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Website Posts Partial SSNs of Politicians in Protest
John3 writes "The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights has posted partial Social Security numbers for several California politicians to protest their vote against pending privacy legislation. According to a San Francisco Chronicle story, the SSNs were purchased on the Internet for $26." Now there's an effective way of showing the problems of the status quo.
This was done after the bill was passed....how could posting the SSN after the fact change anything?
Just post the whole thing. It's not like it matters. Bill Gates' social security number is 539-60-5125. So what?
good for them. This isn't an extorion of a threat, as some claim. As they have stated in their defence, it is a demonstration of the vulnerablity of ones information. Had they released the entire SSN, or threatened to do so, then I would not support them. But as it stands, they have provided a strong demonstration of a need for increased legislation toward the protection of privacy.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
So for $26 a pop... Will the real Mr. President please stand up? Uh, ok, can you show me your proof of ID?
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
Gray Davis trading card, "Privacy Series". Mint condition. Best offer.
I love it when political groups pull off silly stunts to make a point. Politics grows more and more entertaining and less helpful everyday.
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
Either transparency or secrecy is acceptable -- as long as both the citizenry and the government have the same thing.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Clearly not americans...
who the fuck cares what happens in or to America?
Americans. Occasionally.
Had they done it before the vote, or gone to each Assembly-person and demonstrated the capability before the vote, that would've been legitimate lobbying. This is just petty and serves to make the Assembly-people less likely to listen to this group in the future.
John
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
If you really want to find someone's social security number, you can do it a million ways. Every business they work for has it on record, the credit beuru has it, your D/L has it tied in for police. All anyone really has to do is do a credit check on you, claiming to be a possible employer and such. I am not afraid of my SSN being released. Yeah, someone could really screw with my life, but then, I could sue the heck out of whatever company released it. Anything in life either has to have a SSN or a Birth Cirtificate anymore. Why not just implant babies with chips and call it a day? ;-)
I came, I saw, She conquered.
What I find amusing about this situation is that these are the same leglislators (scuse the spelling) that unanimously voted for SB1386 when their bank/credit info was compromised, yet don't want to take that last step now to protect everyone's privacy.
The more time I spend in CA the more I realize our state legislators are like ill trained puppies: They're cute to look at, but occassionally you need to whack them with a magazine to keep them from crapping on the carpet.
-E2The evil monkey commands you to dance.
tell me why banks, credit card companies and other corporations lobbied against the legislation?
YOU SUCK BALLS!
If I use his SS to get a credit card, I can run up $100 million in charges, and well, it'll still be a drop in the bucket for him.
This reminds me of that time that reporters in Washington St. decided to rumage through the garbage of all the goverment officials who supported the police in removing garbage as evidence from the outside of suspects homes.
That didnt end up well for the officials then, sort of a double standard.
Useful information derived from SSN can be found here . You can see everyone was born in CA by the first three numbers. Group numbers can be verified, but isn't the serial numbers the important information?
The thing that astounds me is that the people who voted no STILL don't get it.
The tactics do not show how out of control lobbying is a bad thing (even if it is), they show that those in dissent don't have a clue about what information they are allowing to be broadcast.
I just finished my dinner, so this must be "just desserts!"
from the sfgate article:
"We should be free to vote our conscience and not be threatened or harassed if we choose to vote contrary to people who are lobbying for special legislation," said Assemblyman Ed Chavez, D-La Puente, one of the lawmakers whose partial number was published.
What a crock. I wonder how much money he takes from special interest and lobby groups that pay him to "vote his conscience."
Politicians = soul merchants
Never argue with an idiot, he'll just lower you to his level and beat you with experience.
You dont give us privacy and then you demand privacy . Well that doesnt sound like a good *explitive deleted* deal?
If you dont like having your SSN number spread around the internet then perhaps you should pass legislation to protect everyone (of course instead will end up with legislation that only protects politions and those who have a lot more than $26 to line there pockets).
Thousands of people who were born in the same part of the country as me the same year I was have the same first 4 numbers.
All that can be deduced from that info is an approximate region of birth and possibly age.
Perhaps these guys should release one extra number per week until they get the privacy laws corrected.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The man published the partial SSN's after the vote, so he wasn't trying to extort the legislators to vote for the bill. I'd say the extortion/threatening charges are a bit out of line for this.
Heheh... what a great poke-in-the-eye to the legislators, and a great demonstration of what the issue was really about.
No full SSN's were given out, so no harm was really done here... just some angry lawmakers... Let's hope they have the introspection to learn from this jab.
Bravo.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Here it is (partially) :
:
xxx-xx-1337
And of course, Bill Gates (again, only partially)
666-xx-xxxx
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You're talking about two absolutes here, both of which are unachievable. "Total transparency" means no privacy for the proles, and false fronts for the powerful. Sound familiar? "Total secrecy" means false fronts for everyone, and no recourse when the people justifiably try to find out what the hell is influencing their lives.
The answer is, as always, in the middle.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Depends on what caliber rounds in the magazine .50 BMG now that would hurt.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
I was born in Egypt. I picked up my father's geographic location in my SSN.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
123-45-6789
SUV drivers with American flags on the side.
Conservatives are such stereotypes.
first we are given a number rather than our names, like dogs with tags
then we are tracked, and can't make a buck without it
then it is easy to forge, and everybody misuses it
then it's required for all sorts of services it should have nothing to do with - like why the hell do I need one to get medical insurance
and finally, worst of all, it is attached to one of the largest, most fraudlent ponzi, pyramid, investment aleged retirement schemes in the history of human existence.
we would really do better getting rid of it, I'm glad they posted these numbers, it really hits the point home
The first three numbers don't represent where you were born, but where you lived when you social security number was assigned.
He only posted the first 3 digits of Gray Davis's SSN, that's nothing. IIRC that part tells you where you registered. That can be figured out. If you really wanted to worry them, do something like 5x6-x3-x7x0.
That way they'd have a pretty good idea that you have the info.
The problem isn't that we need privacy laws to protect user's SSNs...those can be publicly available. The problem is that the SSN has been overloaded by businesses and other organizations.
A SSN is a number granted to an individual by the government for the purposes of identifying that person to the government. It shouldn't be a means of identifying someone to a credit card company, bank or other institution (my university used SSN as our student ID numbers). If one of these institutions wants to identify me by a number, they can assign me their own damn number.
What we need is legislation preventing private institutions from assigning extra significance to any government issued piece of identification. Just because SSN is a handy primary key for their db tables doesn't mean that they should be allowed to use it.
</rant>
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Like most here, I think this is an effective demonstration of the ease with which personal information can be obtained, whether on the Interweb or elsewhere. The mere fact that these legislators are reacting so badly to release of fairly benign personal information is probably an indicator that they made a mistake in their voting. If they truly believed in their position they would have looked at this release and shrugged, or even been amused.
Good to know they think of others as nothing but consumers and taxpayers. Imagine actually thinking of someone else as a PERSON... THE HORROR!
Hate me!
The problem arose when the mapping between a person's name (or identity) and the SSN was considered confidential information, and a number of government and non government organizations started treating the knowledge of a person's SSN as an authentication mechanism.
Many companies treat the fact that you know (the last 4 digits of) a social security number combined with some additional information like the last name and street address as proof that you are indeed who the record states you are.
This is absurd. Either each individual should be assigned a secret id, which when used in conjunction with the SSN proves one's identity, or some other mechanism to verify identity should be developed. As long as the SSN continues to be (ab)used as a supposedly public index into a database, as well as a piece of confidential information, privacy will remain a farce.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
.... when I worked on a privacy initiative in washington state 3 years ago. One of our ideas for getting money was to mail possible contributers information about themselves which we bought in bulk. The line was something like - "do you think we should have this information? We don't. If you value your privacy please consider .......blablabla"
It ultimately panned out to be way too time consuming personalizing individual letters, but if we thought of it earlier we probably could have rounded up enough money=signatures to take it to the polls.
by the way what do you think those safeway cards are really for?
This allows the use of SSNs as an identifier, but not as an authentication token. Lawyers have a hard problem with that distinction, but they understand negligence.
It only determines where you were registered for the number. I was born in New Jersey, but have a California prefix of 572. We moved out here whan I was about 3.
I would hate not having my CPR number (Danish Social Security Number). It make identification so much easier, I only wish I could use it for more things.
I never hear of anyone having their CPR number misused. Try to remember that it's just a easier way of identification and NOT a tracking device inserted up your ass. Your more like to be tracked when you use your VISA card than by having a SSN. I'm sure Wal-Mart knows more about most Americans than the US government does.
Why are Americans so much more paranoid than other people? Have your government really screwed over that many times? If you can't trust your government you have a problem. Please do something about it.
The root of the problem is that any system relying on keeping your social security number secret is broken. An SSN is an identifier for a person, it is like a name. You don't keep your name secret (Wizard of Earthsea aside) so why should the number be different?
Not that you'd necessarily want people to be able to find out and disclose your number whenever they felt like it - there are still privacy considerations even with 'useless' information - but if disclosing the number exposes you to fraud then the fault is with the systems that rely on SSN to authenticate (rather than identify) an individual.
Every cheque you write has your bank account number on it. Disclosing the number doesn't automatically expose you fraud (unless you also supply headed notepaper and do other stupid things). If the banks can do it, why not social security?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
All it seems to have done is to start the process of getting "special" laws enacted. I appears this will get "special" legislation passed restricting free speech especially where CA legislators are concerned.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Give us a hint to go on...
I know for a fact, for example, that I can get the SSN of anyone in my company (or who previously worked for it, since they don't delete the info!).
No, I'm not privy to the information. They have an app with a poorly implemented security layer which will allow you to see anyone's information - where they live, ssn, name.
Perhaps you could work for the same company?
I appreciate the irony in this story. And there is a pat of me that believes that those involved got their "just desserts".
On the other hand, I have to ask was this right. Doesn't this undercut the position that people have privacy rights, and no matter how much we may not want to respect them, we will. I am, in a sense, reminded of Voltaire's statement: "I disagree with your believe, but I will defed to your death the right to hold it."
I also question the effectiveness of this tactic. Pulling and showing confidential information in a private setting or in the context of a public hearing (for example pulling together a detailed dosier, handing it to a legislators, and saying, "Do you think I should have this information? Well, we don't either, that is why we want this law passed.") to specific legislators. Frankly, this is about as helpful and effective as my making the basktball team pee blue in high school.
To me, this once again demonstrates that we geeks in general don't know how to work the system. We disparage thhose that do know how to use it - much as we were diparaged as "geeks" in High School by the jocks - and then wonder why we fail. We could stand to learn a little bit about how to influence the world.
Just not about the good of the people or the good of the country. Their thoughts are about personal ambition and personal gain.
And, no, it is not funny...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Do the ends justify the means?
Michael: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Cowboy Neal: I don't even know anymore.
-
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
The first three digits of a SSN tell you in which state a person was born. THe first three digits of mine are 001 which tells you I was born in New Hampshire. Thats like saying:
"We just posted the partial addresses of all lawmakers in protest"
George Bush Washington DC
Howard Dean Vermont
Just post the whole thing. How is this news? I agree with their stance but they should either be forceful or do nothing at all.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Ok,
To really tick them off, we need irritated Californian number 2 to buy the same SSNs and post the next three digits.
Then we need irritated Californian number 3 to buy the same SSNs and post the last two digits.
That way all the digits get posted but not a single person has posted the full set.
Posting the full set on the internet apparently is a crime in California.
Better yet, have persons two and three be out-of-staters, anybody in Maryland up for it?
Caution: Contents under pressure
The Social Security Number may as well be a tatoo on the forehead. You are now issued one at birth and it is used for everything from drivers' licenses to credit reporting and obtaining to a tax ID. It was not originally meant to be a 'Nation ID Number' used to track your every movement. That's just how you let it end up. Here in NZ there is the IRD number which is used for tax purposes *only*. In two years here I've gotten a Mastercard, purchased two cars on credit and gotten a house mortage without *any* numbers. Just my name. And good luck for someone using my credit by stealing my SSN. Can't happen here. Two bad Americans are so gullible on the one hand and cynical on the other. We have crap politcians here in my adopted home also, but here we use their names, not their SSN's to broadcast the fact.
Burns: Social security number? "000-00-002"... Damn Roosevelt!
Identity theft is becoming more of a problem here since there is so little protection. Theives just have to know your SSN, address, ect and soon they're using your credit cards and taking money from your bank account.
Americans should be paranoid. Most aren't. That is the problem.
"Registering" for an SSN number is a matter of assigning your power of attorney to a corporation in puerto rico. You have declared yourself to be incompetent, and set up a parent/ward situation with a corporation that acts as your agent for another corporation on your behaklf, you are now their ward.
This is an EXTREMELY involved subject, and I will have to post AC because of the *paid* gov shills who will fall all over themselves spreading FUD and lies about it. I just don't want to get into it with them, it's a lost cause on any forum you try it on.
Ever wonder why a "title" to a piece of property doesn't give you full "title" in a court? That the government can seize or "arrest" your property? It's because you gave up your adulthood and competency and became a ward voluntarily. It's also one of the reasons government can seize peoples children so easily, they gave up their claims to government when they registered their kids, and now it's down to infants in hospitals.
It's researchable using google, look up some of the facts around the background of SSN, the IRS, inc. United States inc, the difference between your name in ALL CAPS on a legal document and written normally, and so on.
It's fascinating really, it's a series of extremely convulted but legal scams that have taken them generations to perfect. There was one book out there until very recently that really had all the detailed information, heavily annotated, it was called "cracking the code" and despite the US allegedly having a "free" press has recently been banned, banned as in, you can't get it, the author(s) harassed unmercifully.
BTW, I so much agree with your prediction that I would say it is true right now, no need to wait ten years. We have a legal aristocracy now, de facto if not de jure.
Just remember that lawmakers believe that "Laws don't apply to Lawmakers".
Their feeling seems to be that one we elect them they have no responsibility to the people that elected them -- just to the lobbyists that continue to pay them.
Remember Orrin Hatch only cares about his buddies in the music industry.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
At least give the context! :^)
... naught, naught, ... naught, naught ... naught, naught, naught, two. ... got in my way.
Doctor: It's nothing serious; just lay off the chili and you
should be fine.
Castro: [sitting nearby, snickers]
Pope: Don't you laugh, Fidel. I've been in the car with you.
[pan to Burns, who is filling out the admissions form]
Burns: Let's see, social security number
naught
Damn Roosevelt. [continuing to read] Cause of parents'
death
I paid well over $26 for this information, but itâ(TM)s worth it. Throw a brick through the window for me.
123 Fake Street
Utah, USA
It is a Taxpayer Identification Number!
Get it straight!
There is nothing inherantly wrong with using SSN's as identification (because there are lots of Bob R. Smiths out there). The problem arises when the ID itself becomes proof of ID. This is how SSN's are used nowadays.
A lot of the time, not only is it stupid from a security standpoint, but it's also redundant. For example, with credit cards, each cardholder already has a private, individualized identification number--the credit card number itself. Each cardholder should use that number to identify themselves when calling the CC company, and each cardholder should have a password. SSN's should not be passwords. They're meant for identification, not proof thereof.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Does it help if you break up the numbers differently ? Working help desk I found most Americans* rigidly pre-disposed to hear phone numbers as 3 digits then 4 digits (123 4567). If I gave any other pattern** (eg. 12 34 567) many couldn't even catch the digits (unless they wrote it down and "translated" it). Giving your number as "one-eight-oh oh---" etc, might not trigger their 'phone-number' responses.
cheers,
Shane
*just so my 'merkin friends don't feel picked on: Here in Oz nobody knows whether "area code" refers to phones or mail. Some are so bad that asking for "area code and phone number" gets you their phone number and postcode. Happily you can usually just assume these people are from (07) Queensland ;)
**Why use another pattern ? frex to break up misleading pairs/triples.
The rest of the SSN's could probably be figured out with some brute force and a Luhn formula checksum calculation.
;-)
I'm not encouraging this; I'm just saying
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
Just about everybody who pays attention to the world around them knows that the first three digits of a SSN represent the state and year of issue. Getting the first three digits only requires that you know somebody's place and date of birth. You don't even need to shell out $26 for that much information, because it's usually on record when it comes to public officials.
This is a scare tactic, nothing more. If they'd have posted the entire numbers, then they'd have my attention.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I told you all. SSN's are public information. There are so many places on-line, so many business employment oppurtunities, so many forms and such that just use the SSN as a method of identification. I have access to more than 26,000 SSN's. I can probably obtain even more if I wanted. They've permeated the business environment, to the point that they've lost their status as "special."
Anyway, I could call up the government and get anyone's SSN. It doesn't take much. Even the public library has your SSN.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
A transparent multi-national conglomerate (ie. WorldComm, Enron) is necessary for people who own it (the stockholders) to control it. How else do we evaluate how our employees are doing ?
no need to single out governments...
The problem with this approach is that they can just tell you "No, you shouldn't" and continue doing business as usual. The only way to get a politician's attention is to do it in a very public way, giving them no way to deal with it without doing so in full public view.
The privacy of individuals is a lost cause.
There is video along the highways, in stores, automated tellers, at work, and in web cams in a lot of homes. Facial recognition is coming along. within 10 years, the "personal information" companies will be exchanging will be your complete daily routine. "Data mining" will mean being able to lookup where every person was every moment of the day.
Law enforcement will have access. It would be too stupid for them not to have access.
It is not a question of whether you think this future is good or bad. It will be too cheap for it not to happen.
Information wants to be free. In the future, your life will be free too.
The question is how are we going to deal with it.
Mod parent up
Politicians, like all people don't deal well with being publicly challenged or humiliated. While I think he operated at the level of a Gestapo Goon, J. Edgar Hoover understood this to a degree that most people don't. And he didn't confront politicians in public. He always allowed them to save face and protect their hides. And they did what he wanted.
Simply put, going public in a great "Perry Mason"-like moment and hoping that this will change things makes great cinema (I love "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" to my core), but it isn't all that effective.
As they say in manager school, "praise in public, correct in private." This falls into the category of correcting. You are telling someone that they are wrong and her is the evidence that you are wrong. Do that in private. And when they do the right thing, praise them and do it in public.
that'll get everybody's attention. a ss number aint very impressive really unless it was isued around 1942.
"Democrocy, like sausage, is something that is better not seen being made." Maybe if more people actually see how the political machinery work, they'd take a more active role in tuning the machinery.
1. since ssn's are used by employers for tax stuff, you can also pretend to be an employer and get all sorts of info that's stored by SSN. 2.Even worse, if it's not someone famous like a politician or Bill Gates that people know what they look like, getting someone's SSN is a good first step to using their identity. see step 1, you can get hired as that person and income tax stuff will get really mixed up.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
The real problem is not SSNs or even the ability to get someone's SSN for $26.00.
The real problem is corperations using SSNs as some sort of authoritative proof of identity in spite of the identity theft problem being common knowledge. It's bordering on criminal negligence.
The problem is credit reporting systems that implicitly trust information provided to them by companies that make little more than a token effort to validate a customer's ID but not counter information from the subject of the report. At best, they amount to gossips, at worst, they're slanderers.
One of the best ideas I've seen is to announce that in 1 year, everyone's SSN will be published and that at that time, any business using it as an identification will be subject to severe penelties.
If you RTFA, you'll learn that a) The lawmakers wanted to bust this group for extortion and b) because they posted the numbers after the vote and bi) they only posted partial numbers, then c) the extortion point was deemed bullshit by just about everyone.
Unfortunately with these types of people, it's ok for companies to do this to normal citizens, but it's bad for lobbyist to do this to them.
Hypocritical a-holes : politicians.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Social Security is a Trust Fund. Whatever you associate with it, is technically property of the Grantor (aka Trustor). The "United States" (Corporation), not to be confused with the united States of America, has members (U.S. Congres), not to be confused with the original Congres, whom are presiding Trustees. Looking upon the Privacy Act of 1974, a mere part of the Freedom Of Information Act, any whom claim to require a Social Security Number must provide for what reason and may not disclose such information under certain conditions. The Internal Revenue Service, in its own slithery way to be outside such regulation, enstated the Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) and the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) to be an exact replica of the SSN but instead expressly states it as a TIN or ITIN thus they claim they do not ask for a SSN. Understand? The SSN is a nexum that ties your commercial liability to Federal Reserve Notes and thus in turn to jurisdiction under the Federal Venue by the benefit of using Federal Reserve Notes (Contracts expressing debt, not backed by any precious element other than the stupidity of a human to work for "debt notes", granting equity jurisidiction to the United States (Corporation), masquerading as promisory notes to pay, notes of promise). Keep in mind, the true Constitution of the united States of America as well as the Common Law requires that Gold and Silver is the standard and nobody may coin money or certificates...use your brain, they aren't operating by the Common Law or the Constitution of the united States of America. They are operating by what the international banks and the United States corp want to do to keep its securities (human beings) and investments (human beings) under its control secretly using the Emergency War Powers Act.
United States incorporated from in Costa Rica (no extradition laws, thus is their safe haven).
Social Security Administration is a municipal corporation of the United Nations.
United Nations is a corporation which incorporated within New York-New York. United Nations has established unconstitution treaties with the United States corporation that demand immediate agreement to contract (coercion, collusion).
Internal Revenue Service is a corporation attempting to fool people into Income Tax, though it has no jurisdiction until a 1040? contract is granted to it as well as it lacks any certification from the original congress (not the U.S. Congres; a corporator) and not one element of Title 26 refers to the Internal Revenue Service.
Mind you, all the corporations work together under maxim of law and color of law to get their work done: control, to use its resources (human beings) to their advantages. When corporations begin forming, their enemies also incorporate, and an arms race to corporatedom ensues for the "security of interests, vested or otherwise."