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False Information A-Okay in Primary FBI Database
blamanj writes "The FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC), which compiles a huge database on criminals, arrest warrants, missing persons, etc., no longer has to put up with the pesky problem of ensuring the data is accurate. I guess the Justice Department isn't particularly concerned with justice anymore." The full text of the provision which the main FBI criminal database will no longer have to adhere to is: "Each agency that maintains a system of records shall ... maintain all records which are used by the agency in making any determination about any individual with such accuracy, relevance, timeliness, and completeness as is reasonably necessary to assure fairness to the individual in the determination."
If they're not worried about accuracy, they'll save millions by simply using a very large MS Access database!
I would rather imprison hundred innocents than let one guilty go free.
has anyone else noticed that while liberties in many other places in the world is on the rise, Liberties at home seem to be more and more restricted and monitored? How can we free other peoples and nations when we can't even free ourselves?
Even if they can't verify all of the information that they put in, what they could do is record whether/how a data item has any verification status (or even possibly, falsification status).
It surprises me how often databases of information that it is vital to check for accuracy/truth/reliability just don't have any content that indicates how far, if at all, any of the main data content has actually been checked (and by whom and against what comparator). Ideally there should be an audit trail for where the data came from and who entered/checked it. Better than nothing would be some kind of indicator that this data item is either unchecked (by anybody other than the person who added it), or else has been checked as either ok, or doubtful, or not ok (and when, and who checked it).
Terry
Now that plus PATRIOT is a nice formula for abuse. "Mr. Smith, we see that you have recently converted some of your holdings to cash and our database gives us reason to believe that you are going to give it to terrorists, so we have seized it. We don't have any evidence with which to charge you, but we will be watching you. No, of course you can't have the money back."
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
68 FR 14140. Direct link to the Federal Register. PDF format. Enjoy.
PS: Request your FBI file regularly. It's really easy.
... punks worrying about nothing but yourself! We got a $74 billion pointless war to fight for the love of god! We can't expect the government to have to pay money to protect our freedom!
All undertakings of The Ministry of Justice are double-plus-good.
With this new policy, bad data will affect you and your ability to, say, travel without strip searches. And you'll have few (meaning zero) opportunities to fix it. But the best part is that the bad data will creep out to taint anyone you associate with: you'll now have a permanent case of dataSARS. If you're a possible terrorist, then your old roommates might be too. And your new business partners. And whoever you call regularly, so now grandma gets a breast cancer screening whenever she flies.
I think the privacy commissioner of Canada is a precog: most of what he's warning about in his must-read essay on privacy is coming true. (Or Ashcroft is using it as an anti-blueprint):
" If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm.
"Worse yet, we may never know what negative assumptions or judgments have been made about us in state files... Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight.
" That possibility alone will, over time, make us increasingly think twice about what we do, where we go, with whom we associate, because we will learn to be concerned about how it might look to the ubiquitous watchers of the state..."
"The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society...
Here is the relevant file from the FBI database: ARCHIBALD BUTTLE charged with Freelance Subversion, Deconstructive Behavior, Reckless Creation of Suspicion Among the Greater Public, Stealing Work from Qualified Personnel, Practicing Heating Engineering without a License, Failing to Complete Necessary Work Orders, Wasting Ministry Time and Paper
The complete Python file is here: Tuttle
Cheers, Joel
And I'm amazed at the forgetfulness of the average person. Laws such as the 1974 Privacy Act were in response to the massive, intrusive, unconstitutional acts of the FBI during the 1950s and 1960s. The kind of surveillance we're now seeing were done surreptitiously by the FBI in attempts to sabotage the Civil Rights movement, and the anti-war movement during Vietnam.
We live in the freest country on Earth? Does this have something to do with that whole, war is peace, slavery is freedom thing? Just what other countries are you comparing the US to when you say this? Have you visited other countries?
If you want to sit back while your entire life is reduced to nothing more than data in a database, that's fine, but I believe that a human being is more than just data. I believe I have an intrinsic right to human dignity - something which is taken away when my entire life becomes an entry in some damned database to be searched through, scrutinized, colated, etc. My government has absolutely no right to catalog and judge every moment of my life, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let my children grow up in a nation where they have to watch what they say and do, lest they be mistaken for a "threat".
If you think it's anti-American to question the tactics and policies of the government, then you know not the first thing about what it is to be an American. I believe you'll find the regimes in China, Iraq, Iran, or North Korea more to your liking, as those who question the government there are shot. I question my government's actions and plans because I recognize that it is a servant of the people. As such, I have a right and a duty to question anything I see as degrading the service provided to me and my fellow citizens by our government. If you don't like it, move; I really don't give a damn.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I have long believed that the word Justice has no place in government. Seriously, Justice is a moral thing, defined by social mores and subjective judgments about fairness. That department's job should be protecting the people, not punishing the bad guys. If you take away this idea that a government can and should punish the bad guys, for 'Justice' and replace it with the idea that we should apprehend bad guys to keep them from doing harm to society, a lot of thorny questions get very straightforward.
For instance, what is the Just and Fair thing to happen to an American guy who things the taliban is morally correct and goes to Afghanistan to join them? Ok, now ask what should be done to prevent such a man from harming Americans. Different question, and a much more practical one.
Justice is institutional revenge. Our government should not be making such judgments about right and wrong, they should be making judgments on how to protect and serve the populace.
This isn't completely tangential to the topic, either - consider how this would turn out (in an ideal world) if the fbi did not look at these databases as a tool to punish the evildoers, hunt them down at any cost to deliver that punishment, but as a tool to protect those who would be victims of the evildoers - in that view (ideal world, remember) the accuracy of the data would be inherently important as a part of that protection.
In such a view, there would be no such thing as a Victimless Crime, since crime would be defined by its harm to society (no victims, no harm done).
Nobody guarantees that Usenet is accurate, or the web. They capture any garbage anyone ever produces, and Google indexes it for everyone. The reader knows this, and distinguishing wheat from chaff is usually possible, and not too hard.
The stakes involved with Usenet or the web being inaccurate are typically far lower. If you read inaccurate data on the web, what happens? Nothing, really. If the FBI has inaccurate data in their database that says you're a murderer, what happens? They follow you around and arrest you the first time you doing anything suspicious.
And distinguising wheat from chaff on the internet is a bit easier than in a person-information database. Sure, I can use reason to determine that the website that says that the earth is flat is inaccurate. It's a lot harder for someone who doesn't know anything about you except for what they're reading in your file to determine that the information saying you're a serial killer is inaccurate.
If I have a mark on my record that I killed my great-great-grampa, followed by some authoritative marks that I really didn't and that first mark was in error, that looks fair to me. Not editing history is a good thing.
Personally, I would prefer to NOT have a mark on my record saying I killed my great-great-grandpa, no matter how many marks were added saying I didn't do it. And removing the killer mark doesn't look like editing history to me. It looks a lot more like telling the truth.
As someone who used to do contract work for the government here in DC, I can pretty much assure you that there was no way your information would have been accurate in the first place.
I've spent half an hour explaining to govt employees the mystical function of the CAPS LOCK and the NUM LOCK keys, and these are the same people in charge of your records. So, we were all pretty much screwed from the get-go.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
Having inaccurate FBI/crime records will help purge the voter rolls in 2004 of all those pesky people who DIDN'T commit a felonies but who happen to be of the wrong demographic....
Perhaps the mere thousands of legit voters who were
purged in Florida 2000 can be increased to 10,000's as the database goes nationwide!
The city claims that the database software company is at fault. The dsc claims that Axciom is at fault. Axciom claims that it received data voluntarily and why didn't you clean up your credit report? The FBI claims it cannot reveal how it does its datamining in a public forum.
The city still decides to settle. You get your $5,000 and rent a trailer at Lucerne at Clear Lake, California.
I'm not sure exactly what people think NCIC is, but judging by the responses that were modded up, I believe at least some of the assumptions are erroneous. The functions of NCIC are basically keeping a record of stolen property, allowing agencies to search for warrants, records of restraining orders, missing persons, deported felons, and specific threats to national security (such as people who have expressed specific intent to kill the president, etc... not people who buy too many books on fertilizer storage). Very few changes have been implemented since the inception of the system... none even remotely approaching the draconian orwellian total information awareness machine that people seem to think this is.
One more apparently misunderstood point is that a "hit" on any information does not give the officer to power to arrest the person they believe to be a match. At the bottom (or top, depending on the state) of any NCIC hit is a message stating "Immediately confirm with ORI (originating agency)". Wants and warrants are not stored in NCIC. All that is present is a reference to a want or warrant held by a local agency. The officer must then contact the ORI directly to confirm the want. This does not involve NCIC in any way.
So what does the change in the rules regarding this do? Not much, really. The are hundreds of thousands if not millions of transactions within NCIC every day. Basically what DOJ is doing is clarifying that any errors are the responsibility (and liability) of the agency that enters them.
This changes your legal process the following way:
Old way: An erroneous hit is made on you in NCIC. The officer deviates from procedure and federal law by not confirming the hit with the ORI. You sue the DOJ and local agency for violation of civil rights. The judge throws out the case against DOJ, finds the local agency and arresting officer liable. You get money. Hooray.
The new way: An erroneous hit is made on you in NCIC. The officer deviates from procedure and federal law by not confirming the hit with the ORI. You sue the local agency for violation of civil rights. The judge finds the local agency and arresting officer liable. You still get money. Hooray.
Have you looked at the PATRIOT act recently?
For the last few years, the FBI has had the Supreme Court's stamp of approval for "mistakes" like this. Arizona v. Evans (514 US 1) pretty much castrated the exclusionary rule regarding computer databases. Basically, guy gets stopped for a traffic violation, guy had a then-expired misdemeanor warrant in the computer, guy gets arrested for drug possession (not what the warrant was for, by the way). Despite the fact that the warrant was invalid, the evidence was still admissible, so the guy was convicted.
Their reasoning behind this? It's more of a clerical error than a police error, and since the exclusionary rule (forbidding illegally obtained evidence in court) is only supposed to deter police misconduct, everything's perfectly alright. Yeah, Rehnquist wrote it, so it's not like it's supposed to make sense. Before anyone turns this into a convervative-liberal argument, the vote was 7-2, so everyone's at fault.
Anyway, before they were overruled, the Arizona Supreme Court was actually on the right track. From the majority opinion: "As automation increasingly invades modern life, the potential for Orwellian mischief grows. Under such circumstances, the exclusionary rule is a 'cost' we cannot afford to be without."
Anyone hoping for a constitutional review of this, don't hold your breath.