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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.
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
Just 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
I know what you mean. I think we should all get behind this Senator Palpatine guy during the next election.
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
You have a dictator. Well it's heading that way, anyways.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
ok"Sometimes I wish we had a dictator." Me me me Pick me ! Pick me ! theeeen we will see how long those spammers last hahahahaha
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
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
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.
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?
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.
No, it's not.
He'll lose his position eventually. If it takes eight years to toss him, it'll take eight years. The problem isn't that ONE person is a dictator.
The problem is that the entire political system has been corrupted at the roots all the way to the top of the tree. So, when this kook and his cronies and the current inept morons at each level of government are gone, they'll be replaced by a whole new set of gibbering morons and self-indulgent puppets.
Yes, it's Democracy. Yes, it's a republic. But, what's the point when you're choices always boil down to dumb, dumber, or dumbest?
If this goes on much longer, that is, if the American populace doesn't start demanding accountability from it's own government, the only solution will eventually be to rip the whole thing up by the roots and put an uncorrupted system back in its place. The odds of a successful transplant on that scale are, to say the least, not good.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Maybe the US troops in Iraq should come back to liberate this country.
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.
... 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?
You assume the dictator is the same person as the chief. Consider how long some of the current administration heads have been working in the government. My favorite example is Jack Valenti. He gets onto the radar of these young nerds because of recent dealings in the entertainment industry. But how many realize that he'd occupied a position of authority for 4 decades? How many know he was in the JFK motorcade?
Consider Ashcroft's career. Did you vote for Ashcroft? He had power 8 years ago, and he will probably still have power 8 years hence, even though Mr. Bush will be quietly enjoying his retirement.
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?
The people fucking up the State are NOT elected, and they do NOT have finite limits on how long they can stay in power. Some of the most important people making some of the most significant decisions in the history of the country, weren't even elected by the people.
Too bad the misdirection works so well, making everybody point their blame the temp worker who occupies the hot seat while the real power people stay under the radar for decades.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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?
"Maybe the US troops in Iraq should come back to liberate this country."
Maybe they would if they had a reason.
What issue do you think is heavy enough to cause a military force to turn on its own command? There are countless examples from history, so we know that it's possible. But do you really believe the US has such an issue today, or will have, in the forseeable future? What issues would those be?
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. For your revolutionary scenario, all that would have to be pretty much the opposite of how it is right now, which is to say nothing of how bad things would have to get before the military *commanders* decided death was a better choice than fighting *for* the country.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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..."
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!
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.
...they're all Democrats! ;-)
It is interesting that back then all it took was a couple of guys with printing presses and a few with horses and a good oratory style to stir up a sufficient number of the population and start a revolution. This was over an outlandish tax rate of 10% to boot!
The Majority of the population of the colonies were not pro-revolution! The majority were either happy sheep or Torries. If memory serves me right the Torry population didn't all go to Canada either after the final outcome. A good portion of them hung around, grumbling; only to try and re-revolt in the war of 1812.
Now we have fat, dumb and happy sheep throughout the first world. What kind of government sponsored atrocities will it take to get the next batch of revolutionaries off their haunches?
I think we will see the slow constant erosion of rights till nothing is left.
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.
What else were they going to do... watch reruns?
No television = not sitting on your ass.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX