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US Treasury to Post Previously Private Email Addresses Online
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."
Here's a consumer alert from the Federal Trade Commission on why you shouldn't post your email address online... how ironic!
Maybe people whose address is posted should file a complaint with the FTC against the U.S. Treasury Department. I know, the Treasury dept is technically not a "business" (although it's arguable) but it would be funny if the FTC received tons of complaints because of this.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
Aside from the rather obvious gold mine for Spammers that this would provide (thanks to the knuckleheads in the Treasury Department), this is an example of openness in government which could be good except that the problem is that they are breaking a promise. Most disturbing is this little item "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." It seems that nobody is allowed privacy in this White House administration except GWB and friends.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Really need to love how the Senate wants to try and look like they're preventing spam, while the Treasury seems to support it. Sometimes I wish we had a dictator.
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
I don't agree with the Treasury Department violating its stated policy. It's frankly chilling coming from a government agency. (Imagine if they had the same policy with witness protection. "Yeah, well, we were going to give you a new identity, but we ran out of budget money this month.") But either way, they were screwed.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
WTF?! Have they never heard of Perl??
Bryan
Are they kidding? Their database is one SQL statement away from having them removed.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Ok, I just have to ask... How is fully posting comments made by the citizens freely "Anti-Free speech ? I can see if they were only publishing some comments, but not others, or something like that.
That said - why isn't this just a perl script or something to remove these fields from the incoming comments. Or are people dumb enough to embed their e-mail address/physical addresses into the comments
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Gee, if you think about it you might come to the conclusion that this was deliberately done to dissuade reasonable people (ie, those don't want their emails to be harvested) from responding. I sure as hell will think twice before I respond to another one of their "request for comment" periods.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
You know this is what dead drop email accounts are for. It is an address that I use to send information but never to receive it, or just receive things once. Simple reuseable 1 way communication.
Free email accounts like Yahoo/Hotmail are great for this.
My Slashdot email, a dead drop yahoo account. That email account I need for registration that sends me a temp password in the email, drop dead account. MSN Messenger and the MS Passport thing, drop dead account.
People I WANT to talk to, my personal email account. People work pays me to talk to, my work email account.
Running my own email server allows another level of indirection. Every company I do business with gets their own email address (well alias to a mail_order@myemail.com address).
This is why it's good to use email addresses like me+treasurydept@mydomain.com. Then when the spam starts coming in, you can set up a forwarding rule to send it all to the bonehead who made that decision.
I assume they aren't going to post the names, addresses, and e-mails of children?
I assume they ensured everyone posting was of legal age?
I assume they know the rules of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act?
If not, they're dumb.
The point of suing an entity is not to obtain money - it is to legally compel them to action. In some cases, that means compelling them to give you money, but in many cases it's to stop an activity, cease a business practice, etc. The masses have been brainwashed into thinking that the courts are a large, complicated piggy-bank from which the delusionally mistreated obtain their fortunes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Certainly this is no reason to stop commenting on proposals. We're talking about a tax on malt liquor-based beverages, for crying out loud! Fighting that is worth a little exposure to spammers!
(Are there really "malt beverage aficionados"? And they communicate with one another)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
power
Your pessimism is unwarranted. Read some Jean Baudrillard; power is nothing more than an illusion, and more than that, its an illusion that is over. The mass, with its black hole intensity of gravity, can destroy the illusion of power in an instant.
Why do you think "fraudsters" like Frank Abignale and Kevin Mitnick get sentences that are longer than those given to murderers? Its because they, through thier actions, reveal the true nature of the social and the illusory nature of power. Power doesnt exist, only deterrence exists.
Go and read "In The Shadow Of The Silent Majorities". It will completely transform your ideas about government and power.
It's EXTREMELY STUPID to assume your email address is private. In security terms, it's a NAME, not a PASSWORD - it is long-lasting and necessary to contact you. Either use a throwaway email address or start using public key crypto to issue "stamps" to people you like, and spambucket everything not signed.
Since it is "public" information the Dept of Treasury should be required to provide (maybe with a FOIA request) the home addresses/telephone numbers/email addresses of all of their employees. That would be inline with what they are doing.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Free speech includes the right to speak anonymously (McIntyre vs Ohio Board of Elections), so people can express opinions without fear of reprisals, whether from the government or from non-government parties.
BATF invited people to exercise their right of anonymous speech: they asked citizens for their opinions, said please give your contact info so we can get back to you with followup questions, but we won't publish your info, so random loons won't see it and bother you. Then they decided to publish the info anyway, opening the senders to reprisals, i.e. punishing people for exercising the right of anonymous speech.
Think about what happens if you know about an ongoing crime (e.g. your mayor is taking weekly payoffs from the Mafia) and you tell the FBI on condition of anonymity (i.e. you can't testify as a witness, but you give them info to help them organize their own investigation). You might be fine giving the FBI your name and phone number so you can keep assisting them, but you definitely don't want them to notify the Mafia of where the info is coming from. The people you're concerned about reprisals from are not necessarily the government.
Send the data to me after I sign a nondisclosure and I'll clean it for you.
Why should you have to sign an NDA? This is, after all, information they are just going to throw out there for everybody unless something smart gets done. Giving it freely to one person has to be a lot less damaging than that, and if they think you might try to munge more than email addresses, a simple scan by eye of the diff would show that.
It's not that much data anyway.
More importantly, it is data that by procedure could have been stripped as the comments were read by whatever human(s) went through them. Not doing so is essentially an admission that they didn't even bother to process the comments properly otherwise. The whole thing is just dripping with government incompetence.
The following makes no excuses for the US Department of the Treasury. They need to stick by their contract with the commenter at the time the comment was posted. This is an explanation of how the whole process works....
The "public comment period" is standard in most US federal government rulemaking actions. Before the advent of access to rulemaking data via the web you were lucky if you knew there was a rulemaking in process unless you were part of an affected industry or had a lobbyist on staff.
Typically, comments were filed by mail, fax, or courier. The courier provision is provided for the convenience of all those lobbyists and interest groups in Washington D.C.
An issue such as changing the tax rates on malt beverages might get something like 10-100 comments filed. The GS-5 (maybe a 7) in charge of handling the comments would log them properly on a 12th generation photocopy of the "comment log sheet" (or some other similar name) and the comments would be either published with personal information removed (via a big black marker) or more likely ceremoniously placed in a large manilla file and trucked to a records vault.
Enter the Internet - Now the rulemaking process is often posted for the whole world to see. Even with a requirement
Now we've moved to having the rulemaking documents available on the Internet. While still requiring postal/fax/courier hard-copy replies this may have raised the comment quantity by an order of magnitude (100-1000). This greatly perplexed the government. Now they were getting comments from ordinary citizens. In fact, it is likely that the majority of the comments came from individual citizens. What are they to do? Not only is the filing clerk overloaded with the number of comments (and having to make a 13th generation of the log sheet to file them all), but they can't just take the lobbyist/interest group positions and claim it as public opinion.
Now open an avenue to submit comments via email. Post the information to a few lists/newsgroups/web sites and suddenly you've got what happened here. The file clerk is totally overwhelmed. They can't do an automated strip of all personal information because they might miss some. They can't hire more people because its not in their budget. If they did hire more people there might not be funds for all those "fact finding" trips to places that coincidentally have excellent golf courses.
Besides the most important point - now the *VAST* majority of the received comments are from individual american citizens. Whats is a government agency to do without the firm and easily heard voice of lobbyists to guide them? They might actually have to *READ* the comments and do some data analysis on what the citizens actually want.
The best way to deal with this is for everyone that commented to send a written formal request that their personally identifiable be removed from the filing direct to the Treasury Department. Then send a similar dead-tree complain to the FTC. A letter to all 3 of your congressmen won't hurt either. It will give them a great opportunity to posture.
As you probably know, someone will either mod you up for being insightful, or mod you down for being a troller and a flamer. The latter of the two seems more likely. I also bet you don't care. I just felt like wasting thirty seconds to type this all out. Have a great day/evening!
The cynic in me tells me that Treasury's "solution" to this is to have people send them comments/complaints.
Via e-mail.
Different AC, but for a historical perspective I'd refer you to the anti-Federalist papers - all written pseudonymously.
The Supremes have upheld the right to anonymous political speach, and their logic is similar to the librarians (see tatteredcover.com, they were in the lawsuit, there was a page about it on their site)
Basically, there are times when you need anonyminity to be able to speak freely, like in a voting booth, and to be able to listen freely, like when buying a book, or attending a rally.
Yes. It is a bad thing. Our goverment should not work in secret unless it has to. Energy policy does not currently rise to that level.
... is life without privacy.
This story has people complaining that their email addresses are being revealed, and you advocate giving your entire spending history to Visa and its customers?
If you are one of those email addresses, you should sue to get an injunction against the gov't. Where is the EFF on this one?
Some fanatic once said something like Live free or die.
The Breakup of the Soviet Union was Post Nuclear..
You have to niave as hell to think that any government would nuke their own land. It is one thing to obliterate some far shore but quite another to destroy yourself to prove a point.
Even The Soviets in all their lunacy were stopped by the doctrine of Mutual Assured Distruction. Yet the New Russian Revolution came to pass, without the massive bloodshed of protracted fighting or the use of nukes.
That shocked most of the old Pentagon Hawks... USSR going out with a wimper, not a bang
Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
So you see those in "power" have no power over me,
for I am not anonymous nor am I a coward!
1. Does the government really pay attention to user comments in the first place? (unless you work for a major corporation)
2. Does the government attribute ANY significance whatsoever to Internet-based feedback?
3. Who lists a real e-mail address on those stupid forms anyway? As if it would make a difference?
Which may be true, but I really don't agree about the cartridge box.
Yeah, well, the founding fathers had in mind that at some time in the future, government might once again get too onerous in its rules and regs designed to perpetuate its existence without regard to the general well being of the populous. Homeland security's recent undercover law passing being a case in point.
Why else do you think they rather quickly passed the first 10 amendments to our constitution?
Get a copy, and read them very carefully. Its very educational. Each of them is very carefully crafted to control a runaway government.
The reference to the cartridge box of course is implicite in the 2nd amendment.
You may not agree with it, but if push comes to shove, and you are the one on the end of the gangplank being shoved, and it wasn't the jury box containing 12 of your peers that put you there, what would you do?
I thought so...
I rest my case.
--
Cheers, Gene
A mostly retired old fart.
The Bush administration doesn't give a damn about public comments. In fact they despise all input from the "little guy". When they started getting too much negative email about the invasion, they made it so you had to jump through many hoops to send a comment, and then you could only comment on their "approved topics". Not only do they not want to listen to you, they won't tell you who they are listening to.
They're not conservatives. They're plutocrats.