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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?"
What are you, a terrorist?
This was already reported on slashdot eleven days ago, though the link in this one seems to work better.
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.
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 agree that that's what you should do if you want to practice civil disobedience by encouraging them to spy on you for no good reason. I don't agree that that's what you should do if you want practical privacy.
Observe the following technique:
And then gosh, they can't track your actual purchases. They can still decide that you're one of those freaks who deals in cash and needs spying on, but there's no way to avoid that judgement unless you either don't work or work under the table, and there's likely to be too many of those to practically spy on quite yet anyway.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 whole point of tracking purchases is so that they can use datamining to find people who buy large quantities or interesting combinations of things such as "gasoline, nails, ... household ammonia, hexamine, car batteries, ... growth media, gas masks, firecrackers". Individual purchases will be ignored, but unusual combinations, especially ones which are inconsistent with the individual's normal buying patterns, will be tagged for further investigation.
Anyway, I think privacy advocates are wasting their time -- it's a lost cause. There are already video cameras everywhere. In the U.S., they are mostly in private buildings, but it won't be too long before the FBI starts buying feeds from these and using face recognition to track people's movements. Purchases are already being tracked by corporate interests (and the FBI/Pentagon has just as much access to this info as do the telemarketers).
And such monitoring does not by itself do any harm! For this reason it is much more critical to focus on the potential for corruption and abuse of the power that surveilance gives the authorites. (And, at the risk of flamebaiting, you desperately need to work on making your government more transparent and more genuinely democratic instead of being just a meritocracy of wealthy lawyers and businessmen.)