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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)
the same people that said they wanted to take all the residents of Mount Carmel alive (unless it was inconvenient or cost to much overtime)
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
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 ||
maybe it's just that the department of treasury figures that spammers support the industry more than they do harm to it. Thus they decided to support the spammers.
We have anti-spam laws now.
Those will stop the spammers and email harvesters.
Clif
clifgriffin > blog
Can they be held financially responsible when the SPAM starts pouring in?
I doubt any lawsuits will fly, but technically savey people know that what they did was a Cardinal Sin.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okJust show the treasury you disaprove by not using their products. If enough people do this they'll get the message and change their policies.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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
But the public can not find out about the VP's secret energy taskforce.
Sad.
If you drink, don't scribe.
If you post it, they will read.
WTF?! Have they never heard of Perl??
Bryan
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
Why stop at email addresses why not just give out our home address.
MonkeysKickAss
Usual disclaimers apply (IANAL), but when you decide to post on a public website under the auspices of privacy, you have a right to expect that their end of the bargain will be held up, no? Couldn't it be viewed that the privacy statement was a sort agreement between the department and the poster? Now that the department has broken its promise, is there any form of redress a person can seek?
-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska
What, you think you can hurt them like that? They MAKE the money!
I have been pwned because my
I could do it pretty quick with a regExp search/replace in UltraEdit, my fav text editor.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
They're going to wait for spammers to harvest the addresses and then call in air strikes on Alan Ralsky. :P
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
in fear of flame from regex super gods, i won't dare post my regex example here... but really, could it be that hard to remove something@place.com ???
You can actually do this and live quite well.
Direct deposit + a Visa check card means you can live quite nicely without handling any physical money (or even checks) at all. Heck, don't most Slashdotters live that way already?
BTW, more money is out there in non-physical form than there is physical money.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
perl -pi -e 's/\S+\@\S+/\[email_ommitted\]/g' comments_file.txt
Do I win the prize?
The terms of this agreement may change without notice.
Looks like terms just changed.
These links are booby trapped!
They abuse the FTC's scripts to do a nasty redirect.
And the parent post is quite likely illegal as a result.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
How is this limiting speech? I thought information wanted to be free? Oh wait thats unless its about you. Please explain how Bush is limiting my freedom of speech. Don't just say patriot act blah blah, give me specifics and details.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Of course I'm a student, so I'm pretty much doing that anyway.
Mike Hoye
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.
It seems that it was no secret that the body of these messages were going to be made public. If we ignore or miss the important disclaimer about the editing only being done until it became inconveinient it still seems to me that common sense would tell you not to put personal information in the BODY of the message as the risk of human or programatic error during the editing process would seem at least possible if not altogether likely.
I personally would never send my real email address to a public anything online, much less my name and phone number. I don't agree with the release of this information but for those who need a lesson in personal privacy management perhaps this will help them understand.
So you prefer to let them fuck you over?
Let's get those free speech loving Democrats such as Tipper Gore back in power again. They LOVE protecting our rights
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I certainly use my hotmail address for nothing but garbage.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
If I were worried about this I would setup a one time e-mail address for this, or not provide one at all. I wouldn't fully believe these things anyway - what if a person put in a comment, I am going to do something bad - don't think that e-mail/physical address would get out fast ?
What about FOIA requests - somebody really REALLY wants to know what the e-mail addresses are (your handy spammer) and files one - bets on there being all kinds of ANTI-Free speech stuff going around when the headline reads - Govt. refuses to give up information to organization requesting it through FOIA ?
So what you DID ignore was me also wondering why the heck they couldn't just filter the junk out of online posts ?
Or maybe the problem is with OCR input letters, having to have staff go through and edit each one for content, I can see that taking a long time - and being a big problem if for example side A tended to use the internet for input (and it going online immediately) and side B was using snail mail and comments being held up 2 months (beyond receiving the letter) because a staffer had to go through the OCR'd input and remove all personal references to address/phone numbers/e-mail addresses.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
That's why I have a e-mule account. For example, Hotmail provides a free e-mule account that I use. Want to make that account available to SPAMers? Suit your self. I'll just create anotherone and ignore the now plundered spammed account.
Life is not for the lazy.
No, they won't be fucking you over if you don't fuck with them first. Keep a low profile; be nearly invisible.
Thank you slashdot for posting a story that links to the addresses the Treasury Dept. has posted :-)
Seriously, though, that's probably not helping. Unless someone on slashdot actually takes action against them, but that seems unlikely.
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...
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|ter
(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.
The US Treasure seems to be inviting all sorts of dangerous abuses with this current ideology. Obligatory perspective paradigm: "Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster. For if you gaze in the Abyss, the Abyss gazes into you." :)
~Tirinal
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.
How is fully posting comments made by the citizens freely "Anti-Free speech ?
ok, would you kindly post your name, address, and email in reply?
still feel free?
no script any time soon, for someone's email address included in the body of an email is not a 'field'. (and how, exactly, is it dumb to put your email address in your email, aside from the extra bandwidth?) do _you_ want to write the perl script that takes out all email addresses in all messages, except for all of those ones that are (and should be) publicly known, OR are germane to the message, wherever they may appear in the message?
i'm not volunteering for that one. the only way i'd tackle that coding job is if i had an exorbitant government contract ($300/hr for each team member would be about right) because i'm sure the scope creep would be...extensive.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
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.
They claim that they cannot process all of the e-mails to remove the e-mail addresses in a reaonable time.
What do they have, some moron using MS Outlook copying the messages by hand? Someone needs to clue them into Perl, C, or any of the dozens of tools for this job.
The (soon to be) American way.
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."
While the government shouldn't go back on its word regarding the posting of private information. They are stripping out headers from the messages and allowing indivduals who do not want their information posted to write in.
This means that only people who felt the need to repeat their email address (or mailing address) in their message, and/or are ignoring the issue (as this has been postedin several areas) after submitting their comments will be affected by this decision.
At least that is my take on it. Nasty, but not the end of the world
For crying out loud. Please tell me you're compelled by the law or by a Supreme Court decision. Tell me you didn't notice. Tell me you don't care about privacy. Tell me it's an April Fools Joke. But please, please, don't tell me you're posting them because you can't get rid of them. It just makes you look silly. The answer is Perl and a competent scripter. Send the data to me after I sign a nondisclosure and I'll clean it for you. It's not that much data anyway.
For Pete's Sake!
RP
If their word is not good on one thing, why should one trust them on another? Not to mention, of course, the government's defaults on Social Security and Medicare.
Moderate this man up.
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.
nt
Still feel good about voting the republicans in ?
I still haven't gotten around to making a bumper sticker that says "Don't blame me, I don't live in a swing state."
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.
Well, then don't fuck with people with a lot more deterrence than you. Either way, you still get 28,000 Viagra spams.
Yeah works great, until some "friend" of yours does a reply to all or doesn't know how to use BCC or some moron that should definately know better leaks your email (linked no less) onto usenet and your pristine private address is now junk (I'm not bitter ;)
qmail is your friend (I'm sure the others do something similar) me-somejunk@example.com for every place that needs an address.
[OT] does anybody know an easy way to use a '.' in addition to a '-' for the extension addresses? I have been unable to find any references online.
It might as well be an anti-free speech measure. Bush has stated he never reads newspapers or watches news on the TV. He only knows what he's been told. Ok, the first part doesn't make sense, but I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. Or maybe you can't. Actually, I forgot where I was going to go with this.
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.
Not "fucking with people" is a lousy lesson, and violates basic Social Contract aggreements which mark the United States' foundation.
To not fuck with people implies a revoke of women's suffrage and apartheid-like systems.
Remember the Spirit of 1776. And 1967! Any of the good years actually. 1517. 1888. 2004!
The Custom Mary
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!
Back in the old days (94-96 range) I remember this free service from something like anon.pennet.fi, where you could "bounce" email messages through an anonymizer. You could send emails to... say... newsgroups without revealing your true identity or email address.
I remember this service being shut down for some nefarious reason several years ago. Perhaps the rise of spanmming lead to this -- I certainly see how an email anonymizer could cause problems. However, if designed and implimented correctly, I can invision a similar system with similar features but fewer spam/security concerns.
In this day and age, it is often necessary to give out SOME email address and perhaps even be able to receive responses. It would be nice to be able to do so without having to create many ficticious addresses or opening one's self up to spam and abuse.
Everytime something like this comes up, I tend to want to plagerize an unknown pair of authors as follows:
Politicians and diapers need changed from time to time, for the same reason.
Freedom depends on four boxes.
The soapbox.
The ballot box.
The jury box.
The cartridge box.
Cheers, Gene
Have a look at the front page of ftc.gov
If you highlight the section just below Last Updated: Thursday, January 8, 2004 10:05 AM you'll see two "hidden" email addresses (font color set to white.)
Anyone know what this is about? Spam trap?
Yes, it's still a trivial regex, but don't assume ".com".
If we can't trust the government with our email addresses, WHY oh why do we trust them with 55% of our income each and every year?
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.
Do you realize that, if a government feels free to lie, it is corrupt?
Instead of posting as html, text, or even pdf, they posted all comments as RTF files. WHY?
Look, it was crappy that they went back on their word but this isn't the beginning of some totalitarian state. The TTB normally receives around 20 comments for something like this and this time they received close to 15,000. They got slahdoted.
The TTB announced their plans to publish the full content of the emails and letters on Dec 2, 2003. They gave everyone who contacted them a way to prevent their addresses from being published. Granted, not many people read the Federal register but given the budgetary constraints that the TTB has this was the best way.
Also, everyone is assuming that it is the emails that are the problem. TTB also received 4,800 letters and faxes. Normally they receive about 20 comments. It's really easy to redact information from 20 comments but 4,800 letters, that will take a lot of time and manpower. Taking the info out of the emails requires a technical know-out that maybe out of reach of the person who's main job is dealing with 20 comments at a time. Is the TTB supposed to put out bids for a contractor to come in a write a Perl script to do a job that a person normally does in two minutes with a marker and hitting a few control x's? Is it worth the delay in the public posting the comments?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.
One of the "authors" this post has "plagerized" uses some perplexing grammar.
... Which may be true, but I really don't agree about the cartridge box.
The first time I saw this on an advertising flyer, my host was kind enough to explain to a confused visitor that "Does your driveway need sealed?" was localese for "Does your driveway need TO BE sealed?".
Likewise, "... diapers need changed" means "diapers need to be changed".
-- Not a Sig ---
Sigmund
this is weird....so much for privacy when you want it....
hell, I still can't get my exam scores from my university (they site "privacy issues" due to some federal law). what the hell is the point of privacy if the person whose privacy is to be protected, can't even access their own info.
man...my own axiom that I came up with over a decade ago keeps slapping my ass, "Bureacracy; If it makes sense, it ain't gonna happen." It's probably the most true tautology known to man.
... 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?
Forget perl scripts and so on... surely people are *reading* the comments, and thus could edit them at the same time? They received both emails (cut + paste), and faxes (photocopy + magic marker).
Unless, of course, they only actually read a sample of the submissions...
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
If this is done, why not show the people at the treasury WHY it's a bad idea through a little.. Uh. Kinesthetic Learning Excersise.
Why get the personal names, email addresses, and street addresses of those who made the decision and share the love? Wasn't this sort of thing done with a certain spammer in Michigan?
You could start with Treasury Secretary John Snow...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The email harvesters are going to have a great time.
10,000 emails is nothing, harvesters grab that amount in less than 30min.
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!
My SPAM has a first name...it's U-S-T-D.... *sniff* *sniff* Lawsuit? Could be interesting. A lot of companies stand to be screwed over this if they commented...let's see how the administration attempts to make them all happy.
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?
I can just use a dead drop sub-domain that goes to home home connection which is hosting a spam can.
I use it to bait spam so that I can preemptivly filter it on my real server where bandwidth costs money.
anything@spam.icarusindie.com is the current sub-domain. Feel free to sign it up for crap. I'll kill the sub domain if it gets too bloated.
So far I havn't gotten anything to my slashdot@spam.icarusindie.com address in my sig.
You can get the EXE and Visual Basic source code for the catch-all I'm using.
http://therabbithole.icarusindie.com/spam
Ben
Work Safe Porn
We had 2 councilmembers turned out in the last election because of illegal contacts with lobbyists.
This is no different. And the fact is- Cheney was asking the thieves who ripped off California, Oregon and Washington on how to handle the crises they manufactured. Their response was predictable: pollute and drill more.
Man I hope W time in office expires before the statute of limitations. Kenny-boy? Meet RICO. Then meet your cell-mate Bubba.
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.
A fair number of high school government classes have students do various politically oriented letter writing as "experience" in "being part of democracy" (in quotes because I thought it was lame when I was in high school). Commenting on proposed regulations seems like a reasonable thing to do -- just because the student can't (legally) drink doesn't mean that they could comment on the fairness/benefit of a specific regulation dealing with alcohol (how many kids have made comments about smoking issues in various areas? I opposed a local smoking bad when I was younger than eighteen.)
Rachael
"Go Forth Ye Lemmings and Propagate"
...they're all Democrats! ;-)
".....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."" To me, this reads that only the body of the email, or "comments" will be posted. Not the origination email address. It sounds like they are having troubles pre-screening the comments, and to help reduce efforts, the entire comments will be posted. All subject to interpretation, of course!
Computer! Re-enable sarcasm processing.
yeah. no worries though. If I need to regain some karma, all I'll have to do is get an easy "+5, funny" by either:
a) making a crack about Duke Nukem Forever
b) mocking U.S. metric confusion or
c) saying how maybe we'll _________ if we just tell Bush there are WMDs there!
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.
"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"
How hard can it be to simply not include something? I just can't fathom how hard it could be to use only certain fields of a database. Or even use Perl!
Free speech is an inconvenience to the Bush administration. They mechanize the rejection of emails to the White House; the Forest Service says don't even bother emailing us; and the TTB (formerly ATF) begs for comments and then renegs on a commitment to maintain privacy because, somehow, a giant government agency can't hire someone to write a sed script to remove the words before and after the @-sign.
Of course, the ideas of anyone under $10 million net worth don't go anywhere with these guys, anyway.
A higher one than you're in.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
A while ago, the government of the UK started yelling about proposals for universal ID cards (historically, I believe, Britons have not had anything like this, and unless I'm mistaken, a mandatory ID goves against a lot of the traditional principles of English common law.)
They requested comments, including those sent in per email. For a long time, they utterly refused to consider comments submitted via its Stand website. Finally, they had to admit that generally, the public were opposed to the whole scheme.
However, if you look at the Queen's last speech (State of the Empire? Wotsitcalled, sorry, forget the name), somehow it slipped in there anyhow.
Comforting to know we're not the only ones doing stupid shit like this.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
That's a deeply troubling quote right there, are they removing all this info from the received mail by hand?!?
I could write a PHP script which just says hello to a pop3 server, pulls down each email, runs a couple of eregi_replace()s on the body (to strp out email addresses and phone numbers) and pumps it into a database... in about 20 minutes. With another 5 to set up the cron job and test it and hey, it's a working solution! - sure, people with an autosignature containing their postal address is going to be a little more complex but not excessively so.
Your tax dollars at work ladies and gentlemen... It sounds to me like your hard-earned cash is employing at least one person to sit at a desk hitting send/receive, copy and paste the body of each email they get into a frontend and then manually remove the email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses.
Seems a little wasteful, doesn't it?
I have read the article (yeah, me slashdot newbie), but I can't see anywhere that the messages are just stored without any format. So, if they are stored as emails, its easy enough to get and remove the email address from the header (and replace occurences in the body), if they are stored as structures submitted by a form, even easier.
Even without that, its still easy enough to remove anything that looks like an email, a phone number, or an address. Is it terrible if an address that could be publicly known is removed this way? I dont see why.
This is all kind of stupid though, isnt the point of posting a comment that it is going to be read? by a human able to manually remove the address?
As a previous poster wrote, it seems they are simply overwhelmed by the unexpected number of replies. They should still hold their promise not to publish the addresses.
It's not that bad since a person submitting his address to post a comment is likely to be either using a junk email address or having done that in the past, thus the address is already spammed. Besides, it made me discover spamgourmet.
I'm really surprised at the level of anger on this issue. If anyone sues, the courts should prevent Treasury from releasing the emails. Nothing will prevent this in the future, though. When commenting on regulatory action by a Federal agency, your comments including postal address and so on usually becomes part of the public record. I commented on the FCC's regulation changes requiring a copy protection flag for digital content. As a result, I actually had opponents of and advocates of the digital flag contact me.
The price of participating in the public policy is that there is no expectation of privacy. When it comes to rule-making, silence is the price of privacy. Anonymous comments are not of value to regulators (no ability to validate that it is indeed a US citizen or to contact the commentor) who are supposed to use public comment in their decision process (congress has delegated legislative athourity to the agency over a specific area). It's unfortunate that many agencies ignore public comment - but the web has one very positive feature: it's much easier for the public to lear about regulation and much easier for the public to let their voice be heard.
Just don't expect privacy when participating in government!
-- $G
If they had simply made available a definition or example of how the e-mail should be composed (e.g. anything above or below some number of hyphens would be removed), this could've been prevented. A web form would've been ideal - e-mail/address/phone doesn't even need to be intricate, two multiline text fields would be enough to separate personal info from comment content.
I'm thinking at least checking/filtering on the vcard spec would take care of a LOT of the personal info.
One unanswered question: did they attempt to do it partway then abandon, or was it a no-starter?
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
Having such a statement work backwards makes it kind of pointless to have an agreement say anything at all. I can see how one can change an agreement so that it from a certain point of change, onwards works in a new way (and one can then of course cancel the whole agreement), but simply changing it to affect allready agreed upon things is usually not applicable.
I guess now we have to add The inbox on that list?
It looks to me like everybody is pretty much blissfully happy with the general state of affairs, and that the people in the military rank and file are just about as loyal and satisfied as any military organization has ever been in history.
Really? Is that what you think? Do a search on suicides by US soldiers in this Iraq conflict, and get a shock.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
How about Rumsfeld? He didn't just fall off a turnip truck in 2000 either -- he's been pulling strings in Washington DC since the Eisenhower administration! Did you vote for Rumsfeld? Why didn't he disappear after 8 years in the executive team?
Oh, its far more obscene than that, my friend. Not only has Rumsfeld's service in Washington continued for nearly two centuries now, but he is, in fact, Skeletor of Eternia! I submit as evidence this google search. Who will be our He-Man?? Howard Dean? Joe Lieberman??
We all use credit cards, which are really the flakiest form of currency ever invented. Pure electrons.
Sure, they can track us if we use electronic money, and that's a concern especially in an age of subpoenaless power (taken by the ruling Party from Judiciary and given to the Executive branch in December). But I think of even more concern is day-to-day verification. With cash, you can physically, mindlessly count it in each transaction, and it's easily verifiable. But how many of us, at the end of the month, actually reconcile grocery store receipts with our charge statements? Few, I think.
Without open-source certified proof and automatic self-journalling/reconcile, it's another avenue to be nickel-and-dimed... or wiped out. And without instant transaction extinguishment, it's another avenue for identity/CC# theft.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
Are there any of the "Don't blame me, I voted in Massachusetts" bumper stickers left?
> My comment can be quoted whenever, wherever, so long as you bloody well provide attribution! >
Suicide rate in the military is low compared to the general population. I don't know what's supposed to come as a shock. That being in the military lowers your risk of death by suicide? Or that military recruits are less susceptible to certain mental illness?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
this si a test
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
There is no doubt about the unseemly affinity of the Bush Administration for the extractive energy industry. Do you really doubt that the secret meetings with oil industry lobbyists (some of whom are known) were actually arguing for rebates for California rate-payers, tax credits for wind-farms, and improved auto fleet mileage and Cheney weighed the merits and decided to issue the piece of shit that he did?
but in case you are-
the plan released by Cheney's task force included exempting power plants from environmental regulations and overturning laws and regulations governing their construction. It also contained the only energy policy you'll get from an oilman: "Drill more."
Which is nuts, of course. Oil resources in the ground are comparable to a bank account, not income. If energy supplies are low, conservation and development of sustainable energy is the way to go. Cheney's group had nothing to say about that, other than "use up oil as fast as possible, and find more except off the Florida coast where we need to assure the President's brother is still on hand to supervise the 2004 election."
>Freedom depends on four boxes.
> The soapbox. The ballot box. The jury box. The cartridge box.
You forgot the important part of the quotation.
"Use them in the order listed."
"Use them in the order listed."
Was not included in the tagline I was plagerizing from a rec.guns message. I'll remember that in the future I hope.
Do you know who originally penned that so the real credit can be given?
Many thanks, that does complete the picture very nicely.
Cheers, Gene
A mostly retired old coot running linux.
Well, someone could post this address from their website on some IRC channel and a couple of newsgroups: webmaster@ttb.treas.gov. Or is a /. comment sufficient?
BTW, I guess this is the webmaster's picture, since "he" says on the front page: "The input you provide can help TTB better serve you and our other customers. Please feel free to email your ideas to us "?
Note that their TTB Job Postings do NOT include a Perl programmer.
Heh. I didn't know the source either, and I got it slightly wrong too. After some googling, here it is, straight from the horse's mouth:
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Source: Ed Howdershelt himself, confirming the origin of the quote, on USENET.
(Damn. Even in 2004, there are moments when I realize just how unspeakably cool the 'net is.)
The Military has a tradition of keeping thier noses out of politics witha very few exceptions eg Eisenhower
This is a good thing no Juntas here
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Enron had so many peculiar scams going that of course they went broke. The fact that felonious corruption wasn't enough to save them is not evidence that there was no such felonious corruption.
In fact, they DID help them. One result was that the Feds denied the California rate payers important relief- release from long term contracts at crises-extorted rates. They also refused to put in aprice cap, which would have defused the crises overnight. (Yeah, I took economics- enough for a minor had they offered one. It's fine stuff for analyzing markets, but classical econ deals wwith a weird definition of market - neither buyer nor seller has enough power to distort the price. This doesn't apply here.) Remember: it's a criminal enterprise to game the market. Collusion among suppliers kept power plants off line, generating artificial shortages and massive windfall profits from selling the remainder. Without the incentive to withhold supply, the plants go online as the former colluders compete to get what they can, and the need for a cap disappears. These suppliers were the same clowns gathered to advise on handling the crises! The Bush administration role was essentially holding down the victim so she wouldn't harm her rapists.