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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.
we've got hundreds of bases inside the United States that are potential terrorist targets
And we don't want those bases blown up by terrorists with bad credit.
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.
Hey guys, why do i suddenly have an account in the Cayman islands in the name of "Bobby Bo's Bread Shop"? And when did i suddenly take a $2 million loan from a Saudi oil company?
Guys?... Gu-...
The power of investigating certain financial records (such as credit reports) without a warrent was around before PATRIOT, most notably for suspected drug dealers.
It would be silly for the government not to exercise that same power against potential terrorists as long as the power was legal.
So don't thank PATRIOT, thank precedent set by the older drug-fighting legislation.
I have two questions:
When I think about it, everything in my credit report is the result of a public transaction. While I believe credit reports are being used inappropriately by employers, etc... I can't see how anyone believes this information to be private. In fact, most corporations who report to credit reporting agencies publicize this fact because they believe it deters fraud.
Now, whether or not the credit reporting agencies should be gathering this information, and how society depends on it, are a whole different matter.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
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.
You don't own your account information with your bank unless your bank explicitly tells you they don't share it with anyone - but they won't, because they regularly share this info with law enforcement.
If I were, for some wierd reason, sit across the street from you and record each day when you leave and when you return, I could give the info to anyone and the government would not need a warrent to use it in court. Observing someone's behavior in either commercial or otherwise public transactions is legitemate.
Do you think the IRS needs a warrent to go after you for a fraudulent tax form - just to see the tax form?
Check the original article, not the title. The title says "credit report", but the original article says "banking and credit records", which includes a complete list of all money in and out, and who that money came from or goes to, which usually gives information about the types of things you are spending money on. This can reveal what type of magazines you buy, how much you drink, whether or not you're seeing a shrink, whether you're seeing medical specialists, what you pay for on the internet, etc... So yes, it is equivalent to going through your mail and listening to phone calls.
Well if all it takes $100USD I say we all chip in and get Bush and Cheney's Credit reports pulled and see if we get stopped or not. If they can pull ours then we have EVERY right to pull theirs!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Sweet! All I have to do is forge a letter from the FBI and I can get my credit report for free, if only that was legal...
Also, is anybody reminded of those Nixon tapes where the guy laments that the "jews" at the IRS would not release his political opponents' tax returns to the President (IRS being)
As today, I would guess back then Nixon wanted the info to stop the terrorists and keep America safe...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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.
"Cheney's Law" is "I am the Law".
I just watched Sen Feinstein (D-CA) telling the (probably empty, except the C-SPAN camera) Senate floor about how Chief Inqusitor^W^WAttorney General Gonzales has been firing US Attorneys in various districts, without any just cause (except "just 'cause I say so"), replacing them with "interim" Attorneys to last the rest of Bush's administration, avoiding the required Senate confirmation, to determine the outcomes of specific cases in their calendars. Like the "recess appointments" of Bush admin hacks like UN bomber^WAmbassador John Bolton and others. A "loophole" designed into the Patriot Act II (With a Vengance) voted in by the Republican Congress in 2006, which threw away the old "120 days maximum" for "interim" Attorney appointments, in favor of... as long as the Attorney General pleases, with whoever he pleases, whenever he pleases. Pleases himself, that is, not people interested in justice or Constitutional rule.
And this morning I read how Republicans want courts martial to try civilians. I expect they'll lock up trying war profiteers like Halliburton, find them "not guilty/liable", and use our Constitution's "no double jeopardy" rules to exclude real courts from trying them and exposing the evidence to shareholders and citizens. Then I won't be surprised when Bush/Cheney/Gonzales find excuses to apply military courts all over the globe. From US occupations like Afghanistan and Iraq, to battlegrounds in other countries like probably Iran and Syria, to anarchies where they're bombing like Somalia. Then widening to other Terror War territories, wherever they can find them. All in defiance of international laws, US treaties, and our Constitution itself, which is universal, yielding only in the face of sovereign foreign jurisdiction.
After all, Cheney/Gonzales/Bush don't even have any use for the required FISA court that bends over backwards to grant warrants, even after the fact, when spying on Americans. Why shouldn't this gang of "Conservatives" use the laws they've passed the past 6 years with their wholly-owned Congressional subsidiary to do whatever they want, regardless of how tyrannical?
After all, there's no law against Cheney lying to us on TV talk shows - as far as Cheney cares, anyway.
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make install -not war
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.
The analysis over at The Volokh Conspiracy seemed to make sense. In particular "...instead of just informally requesting information in a context that would make clear the request is voluntary, the DoD and CIA seem to be issuing their requests using letters that look a lot like "real" National Security Letters. If that's right, the government would know that the letters have no legal effect, but they would be written so as to try to trick the recipients into thinking that they do."
This looks like more bending of the current administration's penchant for the rules to the breaking point (or past), using the excuse of a drastic threat to society. While I'm slightly sympathetic to such for dire threats, there is no evidence of this being for the unimaginably rare (dinosaur killer asteroid heading for earth) or for even the horrifically unthinkable (better than 50-50 chance of a million plus deaths). Instead, it's an attempt to covertly and permanently expand domestic intelligence powers when the legislature has refused to endorse such expansion.
Everyone should remember: "defending the Constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic" can include defending against yourself and your own darker impulses, and against any of lesser honor who may come to serve after you.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Clearly you don't understand what the word "liberal" means. I mean, Castro is very left wing: do you think he never spys on his subjects?
Hardly anyone uses the right mneaning for "liberal" today. A Liberal used to be someone who stood for Liberty and Small government. They stressed the "importance of human rationality, individual property rights, natural rights, constitutional limitations of government, the protection of civil liberties, an economic policy with heavy emphasis on free markets". Today's liberals or neoliberals seem more like socialists with bigger government, bigger public ie government programs, and penalizing businesses.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Technically, the company making a "pre-approved" offer hasn't actually seen your credit report. They simply ask the reporting agency to give them a list of names/addresses for people that meet a certain criteria. You give them permission to make the full inquiry when you return the application.
You can exclude yourself from the pre-screen lists at http://www.optoutprescreen.com/. I'm a bit concerned about the legitimacy of the site, but I've found multiple referrals to it from legitimate sources, including the FTC. If you aren't convinced, you can download the printed form from the site and snail-mail it to the three reporting agencies. The snail-mail method is required for permanent opt-out, anyway.