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Feds Check Credit Reports Without a Subpoena
An anonymous reader points out that, by using National Security Letters, the FBI and other agencies can legally pull your credit report. The letters have been used by the FBI (mostly) but in some cases by the CIA and Defense Department. From the article: "'These statutory tools may provide key leads for counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations,' Whitman said. 'Because these are requests for information rather than court orders, a DOD request under the NSL statutes cannot be compelled absent court involvement.'" Recipients of the letters, banks and credit bureaus, usually hand over the requested information voluntarily. A posting at tothecenter.com quotes the Vice President on the use of the letters: "It's perfectly legitimate activity. There's nothing wrong or illegal with it. It doesn't violate people's civil rights... The Defense Department gets involved because we've got hundreds of bases inside the United States that are potential terrorist targets."
Why is this any different than any other organization pulling my credit report? I check my reports every 3-4 months, and I see all sorts of people yanking my credit report. Mostly to send me junk mail that i throw away.
Its not like the government is going through my mail or listening to my phone calls...
OK, bad example.
I'm absolutely gobsmacked that the current US government continues doing things which shouldn't even be remotely constitutional, and claiming that it's perfectly legal.
I mean, every time I hear a legal opinion coming out of the White House, I'm forced to conclude that it, or something like it, has been struck down by the courts in the past. I don't believe there is any mechanism whereby the DoD can be pulling credit checks on citizens on the preteext that with so many bases, they need to protect them. This is crazy.
I'm glad my passport expired. I won't be travelling to your country any more -- your gestapo scares me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
'These statutory tools may provide key leads for counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations,' Whitman said. 'Because these are requests for information rather than court orders, a DOD request under the NSL statutes cannot be compelled absent court involvement.
Is that how they get around the privacy angle? Just rename it to an "information request", and somehow that makes the problem go away. Just like torture is "creative interrogation".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
In my experience credit reports are horribly inaccurate because there appears to be no validation at all. My mortgage application was put on hold when my credit report revealed an unpaid Macy's credit card from 1968. I wasn't even born yet. So at the top of the page is my correct birthday with obviously incorrect information below it. The credit agency refused to fix the data. I had to call Macy's and find someone who would send a letter to the credit agency to say I didn't open an account before I was born.
I also know someone who has the exact same name as someone else with just a one digit difference in SSNs. Bad info about this other stranger shows up on his credit report every few years. The credit agencies refuse to fix the data problems themselves.
So the last thing I want is the federal government flagging me as a potential terrorist because of some type-o that no one is willing to fix. Not only should these queries require court oversight, but they should be made directly to the institutions where the accounts are held so they're very specific and more likely accurate.
Developers: We can use your help.
Let's apply the same logic to other threats to our armed forces. For example: speeding on our nations highways. There are almost 2 million military personell in this country, and they're exposed to risks on our highways just like the rest of us. Statistically, on average each of us has about a 1 in 10,000 risk of being killed each year in an auto accident. That would mean that just since 9/11, probably over 1000 of our troops have been killed in accidents, not to mention thousands more serious casualties. This is a bigger loss to our military than almost any conceivable terrorist threat to our military bases would be, and about 1/3 as much as we've lost in Iraq.
Now, we can presume that most accidents involve excessive speeds. Clearly, to mitigate this huge drain on the nation's defenses, we must fight speeding. I say that it's high time that we took advantage of the assets we have to cut down on this threat. We should task the Air Force to use their fleet of unmanned drones to patroll the skies over our highways. With the advanced imaging technology, they should be able to track and evaluate nearly every vehicle on our major freeways. Once people start getting tickets with a NORAD return address nearly every time they violate the law, they're going to start thinking twice about putting our troops at risk on our roadways. It would be a huge tragedy if we as a nation are unwilling or unable to use every tool at our disposal to protect our troops.
What every one of us seems to be missing is the bigger question. Why are financial institutions allowed to provide your private financial records to another private organization? If I were to ask my bank for another customer's financial records they'd laugh. Why? Because it is ILLEGAL to provide that information to me. Why do we allow these institutions to give our private data to the credit bureaus in the first place. Find the administration responsible for allowing that to happen and you'll find the root of this problem
Yes, they do sanity check things. The trouble is, an organization like a government (or a corporation, even) does not operate with the same moral concepts as individual humans. (Should they? Many think so - but the point is that they don't.) A government's view of the country is that in order to do their job better, they need more control. Nearly any power-vested entity has a similar outlook. (That sounds like a rant, I don't mean it to.)
Our moral outlook is that our privacy is important to us. A government's fear-based outlook is that our "private" lives could potentially hide threats to their wellbeing, or to "society" in general. A corporation's perspective is that the most important thing to do is Whatever Makes More Money for Shareholders. This is why "Don't get caught" seems to be more of a governing rule for many non-individuals.
To them, we are a statistic -- 1 of 298 million. If 1% of your constituents (or customers) gets royally screwed by the system, who cares? Mistakes, accidents, etc harm more than that, and besides -- how many of that group actually deserved such screwing?
As individuals, the potential screw-ees, we obviously care a lot more. We see the marginalization of rights, "security theater", and inconveniences which make our individual lives harder, with little noticeable increase in safety, satisfaction, or other intangibles which we value. We see how it impacts US.
For example: Whenever I walk into many stores (e.g., Best Buy, Fry's, Costco), there are security people (or even employees) monitoring the exits, assuming that I could be the next shoplifter. So, they want me to show receipts, walk through a detector, etc. Great - I am not having to prove that I'm not a thief, every time I leave a store. From their perspective, it reduces shoplifting by X%, and thereby reducing their losses and increasing profits -- it's hard to see the business sense in NOT doing it (especially when all your competitors are too).
Similarly, when we go to the airport, we're herded as cattle, and need to produce ID and other documentation at many stages, all because it's viewed as "making travel more secure". Honestly, I imagine it might
So yes -- rest assured that many people have "sanity-checked" the practices and systems by which the government operates. They just are operating with different goals and values, so their sanity checks will return different values than yours or mine.