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US Treasury to Post Previously Private Email Addresses Online

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the liars-damn-liars-and-statisticians dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After receiving around 10 thousand comments about a government proceeding and after promising not to reveal personal info from those comments online, the US Treasury department decided to post email addresses of those who commented online. Sounds like they don't want any more comments about government proceedings. The email harvesters are going to have a great time."

12 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. Not so bad by Nasarius · · Score: 4, Informative

    They're only not bothering to strip email addresses contained within the submitted comments themselves. As long as you didn't sign your comment or anything, it should be more or less anonymous.

    --
    LOAD "SIG",8,1
  2. Re:Thanks for nothin' by BWJones · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hey now, just because you cant afford your own "undisclosed location" dont be player hating our VP.

    Actually, we have our own little "undisclosed location" just down the road from our VP's "undisclosed location" in Jackson Wyoming. :-)

    --
    Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
  3. the camel says ... by Heisenbug · · Score: 3, Informative

    perl -pi -e 's/\S+\@\S+/\[email_ommitted\]/g' comments_file.txt

    Do I win the prize?

    1. Re:the camel says ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      It's not quite that easy as they would have to remove e-mail addresses, home addresses and other personal information. This really calls for a hand check of all the data.

  4. Regex free of charge by ispel · · Score: 3, Informative
    Blockquoth the article:
    "The unusually large number of comments received...has made it difficult to remove all street addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses from the comments for posting on our Internet Web site in a timely manner," the Treasury Department...


    Its clear they didn't ask a programmer to try.

    Just search and replace the following:
    [^ ]+@[^ ]+?\.[^ ]+ that should take care of your emails

    [()0-9+-]+ should take care of many phone numbers

    \d+.{,25}(dr|st|pl|ave|rd|blvd|highway|hwy|tr|terr ) - should take care of many street addresses

    (Above are not tested-just some off the top of my head)

    I'd suggest replacing them with "x"'s so have some idea what was removed, esp. in cases of false positives.
  5. Get a clue people by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The are not posting the email addresses of the people from the email sent to them they are posting any email address and other information those morons put into their comments (sig lines and such).

    If someone wants to be an idiot and put their email address, phone number, address and social security number in their sig line then it's their damn fault for getting this info displayed publicy.

    "The unusually large number of comments received...has made it difficult to remove all street addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses from the comments for posting on our Internet Web site in a timely manner," the Treasury Department said in a follow-up notice, published last month in the Federal Register. "Therefore, to ensure that the public has Internet access to the thousands of comments received...at the earliest practicable time, we will post comments received on that notice on our Web site in full, including any street addresses, telephone numbers, or e-mail addresses contained in the comments."

  6. Um... interesting... by Guppy06 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Wouldn't this violate the Privacy Act of 1974?
    No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains, unless disclosure of the record would be--

    (1) to those officers and employees of the agency which maintains the record who have a need for the record in the performance of their duties;

    (2) required under section 552 of this title;

    (3) for a routine use as defined in subsection (a)(7) of this section and described under subsection (e)(4)(D) of this section;

    (4) to the Bureau of the Census for purposes of planning or carrying out a census or survey or related activity pursuant to the provisions of Title 13;

    (5) to a recipient who has provided the agency with advance adequate written assurance that the record will be used solely as a statistical research or reporting record, and the record is to be transferred in a form that is not individually identifiable;

    (6) to the National Archives and Records Administration as a record which has sufficient historical or other value to warrant its continued preservation by the United States Government, or for evaluation by the Archivist of the United States or the designee of the Archivist to determine whether the record has such value;

    (7) to another agency or to an instrumentality of any governmental jurisdiction within or under the control of the United States for a civil or criminal law enforcement activity if the activity is authorized by law, and if the head of the agency or instrumentality has made a written request to the agency which maintains the record specifying the particular portion desired and the law enforcement activity for which the record is sought;

    (8) to a person pursuant to a showing of compelling circumstances affecting the health or safety of an individual if upon such disclosure notification is transmitted to the last known address of such individual;

    (9) to either House of Congress, or, to the extent of matter within its jurisdiction, any committee or subcommittee thereof, any joint committee of Congress or subcommittee of any such joint committee;

    (10) to the Comptroller General, or any of his authorized representatives, in the course of the performance of the duties of the General Accounting Office;

    (11) pursuant to the order of a court of competent jurisdiction; or

    (12) to a consumer reporting agency in accordance with section 3711(e) of Title 31.
    I don't see "published on a public website" anywhere in there...
  7. Re:tagged email addresses by Mawbid · · Score: 2, Informative
    It's better not to include the "me" part at all. That means extra work because you have to add to /etc/aliases yourself, whereas you can have the MTA do the + thing for you.

    Point of information: I've been doing this whenever a company asks for registration to download their products, use their forums, whatever. In the years I've been doing this, I've never received spam to any of those aliases.

    So, it's apparently very rare for reputable companies to use their account database for spamming or to sell addresses to spammers.

    I should have been less paranoid about businesses I have some sort of relationship with and more paranoid about where my address appears on the web.

    --
    Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
  8. Not as bad as it sounds by CoreyGH · · Score: 2, Informative

    According to the article, it seems like they are only going to release contact info that is in the actual text of the email message, for example, if your .sig includes your address. It's easy to separate email messages from email headers; the hard part is catching the contact info that might be in the message itself.

    However, you'd think they'd be able to catch that stuff as they read each email... they do read all the email comments they get, right?

    Anway, unless you include your email address in the body of your email messages you're probably safe. Not good enough in my opinion, but still not as bad as it sounds.

  9. Re:And the FTC explicitly advises against... by swv3752 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Isn't this why one has an hotmail address? :)

    --
    Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
  10. Re:And the FTC explicitly advises against... by Shivaji+Maharaj · · Score: 3, Informative
    No.. that is why you have spamgourmet.com or if you have cash to burn you can buy similar service here.

    Just a pbs work - not affiliated with yahoo or spamgourmet.

    --
    We do not have a history of profitable operations. Our future SCOsource licensing revenue is uncertain.
  11. Re:And the FTC explicitly advises against... by rifter · · Score: 3, Informative

    Also ironic: the FTC posts their own email address online (uce@ftc.gov) at the bottom of their webpage!

    uce@ftc.gov? That's a spamtrap address if I ever saw one!

    Yes, it is. In fact, I use that address to sign up for crap somethines when they swear they will not send me spam therefore. Also, the FTC set up that address for people to forward their spam to it for their analysis.