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Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act Introduced
SewersOfRivendell writes "Quote from http://boingboing.net/: 'EFF, EPIC, CDT, ACLU and Free Congress have drafted a bill that's been introduced by Senator Wyden today, for a new law called "The Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act." This is a hell of a law. It finds that various species of spooks are making avid use of commercial and governmental databases, merging them and aggregating them, without transparency, accountability, or any real understanding of the danger to civil liberties involved in this practice. Accordingly, it requires any Fed agency using non-Fed databases to cut it out and make a full report to Congress on who they're buying database and database-services from, what they're doing to preserve privacy, why they're doing what they're doing, and whether they actually have a realistic chance of catching any bad guys. And it calls into account Feds who abuse their authority and limits the kind of doomsday hypotheticals that can be used to justify such abuse.' PDF draft of the bill here."
The "accountability" thing is going to be quite a trick. This is the same government, after all, whose own GAO (General Accounting Office) concluded that government agency accounting is so bad, there's no way they can determine how much the government is actually spending--and that if this degree of lax accounting was taking place in a private corporation, the owners would face legal action.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
This is a good start. Now, what can we do about all of the non-government entites that are doing the same thing?
Thomas Galvin
I think I'll start the official R.I.P. thread here. BushCo seems to hate the word privacy as much as the term Wind Power.
On the other hand, does this law apply to the private sector?
I already emailed my Rep. to support it. You should do the same.
I'd like to see some corporate accountability added into those sorts of databases. I want to be able to walk into the front door at Citibank and say, give me a printout on all the information you have on me.
Then I want to be able to read the printout, walk back up to the desk, and say, Okay, now delete it. All of it.
The Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shall each prepare...
All of the other agencies, particularly the Department of Commerce and it's Bureau of the Census, utilize numerous public databases in the process of their daily work. Why not include reports from them too?
even it fails: the bill encourages dicussion.
ACLU and EFF members will learn more.
The media will write about it, and learn more.
And Congresspeople will read it,
or have their staffers research it,
and maybe learn something.
I thank the EFF and ACLU for this.
And I donate to both of them.
Cheers, Joel
According to the ACLU, because I'm consolidating public information, I'm a national security threat. I should also be forced to submit to even more beaurocratic loopholes to get data that's already public, or be stopped from accessing to much public data to begin with. And I thought the ACLU was all about personal freedom and open governments
Good. You may be inconvenienced, but in the long run it's a lot more advantageous for us to gain some protection from overzealous spooks than it is for us to be able to research properties a little faster. Annoying for you, maybe, but just because the governmental agency you work for is benign, doesn't mean they all are.
Simply letting federal agencies run around and spy on people simply because they can doesn't seem to be the best idea for a country based on freedom and all of that jazz. Accountability is what keeps things from going bad to worse, look at dictatorships all over the planet, when people aren't held accountable for their actions they go to extremes. Americans or not, I don't fel very secure when someone can peer into any old asset of my life without asking my permission or without being checked in some fashion. I for one, feel more threatened by the current way the administration is going in regards to policy (foreign, fiscal, energy, environmental, copyright, and pretty everything else) than I do by any terrorist threat (then again, like 90% of americans I don't live in a threatened area, I likve in the 'burbs, well, the sort of burbs).
Slavery? Gone! Who's going to pick the cotton?
Male only voting? Now even women can vote!
Child labor? Now they go to school instead, those lazy bums!
Although I'm all for the protection of privacy, I also think it's important to point out that the integration of various government databases has a lot of potential positive effects as well. There are a lot of agencies out there maintaining separate (and redundant) databases that could be combined or used together to make government services easier to obtain. There is also a lot of potential money saved, in terms of government functions currently done manually that could be automated.
/.ers will agree are useful and productive.
Certainly, it is prudent to keep prying eyes from using their power to intrude into our lives. But there is a balance to be struck as well, between protecting privacy and allowing government to make use of tools that I think many
And to think that folks used to move out to the mountains to drop off government radar.
I can't believe the crap I'm reading on this one, although I guess I shouldn't really be surprised. It seems that most Slashdot posters are grumpy, bitter and jaded. This bill is a really good thing, and yet the majority of the responses are "Pfff, like that'll happen". With the likes of you folks, it'll never happen. It seems you'd rather sit around and simply be negative about everything! You're simply part of the problem that you like to grump about. Get off your ass and write a quick email to your representative. Then go find a puppy or something to play with for god's sake, and quit being so damned negative.
I moderate "-1, Fool"
You are the guy on the freeway overpass taking a leak, and he is down there looking up....
I totally agree with you on this. The second ammendment was set to protect the people from tyranny. The one problem with the way it was written is the founders did not anticipate the replacement of State militias by a federal military machine. During the start of the civil war, most troops were state militias and not federal. With the advent of conscription that picture changed.
It also fundamentally changed the perception of citizenship as well. Initially, people thought of themselves as a State citizen first, and not as a united states citizen. I.e. a New Yorker, not an American. The balance of power was inalterably skewed in favor of centralization by that war. Most people do not appreciate the idea of checks and balances our system was created on. It was not merely checks within the federal level, but checks UPON the federal level by leaving the majority of power within the individual states.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
From my reading, it looks like the actual usage of such a database is the problem, not the creation. So it would be OK for you to put this database together, and OK for citizens to use it to find property information, but NOT OK for the cop down the street who decides that he doesn't like that I've painted my house green to punch my address information into it and get my name and fake a bunch of correspondence from me to get a warrant just so he gets the chance to beat down my door.
Conspiracy theorists miss the trees for the forest. Its not the government thats out to get them, its the FBI secretary who you cut off on the way to work that morning who just happens to slip your license plate number into the stack of "people who buy too much fertilizer". By accounting for this secretary's actions, we reduce the risk that any one person will abuse the power of the government. If the cop above later had to admit that he had no idea who the heck I was and that he had never met me or otherwise known about me without the property database, he might not run the risk of looking stupid at the trial.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
If everyone on /. would just spend 2 minutes we could get this passed.
- Click here to go to senate.gov.
- Pick your state from the list.
- Click on both of your senator's e-mail contact links, each link opens a new window.
- Fill out your name and address in the form, then paste the following:
Fill in the blanks, and get this passed! The statement about it improving security is true, and since it's the big thing in congress lately, they want to do everything to help that out.frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
But if you had said "A minor group of citizens who can't convince the common citizen of the validity of their views", I would agree with you.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
The only real protection that the "average citizen" has against the military (and the more heavily armed members of law enforcement) is that most of the members of those organizations are "regular Joes". If they were ordered to commit a wholesale massacre on US citizenry, it would be more than likely that they'd arrest the person giving such orders.
Most dictators/oligarchs & such take a fair bit of effort to build up an elite military/police force with loyalty ties mainly to them (isolating the force from the public), which they can then use to intimidate the public.
On the other hand, even though our current forces won't follow drastic orders like "enslave the public", they probably won't do much to stop a gradual erosion of everyone's civil liberties. I highly doubt that personal ownership of firearms also stops erosion of civil liberties, either, and in fact, taken too far, is far more likely to convince law enforcement to reduce civil liberties.
Really, the only realistic way of stopping the erosion of civil liberties is to constantly monitor the state of said liberties, and to unleash electoral retribution on any politicians stupid enough to ignore their REAL constituency.
That none of the big 3 credit agencies know where I live and still show my employer from nearly 4 years ago.
I guess the funny thing is the feds would be better off calling me than going to my house if they had reason to want to talk to me. Since public databases are so innaccurate.
But what's not funny is the fact that a government agency working on bad/outdated information could very well surround a old lady's house and when she goes walking around with her big black maglite they open fire and killing poor grandma. Of course they'll use the same tired excuse of we had bad intel.
I'm sure the guy that dropped the bomb on the chinese embasy said the same thing.
I think, in short, the biggest issue against things like the TIA is this:
The TIA was thought of as a means to search for patterns among public data on American citizens. This equates to the government (computer program or not) evaluating you and your habits for potential trends. It is, in effect, a way for the government to stake-out its citiziens.
Rights to privacy and due process state clearly: you are innocent until proven guilty, and you have a right to be left alone. What the TIA is doing is investigating every citizen regardless of their behavior.
A good analogy is putting up cameras in every public place. The place is public, and they're not targeting YOU specifically, so what's there to worry about, right?
For one, I want to live my life without knowing someone is looking over my shoulder unless they have a reason to look over my shoulder. Playing big-brother to all citizens is not where we want things to go.
Secondly, the argument "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about" shows logical ineptitude. The first step in any police state is the ability to monitor citizens. The next step is to deem minority actions illegal (e.g. possessing communist doctorines [see McSurely v. McClellan, Supreme Court]).
When a single body controls both the laws and the force that enforces those laws, the only things they lack are the tools to find those breaking their laws.
History has shown that the public won't stop a government from enacting laws against minorities, especially if the law and/or enforcement of that law are vague, so instead of trust our government not to abuse their information gathering tools, I'd rather just not give them those tools.
If terrorists are on every street corner, either we should be having a lot more bombings (how hard is it to strap TNT to your chest and walk into a Burger King?), or the government has been doing a damn good job in the last decade without these tools.
If you folks want guarantees that terrorists can't do anything to us, enjoy living in a police state, I'll be buying a private island.
PS: To any trolls wanting to call me a liberal whiner who doesn't want my ID checked in an airport, I'll save you some time and humiliation. I typically agree with conservatives over liberals, I believe in airport ID checking and the like. Where do I draw the line? Going to an airport is not generally a regular experience for the vast majority of Americans and often involves international travel. Airports are a good place to scan, IMO. However, if I can be watched just by going through a normal week, I have issues.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.