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U.S. Gov't Spent $30M On Citizens' Personal Info
infosec_spaz writes "According to a news story on Yahoo! News, the U.S. Government has spent US$30 million in the last year on buying citizens' personal phone records from online brokers...The very ones who Congress is trying to put out of business." From the Article:"Congressional investigators estimated the U.S. government spent $30 million last year buying personal data from private brokers. But that number likely understates the breadth of transactions, since brokers said they rarely charge law enforcement agencies any price." "So...who is getting all of BellSouth, SBC(AT&T) and other phone records?"
FBI lawyers rationalized that even though data brokers may have obtained financial information, agents could still use the information because brokers were not acting as a consumer-reporting agency but rather as a data warehouse.
So seriously, what's the difference?
How can it be legal to sell this information? I am not American so I don't understand the laws. I am used to laws where there are strict rules for all companies that holds personal information, what they can do with it and how they shall protect it.
Can you also sell personal information from websites? Like what people have visited etc.
Perhaps if you own a site where peole have used their credit card. Can you sell the information about what they have done?
This all comes down to what you are scared of and who you trust.
Scared of: unfettered Government, people with criminal intent, and the day there's a knock on my door and they tell me that because one of my genes is linked to future terorist behavior, I'm being preventatively detained.
Who I trust: Myself, my wife, the most immediate members of my family, my best friend and his family and nobody else I don't know inside and out.
Most people cannot handle freedom and they want someone else to tell then what they can and cannot do. We need to fix the people more than we need to fix the government.
I agree. I'm suggesting we "fix" anybody with an IQ lower than 100. Letting them breed is a bad idea.
People are people; many have more than a few brain cells to rub together, they just haven't been trained to use them. That is indeed the fault of the educational system, which is run by the states (bad idea) and has no cohesion or standardization. We're spending so much time on helping children develop their feelings, that while they are very in touch with themselves, they haven't got the common sense of a kangaroo rat. They do stupid things like believe the guy on the other end of the IM "wants to be their friend"; then they grow up and believe "the government is only doing its job."
THe solution is simple: Americans need to take back their government, put people in positions of authority with some common sense and foresight, and teach kids to read, write, do math and take responsibility for themselves and their actions.
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http://www.gregpalast.com/massacre-of-the-buffalo- soldiers#more-1418
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"African-American Soldiers Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List"
"A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority precincts."
"Here's how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, "Do not forward", to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as "undeliverable."
"The lists of soldiers of "undeliverable" letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters' registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted."
"The BBC obtained several dozen confidential emails sent by the Republican's national Research Director and Deputy Communications chief, Tim Griffin to GOP Florida campaign chairman Brett Doster and other party leaders. Attached were spreadsheets marked, "Caging.xls." Each of these contained several hundred to a few thousand voters and their addresses.
"A check of the demographics of the addresses on the "caging lists," as the GOP leaders called them indicated that most were in African-American majority zip codes."
http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=502&row=0
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THE SPIES WHO SHAG US
by Greg Palast
I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
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It's worth reading, that and Choicepoint's responses. Palast (American with a BBC broadcast) has an entire chapter on the subject called "Double Cheese with Fear" in his book on the subject, "Armed Madhouse".
Silly American government, spending taxpayers money buying personal data...
The US Intelligence Agencies don't bother paying for British citizen's personal data; they just jack into the live feed
The problem is that anyone can buy this information. Of course it's disgraceful that the government is using illegal or questionably legal means to gether information, but it's even more outrageous that anyone at all with a modest stack of cash can get this information.
What if someone holding a grudge against you decided to avail themselves of these services? Anyone here been involved in an acrimonious legal proceeding?
Hey, the American government does too! Don't you worry... I once put an unlikely typo into my IRS tax return and in DAYS I was getting junk mail with the very same typo.
So can we now use the Freedom of Information Act to request this data legally?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It's amazing that in a consumer driven society the people with the most influence rarely effect a change as often as they bitch about it. It's not difficult to understand why this happens though. Even I would rather go snowboarding then march to washington and line Pennsylvania Avenue with fancy signs and flaming bags of poo.
I do vote though and write my congressmen about important issues -- which should be enough to effect a change IF more people would do the same.
Life is very much about competition, and crafty companies and governments hoard information and dish out only what they want you to hear. But then again, I bet you do the same thing on a personal level too. Only someone without self-preservation would share the same information with his or her boss AND coworkers AND spouse AND surley DMV worker, et al. Of course, companies and governments can do this on a larger scale and with a greater effect than you can, but it is the same thing and can be just as damaging. Granted there IS a difference between Ford's Pinto fiasco and not telling Jane Rottencrotch that you just gave her herpes, but just look through your local newspaper if you want real-world examples. But I digress...
In a society where people don't need to make any sacrifices -- EVEN DURING A WAR -- it's not surprising that the US public has slowly let companies collect more and more information. Whether you look at marketing companies, software EULAs, the actions of the RIAA or phone companies, or even the US Government, the story is basically the same: take without asking and check if anybody notices. Repeat.
Nobody wants to give a few minutes out of their schedules to pay attention or care about any sort of accountability. Data brokers have been operating legally for quite some time now, but I doubt public opinion of them has changed. They were bad news when they started and they're still bad news today. Perhaps more people know about them today, but does that mean more people will do something about them? It's OK as long as it's not in my backyard.
Instead of being shocked and annoyed that the US Government would utilize information from legal data mining companies, realize that: your fellow citizens do it to each other every day, and that you do have the power to do something about it.
It's almost noon. I need to finish my beer and get back to Langley.
The same people responsible for hating to pay for education & public-safety seem to be quite happy giving up tax-money to build prisons though.
Thing is, I hate to pay taxes not because I don't think these things need improvment, but because the government seems to constantly waste money. This is a prime example. Our government is more worried about enforcing copyright, spying on it's own citizens, fighting a war in Iraq and making sure gays don't get married, stoping public smoking and primarily wasting money in general than they are about law enforcement and education. Even programs designed for law enforcement or eductation (No Child Left Behind, Click-it or Ticket) are smokescreens designed to distract us from real problems.
My cynicism has grown to the point where I've pretty much ceased to have any empathy for what crimes happen to upper-middle-class & richer folks, unless they're someone who I might know personally.
Worst part is, the upper-middle class and up people aren't the ones most of the crime happens to. They live in nice neighborhoods that don't allow sex-offenders or any manner of riff raff to live near them. They hire security guards and create gated communities. Meanwhile it's our society's lower class that has to deal with the crime. That's why areas in big cities get ignored, no rich people live there and the cops don't feel like risking their lives for $12/hour.
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"Of course they are."
So this contradicts what you were saying earlier? I'm just not sure if you were writing of something else when you said it wasn't government...
"I'm not sure I see how this is systemic. There are hundreds of thousands of government employees. That there were a small number of them that racked up $30m doing something doesn't really make it seem that systemic to me."
$30 mil is a lot of money for a 'small number' of individuals. Does the system (the government) allow this activity? The answer is likely yes... otherwise proper oversight (I know, that's hard enough to get in the federal bureaucracy) would have stopped it. If it were a handful of 'rogue' individuals, that would be one thing -- but I think we're talking hundreds or thousands of individuals, which clearly indicates systemic approval of the process. Sure, there are 10^5's of govt employees, but how many are involved in investigations, which is the subset we should be concerned with? How many of those are involved at the level of investigation that would require this sort of info-gathering? I think we're looking at this method of investigation as being a de facto source for info, as it is more expensive (time-wise) and more risky (success-wise) to approach a court for a warrant.
"This (as in the subject of the article) has nothing to do with the NSA or the large-scale business of gathering phone records."
Sure it does, they are both issues involving the right to privacy and excessive government access to personal information. Yes, phone records are not private per se, but the basic issue is still the same. With the NSA issue, the real problem is fishing and data mining as investigative methods (not allowed). With the issue in TFA, the issue is use of illegal methods to gain access to information. They are still two sides of the same polygon.
"You could spend that much 10,000 times before you became a line-item on the federal budget. Think about that for a second."
That's not the issue either. I believe your point is that the amount of money is insignificant, and therefore can be explained away by rogue employees acting against the rules. To let you know, I'm an accountant by trade -- and while the general federal budget would not include an item that small (except when it can't be jammed into another budget for legal reasons), that budget is made up of hundreds or thousands of hierarchical budgets. $30 mil would definitely be significant to a lot of those budgets. Again, you have to look at the $30mil or the number of employees in the context of what's being spent on investigative services in the same vein if you want to determine relevance and the likelihood that the problem is systemic or not.
Froma corporate perspective, does a $2,000 expense matter to a company with a revenue of $2MM a year (BTW, that's MM as in the accounting thousand thousand, not as in the metric Mega Mega)? You can bet it does. How about 10 $200 expenses? Or even 200 $10 expenses? Drops in the bucket, but important nonetheless -- and they definitely indicates a systemic problem.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
By your reasoning, those that advocate the use of paper money are placing unfounded trust in their government. After all, even if you're an advocate of the gold standard, you're forced to trust that the government will give you $1 of gold if you trade in a $1 bill. If you don't believe in the gold standard, you're an even bigger government loving hippy, since the entire value of US currency is based on faith in the government.
:)
There are a whole heap of services for which government must exist, and the very function of government cannot be fulfilled without the peoples' faith in it. Those who mistrust government outright are merely failing to logically think through the ramifications of their beliefs.
So then, the question becomes not one of "do you trust your government", but "how much do you trust your government?" Reasonable people can disagree on where that line should be drawn, and oppose faith in the government in one case and favor it in another case without being inconsistent. It is entirely consistent, then, to both oppose things like government sponsored data-mining, which cannot be audited for security purposes, while favoring government healthcare, which can be audited and monitored. One could argue that government programs lend themselves to corruption, but then again, private enterprise is not immune to corruption either. For many of the basic services of an interdependent society to function, you must trust someone else. The question is, who do you trust? Do I trust my HMO more than the DHHS? I don't see why I should. Do I trust my phone company more than the NSA? I surely do, and I think I have rational reasons to. On the other hand, do I trust private defense contractors* more than NASA? Hell no!
The government isn't a big monolithic entity, and entities within the government can rightfully compete with private enterprise for your trust. A well-functioning bureaucracy is vital to any modern state, and the United States' is remarkably free of corruption, with a strong adherence to the rule of law. Placing your trust in that bureaucracy is not necessarily misguided, given adequate transparency.
*) I work for one, so don't take that as a knee-jerk reaction against defense contractors
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And a darn good thing, too. I want those perverts in jail where they can
.02
a) be away from kids, and
b) know the fear and intimidation of being powerless against their attackers.
I know people get bent out of shape 'round here about "Your Rights Online" and claim that the thought police are unfairly busting people for mere fantasy, but I strongly object to that characterization.
No physical act every occurs that doesn't first occur in someone's mind. Sexual "fantasy" eventually moves from thought to action. Lust is demanding, and unchecked, is never satisfied. We're talking about adults, making plans to go see young teenage boys or girls with the explicit intent to have sex with them. These people *do* take advantage of kids, and I think it's great that someone is stepping in to hold them accountable.
You don't have the right to nurture fantasies about sex with children. I don't care if you think you do. It's twisted, and kids will be harmed if that kind of thinking is not stopped.
To put it another way, when it was almost universally "unthinkable" in our culture to hit little old ladies over the head with rocks, it *almost* never happened. The prevalence and anonymity of internet pornography increases the undercurrent of societal acceptance of this kind of behavior. As more people become perverted in their thinking, molestation of kids *will* increase. Someone needs to stop it.
Just my
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Run for office, and I might just vote for you. I used to be a Republican, but that was back when that party actually stood for something tangible. Now I just vote for whichever guy is going to let me stay armed while the country goes to hell in a handbasket, and requires me to pay the least amount of taxes necessary into our broken system.
... sometimes" or "I don't hate gay people, I just don't like them being gay") rise to the top. Involvement in government self-selects for people who have a desire for power, and they're often the worst people for the job. But it's the tendency of a democracy to encourage people who'll say anything for votes, and do anything for contributions; rinse, repeat.
I probably wouldn't be so averse to paying taxes if I actually trusted the people I elected not to waste it, but I've yet to see someone on the ballot (at anything more than a local level) that I'd say that about, in either party. As long as I suspect that they're going to waste and squander everything that they take out of my paycheck, I'm just going to vote for whoever wastes the least, and lets me retain the most to spend on myself and my (future) family.
However, I'm not sure that the system is designed to let trustworthy people with actual values (and I don't mean the Fox News "values" so often espoused by members of the Right, e.g. "abortion is bad
For that reason, somehow I suspect I'll always be voting for the "sucks least" candidate.
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