Slashdot Mirror
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?
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=
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.
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..."--
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.
I wonder how they plan to track purchases made with cash?
Precisely why from now on I will NEVER use my credit card when making crack purchases.
Best Windows Freeware
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.
Simple. Require that an I.D. (such as a driver's license) be presented when making cash purchases. This will be done in the name of preventing counterfeiting.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
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.