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Feds Arrest Private Eye at HOPE
An anonymous reader writes "FBI agents today arrested Steven Rambam, the owner of a company that bills itself as the largest privately held online investigative service in the United States, according to Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog. From the story: 'Rambam was arrested this afternoon by FBI agents just moments before he was to lead a panel discussion on privacy here at the HOPE hacker conference in New York City. Rambam and three other panelists were to discuss how they dug up -- in just 4.5 hours of searching private and public databases -- more than 500 pages worth of data on HOPE attendee Rick Dakan, who agreed to be the guinea pig for the project.'"
According to this article, he has been involved in a lawsuit against a spam blocker (his company was mistakenly placed on a spam blocklist), he has tracked Nazi war criminals, and he discovered that
Elvis has Jewish ancestors.
He's had a mention in a previous slashdot comment in this article Comment title: "Outsourcing is a way around civil liberties". Article summary:
I saw a talk by Steve Rambam at Hope 05. Besides a live demo of a database that freakin blew my mind (in a live demo in than 30 seconds, steve pulled up everything about a guy in the audience, including past roommates, active phone lines, and his mom's credit report using *ONLY HIS SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER*).
his assertion is that privacy is dead, not because Big Brother in D.C. is watching, but because Big Defense Contrator is watching. The government, sick of trying to ram through legislation on what it can and can't do with data it collects on its citizens, is now sub-contracting all kinds of tasks. For example, perhaps the Feds can't do a nation-wide driver's license photo scan without inciting privacy concerns; however, if most of the states sub-contract out their photo processing to a contractor on advice from big brother, then that contractor hires itself to the big brother and sells *RESULTS* from some data mining query (but never the data itself), then big brother hasn't violated any privacy rights. Similarly for phone logs, criminal databases, airline data, medicare, drivers license, health databases, traffic tickets etc.
he told me the name of the database we should all really be afraid of, bigger than Echelon, but i forgot its name.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
On the subject of Rambam check out previous talks given at HOPE conferences. He's a good speaker and quite interesting on the topic of information availability. He stated a couple of weeks ago in an interview leading up to this conference's talk that he had planed to do the same basic presentation at the last hope but the "victim" got cold feet at the last moment after he realized just how much information was available and threatened to sue. If you listen to the old presentations he does make a point that almost any information is available legally but it is more difficult to get it legally than illegally. I have to believe from hearing him speak several time that what he would have done for this presentation would at least to be best of his knowledge been legal.
Four previous presentations.
Privacy - Not What It Used To Be
http://www.the-fifth-hope.org/mp3/privacy.mp3
Databases and Privacy
http://h2k2.hope.net/media/databases.mp3
Information on the Masses with Steve Rambam.
http://h2k.hope.net/post/panels/h2kinfo.mp3
Info for Masses
ftp://ftp.2600.com/pub/oth/beyondh/nfo4mses.ra
HOLY CRAP!!! Don't you EVER read the newspapers??? About 3 to 4 months ago, FBI guy arrested for child porn stuff. Awhile prior to that, big scandal about feebs trying to pull scam on Wall Street brokerage and people, prior to that, those FBI people convicted of being Mafia snitches, gave criminals inside information leading to murders of FBI informants. Ever hear of Ruby Ridge? FBI Assistant Director (under Louis "the Sicilian" Freeh's reign) was demoted before being tried, and convicted for obstruction of justice, falsification of evidence, etc., etc. Later his sentence was overturned when Bushies came into power....Please get with the program and stay current...and note I haven't even mentioned the five FBI agents busted for selling secrets to the Soviets over the preceding thirty years....
Steve Rambam is a licensed private eye, and according to the guinea pig (I'm attending the conference) he signed a waiver and Steve used only legal databases. Steve was also running an intensive mini con on the 6th floor (Hope is on 2 and 18) and was arrested after that. That mini-con was private-eye oriented, not hacker.
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
If only for Rambam's suit against oretec and Joe Jared, I'd say it was fate balancing the scales.
And again, this is in advance of knowing what Rambam is charged with. If it's silly, then I'll have to (yuck!) support him. If it is legitimate AND he's guilty, then I hope he gets tossed in jail and the key thrown away.
My sense of justice doesn't allow me to not object when an injustice is done, even if it's against someone I think deserves what happens for another reason. The law must be fair and just for everyone, even if I think a particular person is a piece of human garbage.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
It's not really funny if you know who he is. "Emmanuel Goldstein" is the founder of 2600, and that's not his real name (it's Eric Corley). The name was deliberately chosen to draw the parallels you're attributing to coincidence.
Here's another example:
Benemar Benatta was arrested in September, 2001 after the 9/11 dragnet. The government determined he was innocent in November, 2001. He was held in solitary confinement for 6 months anyway.
He was released... yesterday. July 22, 2006. That's right, held without charges even though he was known to be innocent for almost 5 years.
I'm not making this up, here's the link