax money and spend it on KILLING THE FUCKING TERRORISTS!!!!!
I mean, for christ sake! Logging everything the CITIZENS of this contry do and say and buy! Hey, why not track who we fuck? What we eat? Stick our DNA in there for good measure! How we vote! Record every one of our phone calls and store them!
I know you're a bit freaked out after Sept. 11, but TRACKING THE CITIZENS of this country doesn't make much sense when the attacks were carried out by NON-CITIZENS!!! Track them! Prove it by tracking one! Just one. Track OBL and snuff him!
Wanna make a difference?? CONTROL OUR FUCKING BORDERS and reform the INS!
PS - Being that the supercomputer and database are likely to exist already, and the law was just a nice formality, then I imagine this message will actually make it's way to you. I hope it provides you with some amusement, being that I am just a pion, insignificant. Just an American.
Gotta go, Big Brother! Gonna eat a cheeseburger and watch the Victoria's Secret show. You probably knew that already, but I'm just making sure.
As consume happy as we are how much storage are we talking here? For one day much less one year. Any informed folks care to speculate?
I dont know why, but this all really doesn't worry me that much. I mean, now the government will know when i go out and buy new speakers for my computer, or that new nifty spiffy triple blade razor. I know a lot of people are horribly worried about the government knowing what they buy, but think about it, are they going to CARE? You are still 1 in however many millions of people that they're looking at. And well...if you go and buy fertilizer, kerosene and a truck, maybe they'll go and make sure you're not hanging around with any known terrorists or sympathizers. Maybe they'll investigate you and your family. If you aren't doing anything wrong, then why are you worried? (i know i've heard that before, its supposed to be scary right?)
Besides, is your life really that interesting?
..be easier to assume that everyone is a terrorist and have them shot on sight.... Saves a lot of tax money..
*You are not allowed to read this*
A terrorist with an economically sound attitude will anyway buy a return ticket (usually much cheaper then one-way) and then toss the return coupon.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
All terroriest need to do is operate as a group, which of course they do. Dont buy 100kg of fertilizer, have 50 people make 2 purchases of 1kg each over the period of 5 months.
Track that if you can!
Just syphon a gallon out of your tank every now and then and get together with your terrorist friends. Even tracking vehicle milage wont help if its spread out over enough time and people.
And just to screw up the system make lots of individual purchases (and it will annoy the checkout clerk too).
"Bin Laden has done exactly what he set out to do. All he has to do is pop up from time to time and our half-witted "leaders" will do the job of destroying everything that makes America..America." Bin Laden. . . . The boogey man of the new era. You realize that this Bin Laden is never going to die. If he did, the US would have no reason to wage the war on Terrorism. One hundred years from now, we'll still be fighting this war on terrorism against Bin Laden the cyborg, or maybe one of his clones, Bin Laden the Virus, or whatever. BL is an excuse. Everything that goes wrong in the world these days is attributed to BL. Every generation has their boogey man. Stalin, Hitler, Quadaffi, Ayatolla, Ho Chi Min, pick one. Ours is no differnt.
Get a clue, Yanks!
Thanks to your own paranoid Baby Bush and his Gestapo, you are rapidly declining into the police state you so richly deserve!
Well, I guess there is something to be said for putting a traitor in charge of looking for bad guys. Presumably he'd know where to look - under rocks, in seedy dives, at the Pentagon.... I wonder if the database will include illegal arms sales and defense contractor kickbacks, or does it just cover run-of-the-mill privacy invasions like what I bought at the corner store?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Do you really think that membership card from your local supermarket is used just to save you money? Perhaps it could be just that--but don't you think it's also convenient way of tracking what a person's buying (i.e. chemicals for a home made bomb)? Think about it.
Get a clue, Yanks!
Thanks to your beloved Baby Bush and his oh-so-loveable Gestapo, you're rapidly declining into a police state! Is this _really_ what you all voted for?
I wonder how they plan to track purchases made with cash?
Outlaw cash transactions.
I wish that that were actually funny. I'm assuming that we'll start to see just that, with certain types of purchases (such as airline tickets) only being allowed through some electronically trackable means. This administration means business and they have repeatedly shown that they are entirely willing to do things that would have been dismissed as ludicrous less then a year ago.
Yeah, yeah, "Good for all debts public and private". Whatever. Stop thinking that your standards are theirs or, in fact, that illegality or irrationality make something impossible.
The Homeland (yeah, right) Security Act has plenty of provisions that most of us would dismiss out of hand in any other context.
The White House is very, very serious indeed and they are the progeny of Iran-Contra, the Watergate break ins, and a hundred other proofs that, yes, they can get away with it.
No games anymore, folks. Simulation is over and this is certainly not a drill.
So, any estimates on how soon they go after any successor to Beanz and the like for being too transferrable and not trackable enough? Any predictions on how many anonymizers for purchases we're going to see? Since credit card anonymizers for porn are under attack the game is already under way.
I predict a system cropping up where you can walk into a storefront and buy a "corporate credit card" with an anonymous name or equivalent and a predeposited balance. Say, a $500 card made out to Joe Foobar with a confirmable balance. Use up the balance and either throw it away or go to any branch and put more cash into this identity. No questions, no ID needed, no fuss, no muss. I'm betting that one of the pawn shop companies currently going national (there are several) will get into this and that they will start having spammer-style constant swapping to new Visa or MCd providers. I'll also bet that this will become illegal within three years and keep existing under a succession of forms. Further, I'll bet that we're going to start seeing a serious increase in Americans with foreign bank accounts that come with credit cards. Sure, I've got a Visa; Bank of Rome, thank you very much.
Yes, cyberpunk is ever more real by the day and I fucking HATE IT. But I'm not going to be stupid enough to deny that it is happening.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
When you talk about the seriousness of the administration, you're actually giving them the benefit of the doubt as to what their true intentions are.
Many people have observed that Bush and Co. have used the opportunity created by Sept. 11th to take a hard-right Sept. 10th agenda and drive it into a Sept. 12th world (in Thomas Friedman's words). I think the law enforcement orgy in particular is just another abuse of his "Rally around the President" popularity. It's nearly impossible to fight terrorism, but you can certainly benefit from it if you're in government.
They may never move us away from using cash, even though it would benefit big-finance, because many top Republicans still need to be able to buy their gay porn, and they sure as hell aren't going to pay for that with anything other than cash. Republicans like Bush need cash as much as anyone else, if not more.
The fact that all of this snooping power doesn't stop terrorists from simply using cash proves to me that they AREN'T serious about this. It's just another step forward in a well concealed pro-corporate agenda that elites know they could NEVER sell to the public in any other way. In crisis there is opportunity. If a Democrat (real Democrat, not New Democrat) had been in the White House, there would be a major push for strengthening the public health infrastructure. You aren't going to hear anything like that from Bush. Just the opposite, and with great cognitive dissonance, but his numbers stay high because Americans have always been easily scared by boogymen.
Obviously they're going to tell us today that only law enforcement will be able to see our private details, but when they introduced the social security number, did anyone realize that it morph into something that we would have to put on an application for a rental card at Blockbuster Video? Tomorrow is always being shaped, by diligence or lack thereof. Today's American public are like a giant ball of clay. As long as you say the right words while you work, you can shape and mold them into anything.
Why would big-business elites want this kind of snooping power? You realize that everyone from insurance companies to pre-employment screeners are already using our credit records as evidence for or against us. If corporate America wants to see what kind of books and magazines we've been reading, movies we've been watching, places we've been traveling to, food we've been eating, etc...then what's good for GM is good for the country, right?
This is the golden age of marketing, and it's just beginning. It won't be a truly efficient free market until the advertisers know what your next purchase will be before even you do, and so Circuit City can spam you on your mobile phone with a competitive price while you're standing in the aisles at Best Buy (I have no doubt that personal GPS tracking units will eventually be "enhanced" for the benefit of big business...those geniuses in marketing can never have too much information about consumer behavior). That's "Freedom", American style. Bush is turning out to be quite a leader.
I liked Snow Crash, and I hate our post-911 trajectory. It has very little to do with national security. This must be the most cynical administration in modern history.
- Muhammed the Strip Mall Terrorist
Sometime in the semi-near future (30-40 yrs?), smart cards are going to phase out cash. Think of them as those stores' gist cards: You can add value, give as present, use to make purchases. Plug SC into reader at supermarket for instant deduction of value. Plug reader into another person's to pay them back for lunch. Visa has nice article about future of SC's With that in mind, purchases will be very easy to track. They'll be wireless too, im sure. Towers everywhere to upload transactions to national database. Wouldnt be to hard if you ask me =)
The FBI can't even keep track of how many of its laptops have been stolen. They JUST made a massive update to its databases so they would only be 10 years out of date. That raises two questions: Does any government agency really have the capability to track all of the millions of transactions every hour? And if they do, why isn't the money allocated to the core competencies of the organizations rather than crap like this? This looks like more of a pipe dream than anything (for a few years).
How did you come to associate "hard-right" with Big Brother? Let's see...Hmmm...big government snooping into every aspects of its citizens' lives: Soviet Russia: not right wing; Cuba: not right wing; Nazis, not right wing (NAZI=national socialism); China: not right wing; UK: not right wing. Ya think maybe that's because left-wing stands for big government, not right-wing?
Bush is to right wing what AL Gore is to personality and Al Gore is to personality what McDonalds is to fine quisine.