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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.
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
You have a dictator. Well it's heading that way, anyways.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
ok-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska
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
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!
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
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.
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?
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?... 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.
"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.