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Florida's Version Of TIA May Spread To Other States
Annoying Cowwart writes "Looks like TIA is coming back, this time through the by-the States-but-all-together backdoor. Now called M.A.T.R.I.X. ('Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange'). See the
Washington Post article for details. I wonder: do they have to try hard to find such apt names for their projects or does it come naturally? (For German speakers, there is another article about this in Der Spiegel.)"
The Skynet funding bill just passed.
Considering that this is coming around "through the back door" I'd suggest a change from "the over-your-shoulder dept."...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Multistatee
Anti
Terrorism
Information
Exchang
Now, how the hell do you get MATRIX out of that?
More like MATIE, as in:
"ARR MATIE, we be getting the blackmail goods on the serfs, arrr!"
www.eFax.com are spammers
Melchior-1, Balthasar-2, and Casper-3 just entered QA testing. It's expected that when all 3 systems are deployed to production, the M.A.T.R.I.X system will use the MAGI computers to determine if the citizen in question should be eliminated.
Putting it that extreme way is short sighted, to be polite.
Having not total control over every citizen almost certainly leads to more crime by the people, but that is the cost of more freedom. More control to the government and you have almost certainly more crimes by the government/and or companies.
And they will probably hurt us citizens more in the long term. Want examples? Google for yourself, or ask. But I'm too lazy to write them all down here.
IMHO law enforcement should be more effective and should not work by gathering information about everyone and then doing some data mining.
In 1999, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI suspended information service contracts with an earlier Asher-run company because of concerns about his past, according to law enforcement sources. The Chicago Tribune reported in 1987 that court documents in a federal drug case said defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, who identified Asher as a pilot and onetime smuggler, offered him as an informant.
Jennie Khoen, a spokeswoman for the Florida department, said yesterday that the agency knew about Asher's "history with drug smuggling," including his work as an informant. Moore said his department "knew about Mr. Asher's past."
Maybe Asher can watch the fox guarding the hen house while he's at it....
Actually, if you read only the first letters, it spells "MATIE". I suppose they weren't going for much of a pirate theme though. "Yarr, matie, we be catchin' us some terrorists, arr.."
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I won't join any organizations like the ACLU to protect my freedoms! NO! I'm going to be an armchair critic and let the government erode my freedoms!
Karma whorin' since 1999
Acronym
Main Entry: acronym
Pronunciation: 'a-kr&-"nim
Function: noun
Etymology: acr- + -onym
Date: 1943
: a word (as NATO, radar, or snafu) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term.
(emphasis mine).
M.A.T.R.I.X is not an acronym.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Sure, you may joke, but there's an important reason for government surveillance of consumer habits.
2 3
Terrorists are everywhere. Yes, even in your breakfast cereal. Did you ever doubt it when they started checking supermarket discount records?
Now you tell me: who's going to protect you when terrorists hitch a ride straight to your basement in that new Sears washer box?
http://safetystate.com/ss.cgi?action=material&id=
Last week the news said airlines were looking at the credit agency and medical insurance reports of every passenger. People with low credit scroes were flagged for additional scrutiny. I guess because these are easy databases to access, not because they are informative.
At least they picked a name that should strike the proper level of fear into joe citizen. When it was TIA no one had a clue, it was almost as good as the PATRIOT Act (who could vote against being a patriot right?). But with a name like MATRIX thanks to the media machine people will naturally associate it with total helpless control and loss of basic rights.
This program will be quickly dropped, the politicians will say it was all that guys idea *point long finger* and it'll come up again under the name "USA FLUFFY BUNNIES AND PEACE ON EARTH FOR EVERYONE Act"
Vote no on USA FLUFFY BUNNIES AND PEACE ON EARTH FOR EVERYONE!
And what if they *gasp* get it wrong?
And what about when someone who shouldn't gets access to the system and either farms details, or better yet, frames you?
And what about when you may actually have a reason to organise a rebellion because your government has turned your country into a police state the KGB would envy?
I've lived with real terrorism all my life - I was 5 minutes away from being killed on one occasion I know of for certain (Manchester IRA bombing) and probably more. As far as I'm concerned this "keeping track of YOU so they can't blow you up" is nothing more than a way to monitor and control a nation, it has nothing to do with stopping terrorists.
States Archive of Terrorist Actions Network
OR
S.A.T.A.N
Yeah... that's it
On the one hand, anything that helps law enforcement officers track down and lock up criminal types is a Good Thing, and anything that helps them identify something dangerous in progress is also Good.
BUT,
On the other hand, there are a wide range of different kinds of cops, and at least half of them aren't the sort of people who should BE cops. They're like the dickhead who used to cruise around my neighborhood on the fourth of july, "confiscating" everyone's fireworks and bringing them home to his own kids, or the cop who keeps a "drop gun" handy in case he fucks up and shoots the wrong person, or the cops who you hear about from time to time, who shake down hookers and drug dealers for their own piece of the pie (pardon the pun).
The problem is, cops are people. And, like all people, some are good and some are bad. Some are REALLY bad. Put a tool like this in their hands, without sufficient top-down control (and you know, they're just going to give that lip service) and at least some of the cops entrusted with this will misuse it. Regularly. Perhaps often.
Another problem is, there's a real "us vs. them" mentality among cops, so even if one cop finds out another cop is, say, digging around in his ex-girlfriend's current boyfriend's records, it's unlikely anything will be done about it. Cops don't "rat" each other out, ok? They just don't. Do you really think a bunch of good old boys are going to keep an eye on each other? What'll really happen is, "Joe won't snitch on Bob for fucking with the guy who 'stole' Bob's girl, if Bob doesn't snitch on Joe for checking up on the hot babe who lives in his building". And, Joe and Bob will keep on misusing their power, as has happened throughout history.
For that reason, I'm against this utterly.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
coincidental circumstantial evidence, with no prior record or other connection to the crime, and you'll be eliminated from the police's enquiries in a flash,
This, for me, is one of the major problems with TIA-esque systems.
The abuses are:
1) a cop harrasses his ex-wife's new boyfriend using TIA data
2) government critics are harrassed
3) innocents are convicted using a "web" of circumstantial evidence
Maybe I watch too much Law & Order & C.S.I., but I do worry that someone with my general description and some other minor similarity: same brand of shoes or car, same point of debit card usage) along with proximity to a cell site near the crime at the time it's committed could be enough to lock me up. Means and opportunity, leaving only a thin motive to fabricate: pysch history, associates, financial issues, high school "permanent record" (corroborated with testimony from a vice principal).
They seem to be able to get bank records phone LUDs and FastPass usage without subpoaenas and use this probably cause to get search warrants.
#2 is what I see as the greatest threat to society at large, but I'm not that outspoken, so it's #3 I worry about personally.
Asher has also donated services to the FBI, the Secret Service and other agencies. And authorities credit Seisint with helping to turn up links among the hijackers who slammed planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and to some of their associates.
1) If this statement is indeed true, then my first question is "Were the links apparent before, or after the terrorist attacks".
a) If the answer is "before", then why didn't these paragons of virtue say something and save ~3000 lives?
b) If the answer is "after", then the system is worthless as an intelligence tool. The bits and pieces of any conspiracy are always out in the public before an incident occurs. The value of intelligence analysis is the ability to merge these apparently unrelated pieces of information to reach a conclusion. If their system is only capable of making a link after an event, then Florida residents better keep an eye on their wallets.
Here, I'll do the same thing without their database: 'The Japanese were responsible for
bombing Pearl Harbor.'
Pretty neat, huh?
2) Who goes to jail if the system is used for political surveillance?
a) Considering the system can be abused (a point that even supporters admit is possible), who will be responsible for rouge elements within a state government that use the system to collect information on political activists who disagree with a sitting administration?
b) Does anyone really believe that Nixon DIDN'T use the IRS and FBI to spy on anti-war activists during Viet Nam?
This system, however worthy it is in stopping potential violent acts, is too dangerous a tool to be placed in the hands of politicians.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Cops are always honest and unbribe-able (sp?). Besides the US government has never abused any of its powers.
And the government needs to know your credit rating. Because if you are poor you are a criminal in America today. If you are poor you might have motivation to commit a crime, rich people don't commit crimes because they're already rich.
Vote Quimby!
The problem is the commercial databases that are for sale. I'm more concerned about getting my info off these databases. I want my privacy, actually I demand my privacy.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I've done lots of privacy work, especially concerning driver's license privacy.
About a year and a half ago, a well known local school board member (known for being very troublesome to other school board members, but extremely well respected and liked by the voters in his community) had an article printed about him in the newspaper saying that he had two driver's licenses.
The question was, how did they find out he had two licenses, since license data is protected by both state and national law. Unless the DMV actually had decided to take action against him (which they had not) someone with access to the database must have called up the paper.
So I called him up, and he said a few days before the article came out, he and his daughter were pulled over. His daughter was driving, but they were in a rented car, so the officer wanted to see his license, because he rented the car. The officer recognized who he was, talked about their military records, and let them on their way. So the hypothesis was that this officer then scanned through the computer, and found the two licenses, and called up the newspaper--which is where the violation of law occurred.
(With regard to the two licenses, the person claimed that it was an error on the part of the DMV. The two records had two different SSNs.)
Anyway, so I did the obvious. Based on freedom of information act, we asked the DMV and the state highway patrol (who runs the computer that the cops use in this state) to give us the data on who accessed the license records and when (a simple record request.)
The DMV cooperated immediately...and nothing of consequence there...they checked his license(s) records when the local newspaper called, to confirm whether or not he did have two licenses (an act which may have violated DPPA (driver's privacy protection act) but that hasn't been determined yet.)
The state highway patrol said that they didn't have to give up their records. Well, I checked through everything I could, but I couldn't find a single place which gave them that authority (though they claimed it.) They said they would perform an internal investigation, and give us the results of that investigation, but would redact the information concerning whom actually looked at his license(s) records.
The story ends there, more or less. The school board member decided that this issue wasn't worth pursuing, given time and resources. And he felt that he already caused enough trouble.
(Actually the story ends this way...two agents of the DMV came to his house and told him that if he gives up the two licenses, they will just reissue him one license at the DMV and that will be that. I don't need to tell you that this is pretty irregular behavior by the DMV (they didn't even charge him) but even with all the time I spend researching the DMV, I can't figure out why they did it.)
I guess the point is, the ability to get auditing records of such a database is vital for making sure it's being used correctly. When a state agency refuses to give up auditing records on yourself, it implies that a need for greater oversight on how they operate.
(My signature talks about my current driver's license privacy project in New Jersey...I wanted yall to know that it didn't happen in NJ, but in Ohio.)
It's the Democrats who come up with most of the IP legislation. Clinton was "tough on crime" and promised to double the police force. He also signed the CDA, COPA, CIPA, DMCA, and Digital Millenium act. Remember the Clipper chip?
The only difference is in what they say. I care more about what they do.
Well, at least a drug-smuggling-pilot-turned-snitch is a somewhat better person to have in charge of all of our personal information than Disgraced Iran-Contra Felon John Poindexter (as El Reg tends to call him... or something similar).
Anyone who can remember back to the year 2000 knows that the State of Florida can certainly be trusted to handle millions of documents in an appropriate fashion.
They will get it wrong, it's a certainty. I work for the State of Florida and deal with FDLE every day, and like any other cops they're not above harassment, vendettas, and abuse of power. More dangerously, some of the techs and investigators are just not all that bright. The law enforcement databases that are being pulled together are chock full of erroneous information. The clerks who enter the data don't make a living wage and there's a high turnover, so the quality of data entry is very low. Those who work in law enforcement are aware of this, but it's very hard to challenge something once it's in there, and they like it that way. If you know someone it helps.
What's most fascinating to me is the bit about "commercially available databases" being included as well. Does this include your credit card receipts? How about the data collected by your supermarket discount card?
PS for the Non-Americans out there . . . I know the development of the culture of surveillance might be disturbing to you, but all we want is to be on reality TV. The Bush administration understands this deep-seated human need and is doing all they can to get us all on camera.