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An Epidemic of Snooping
Travoltus writes "Privacy advocates are frequently confronted with the rhetorical question, 'If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have a good reason to worry about losing your privacy, right?' This AP story uncovers a vast, distributed, decentralized epidemic of snooping into databases of personal information by workers at major utilities, the IRS, and other large organizations. In a number of cases these incidents have led to real harm. One striking example involves now ex-Mayor of Milwaukee Marvin Pratt, who had a pattern of being late paying his heating bills. This fact was leaked to the media by a utility worker and may have led to Pratt's losing a bid for re-election. As one can imagine, the harm becomes much greater when this same snooping is done by Government officials to deal with political enemies, or by corporations to uncover whistleblowers."
How's this for an answer:
I do have stuff to hide. It's just not illegal stuff.
A co-workers once made the same statement to me regarding warrantless wiretapping -- why hide anything if you are not guilty. The response is simple:
- Do you have a daughter?
- Would you mind preparing a binder with photos of her, along with all her diary entries, emails and phone conversations and sending a copy to every police officer in the city?
This will shut up most people. -----------
/. Mathematics:
+1 Insightful for encouraging killing of Muslims
-1 Troll for Muslims responding to such messages
I misread the title as "An Epidemic of Spoofing" and, seeing the binoculars, assumed that this was some hyped up article about how privacy advocates are destroying the credibility of the Internet.
I'm so glad you feel that way, I'll be right over with a camera to video you shagging the misses. We can put in online for the world to see... nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?
is that when politicians have access to spy on people... who are they going to abuse it against? They're political rivals.. ohh but they'd never do that.. A President hasn't got impeached and resigned from office from doing just that..
I knew a girl who had a cop look up her name and address from her car's plate just to flirt with her. She was a bit freaked out by it.
Table-ized A.I.
Who the hell is going to believe that he lost his bid for re-election because he was frequently delinquent in paying his utility bills?
Bear in mind that we live in a nation that's over nine trillion dollars in debt. Whoever believes horseshit like the above has no sense of scale.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
There is nothing to worry about, we are only here to help you.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Darned if I can't find the link, but I remember reading about people being required to turn over their encryption keys to police in "routine" checks, even though there was no evidence of wrongdoing. If they refused to do so they were charged with something, and I think this was at the boarder or something similar.
Why must evil corporations go out of their way to violate the privacy of others? I would never do such a thing. Now excuse me, for I have some other things to do today, such as this and this. Oh, and I have a date tonight and I want to get to know her. I even picked the movie!
"One striking example involves now ex-Mayor of Milwaukee Marvin Pratt, who had a pattern of being late paying his heating bills. This fact was leaked to the media by a utility worker and may have led to Pratt's losing a bid for re-election. "
It can also lead to problems with getting and retaining good credit.
What I like to do to those "If you have nothing to hide" people is tell them the truth. I make sure to tell them about all of the weird fetishes I wank off to, my thoughts on the whole "don't eat your own boogers" conspiracy, and whatever twisted thoughts are going through my mind at the moment.
My right to privacy isn't for my sake, it is for everyone else. Their fragile minds can't handle the onslaught of awkwardness I bring down upon them.
"Everyone poops, but it takes a special person to do it in public."
(Dunno where I read it.)
First, things that are legal are not always socially acceptable. Your weekend bar escapades and porn habits are probably quite legal, but it may not be in your best interests for the outside world to know about your attraction to midget transvestites.
Secondly, and more importantly, things that are legal and/or acceptable now might not be in the future. Look at drug use, for example. There was no point in hiding it back in the 70's, because "everybody did it", and now it's coming back to haunt people (like politicians). People shouldn't be scrutinized because they have the brains to foresee that stuff they're doing today might bite them in the ass later.knowledge is power. If you give someone too much power(knowledge) they will eventually abuse it.
I may have nothing to hide, but I do have a lot to loose.
i'll admit right now that i didnt rtfa. but.. working on the premise is that some guy lost an election because the public found out he doesn't pay bills on time, isn't it possible that if everyone's bill paying habits were public knowledge that his behavior would have been much less interesting or exceptional? I'd bet there are tons of people in all walks of life that have for whatever reason failed to pay bills on time, but since that knowledge is not public this guy stands out. so maybe the real problem is the privacy of everyone elses habits, not that his were exposed.
-Lod
I make sure to tell them about all of the weird fetishes I wank off to.
:).
If you have nothing to hide...
Now let me make some popcorn up for us, and tell us more about your weird fetishes you wank on
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
why is this concept hard to grasp?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
They are right...those who say that they have nothing to hide. There is privacy, data security and physical security. Data security is keeping data safe that could be used maliciously. And then there is privacy that is personal info about habits and the character of a person. I believe in secure data and physical security of a building, parking lot, safety deposit box, etc, but I don't believe in privacy. If you are a celebrity, you better be willing to blow off the intrusions because you KNOW people are going to intrude. People can be downright rude, mean and nasty.( they can also be good, but honestly the vast majority of us are somewhere in between and somewhat unpredictable at times) If you're running for mayor and you have trouble paying your power bill there's no way in hell I'd vote for you. So yes, that could have swayed a number of votes. In this case it was both a privacy and a data security breach to a point. It wasn't an actual breach of data but a violation of ethics in using data that the employee had access to in a malicious way. I do NOT support that kind of ethics violating behavior and the employee should be fired or at least disciplined harshly. But on the other hand the person running for mayor should have had the good sense to pay his bills on-time. Shouldn't our leaders be held to a higher standard? Hopefully now after reading this story we will do a couple things. 1. Not put ourselves in a situation to get fired by using secure data in an illegal way. 2. Not steal, cheat, or lie period at anything. At one point in my life I felt it was alright to lie to get my way in minor areas of my life. Gradually I've eliminated lying altogether because I realized that lying was getting the better of me and I was lying more and more about things to cover up my laziness. It's better to tell the truth no matter the harshness of the reality. Humans use lying to achieve lazy goals that they don't sometimes consciously think about. And they also tend to over exaggerate at times as well. Which is another form of lying. If we have done our best we should never think it's the right thing to do or to even consider lying in order to make another person happy. That's all i have to say. Thanks for reading. Now go and do the right thing.
I'm pretty sure the video my girlfriend made of me chasing her around the apartment dressed as Captain Cocktastic doesn't actually violate any laws (There's nothing on the books in Canada about good taste as far as I know).
On the other hand, I doubt whether having it posted on the internet would help my political career all that much, if I had one. Unless I was running in Toronto/Rosedale, of course.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I think it's ironic that this is being described as a consequence of vast computer databases. While it's probably true that computers have increased the incidence of curiosity snooping by making it less trouble to look up records I suspect this sort of thing has been going on forever. The real contribution of computers is to record access and expose the snooping.
How seriously to take this and what can be done about it are both interesting questions. Fundamentally it's a difficult problem because there is no obvious moral barrier that people cross when they engage in this behavior. I mean suppose you work at the utility and regularly pull up client's records for valid purposes. It isn't going to seem like a harm to anyone to pull up one more record. I mean does it really make a difference that you pulled up the mayor's form out of curiosity rather than for a business reason? After all it was just luck that you weren't assigned to deal with that record anyway. Worse given the difficulty in preciscely definining what you want to prevent it makes it hard to prevent with mandatory access controls.
Now I share the immediate intuition that something is bad about these voyeristic breaches of privacy but I can't exactly put my finger on what if anything is wrong with it. True, someone might use the information to my detriment (share it etc..) but that's equally true about anyone viewing my information whether voyeuristicly or not. I mean consider two companies A and B. Company A's policies mean that in the normal course of buisness only one person will ever examine your data but someone at company A is curious so another person peeks at your information. On the other hand company B has a policy where each month they assign each of their customer service reps to review a random selection of accounts for errors so after the course of 20 years a fairly large number of people have thumbed through your file. To the extent that we want to conceal information or avoid identity theft the company that has more legitimate reasons to examine your data may very well be a higher risk than the one that lets the voyeur look at your recrods. So is it snooping that we want to eliminate or do we want to minimize access more generally?
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
... again and again and again and ...
I'm always amazed just how often this and other nonsense comes up. Then I remember that today's people have attention spans of chronically depressed Lemmings and it all comes rushing back... along with that deep sickening sinking feeling.
At any rate, here's a good essay (found it linked to on Schneier's blog) that destroys the argument:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
Just used it on my parents a couple days ago. Spread it around!
The reason privacy safeguards need to be in place is because the people working at the IRS and other organizations are just regular people too. They are not "better" at handling power than anyone else.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
If a person is an upstanding member of the community that has done nothing wrong in any way, is law abiding, upright, honest and noncontroversial in their actions why should (s)he worry about revealing everything there is to know about (her)himself? Why should this person's privacy be protected? some may assert that the government should be allowed to distribute personal records about people so that they can do their jobs better and make crime more difficult. Right? WRONG! Privacy and its onus on the individual is misplaced and misguided. Privacy and anonymity is to ensure that people are protected from those with malicious intent, privacy and anonymity is never intended to help a person break the law. This is the case people use against privacy.
Privacy and anonymity is not to protect people so they can commit crimes, it is to protect the individual from the many criminal and malicious elements, whether they be political, criminal, mundane or otherwise.
Privacy protects against embarresment and shame of personal secrets, these may be medical ailments (such as that real severe case of haemorroids you got several years ago) and be through no fault of your own, or perhaps the stigma of a family member(goddamn you Uncle Joe! why did he have to do that to the poor horse, again, and again, and again!) with a criminal history or to protect against discrimination (ie. you're too old, fat, black, white, asian, feminine, masculine, ugly, beautiful... whoops maybe not that last one).
Anonymity protects free speech and future reprisals connected with said free speech being employed.
Anonymity protects whistle blowers that see others commiting a crime and allows the person to do the right thing and report the crime safely without jeopardising their job security or become victimised as a result of their actions. (wikileaks yeah!)
Privacy and anonymity protects against Identity theft, the act of stealing another persons identiy can devastate a persons credit history, with resolutions being either difficult or even impossible.
Privacy and anonymity can insulate an individual against premeditated crimes like stalking, premeditated rape or assault or other such crimes, can all be prevented it the person wishing to commit a crime against a person they have met either casually or online are not able to look up the persons personal details in the future and track them down.
Privacy protects against harassment either from other individuals or from companies that make irritating phone calls or send personalised junk mail. If privacy and anonymity were respected we WOULDN'T NEED "do not call lists" or white/black lists! To clarify, cold canvassing is a different story but usually a purchasers identity is bought for a business and they use that to profile and selectively call those most likely to be interested in a product. This happens ALOT.
Privacy and anonymity protects an individual from persons in high office in government that may target a particular individual or group for political reasons.
It doesn't matter who it is, privacy and anonymity should be respected by all individuals, groups, agents, organisations, companies and governments, only you can be trusted fully with your personal details and all the above mentioned should should respect the privacy of others and only release personal information about a person with their consent. In a world that hardly respects privacy to begin with, we have everything to hide. For a law abiding citizen that just wants to live their life their own way ALL the above resonings for privacy and anonymity apply!
We all need privacy - I mean, would you feel comfortable with knowing that there might be a camera in your bedroom? Or in your bathroom? There has to be a limit somewhere, a space where can be alone. Some people may not mind crapping in public (this was apparently what the Romans did, more or less), or knowing that their minds could be read electronically (the technology to do so is getting closer each day); but having a safe haven somewhere is a fundamental need for all living creatures, I think.
So, "I have nothing to hide" is simply not true. I have lots to hide, and I would prefer to have a say in what I have to reveal to others, if it's not too much trouble.
Mind if I follow you into the bathroom?
Some years ago, I had a very strange medical problem. A very severe auto-immune response. The doctors ran through the gamut. Rheumatoid Arthritis, Rheumatic fever, Lupus, Lyme's Disease, Lymphoma, Steve Johnson syndrome, eventually long shots, like HIV, advanced STDs. Nothing, nadda, zilch.
Eventually it was concluded it was a rare allergic reaction, just the right combination of things.
Well, about 3 weeks after the hospitalization, guess what comes in the mail?, a big splashy vivid orange package for fucking Rituxan (a lymphoma/arthritis medication). Is that any of my neighbors fucking business? No it's not.
A far more insidious (in my book) example. I racked up some debt taking care of my mother when she was dying. Anyway, for Valentine's, I send my girlfriend flowers at her work. Three days later, guess what? Creditors calling her work, asking for my girlfriend, and asking about my whereabouts. When asked how they got this number, they replied "We heard you were dating".
Outside of that one credit card transaction, there was no other paper trail connection to us otherwise, anywhere on earth. It's obvious they used the records to call her and harass her at work. That's not fucking right.
Now let's extrapolate that. Let's say I was a married or taken man, and that was not my wife? Would they have the right to potentially destroy a family or otherwise cause such destruction in someone's life?
Sure, some people will say, they would be getting what they deserved, but it misses the point, I'm of the mind that if business is allowed to get that personal, then it's a two way street, including grievous, personal harm in return.
On this subject, this was posted last summer, so some of you probably read it. Quite worth the read though, it makes valid points.
"I have nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/2054219
No wit here.
Definitely.. The arguement that you should have "nothing to hide" is not the point.. the example above of making your daughter's (well anyones diary) available is a good example. It may not be incriminating, but it is private (and hence potentially embarrassing to that person). Also, if these proponents of "nothing to hide" are so keen, why don't they put up their WHOLE life stories and personal details on MySpace/Facebook and see what happens (not that I have anything against these sites - apart from the stories of privacy and misuse of data by 3rd parties). The fact that a 3rd party can misuse this information is terrifying.. its like a divide between those who can snoop versus those who cannot. If a cop said to you, "oh you don't need a lawyer, you have nothing to hide".. would you? Even if you are not guilty, you would still want a lawyer to make sure due process is carried out and the cop is not "bending the rules".. The thing is, everyone has something to hide - it does not mean its wrong..
I'm an Oracle DBA and from what I've seen sometimes people don't even know they're breaking the law. The worst case of data theft without people knowing is when they take an export of production data to development for testing. You're not allowed to do that! I've seen organisations not even know what data they have or that it should be audited. And when it was audited the level of auditing was totally insufficient. Mainly because some clown set it up and didn't understand the requirements from management, or management let some clown set it up and didn't understand the requirements themselves but were glad to hear "it has auditing enabled".
I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way but since alot of companies have been outsourcing their systems to India data theft has increased (google for 'inda data theft'). for example - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/05/india_exposed/
Heh, I saw someone on the Oracle forums post a question, "how do I take an export of Production to import to my home PC" and judging by the name... and he even mentioned he's allowed?!
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=2289794�
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
These are slashdot posters. You will probably come back to find that Kim has been shut in the utility room and the cat has been raped.
Lets go with mandatory GPS implants then
Nobody likes a Nerd, or to be proved wrong. You put them in the position of being proved wrong by a nerd. Surprised they aren't happy? (Written by a nerd who has come to learn that that a discussion on quantum randomness and free-will is not what everyone looks for on a first date!)
I've been involved in testing a data scrambled for a European bank for exactly that purpose. They used a product that did a reasonable job, and with a few small changes we ensured that pattern analysis to rebuild the original source wouldn't work.
I've also dealt with both gov and financial people that understood the dangers of unauthorised access, some wnet so far as to insist on checking audit was correctly, which is IMHO a very intelligent form of self preservation - few realise that logging can also prove that you did NOT do it, a sure boon for the current trend of considering someone guilty until they prove themselves innocent..
Insert
One case in point that I often beat to death (among those who know me, of course!) is the case in California, where "Megan's Law" resulted in quite a few gays being put on the list because they were considered "sexual offenders" by an earlier set of laws, and their names remained in files sitting around in the office of the bureaucrats for years.
Do we all have stuff to hide? Yes! But what is wrong with that? Just because we have stuff to hide doesn't mean that it's "illegal" -- just that we don't want the entire world knowing about it as all. People tend to judge you on the basis of their own morality, and their own expectations. If you happen to simply not "fit in", you could be harassed by the very private information on yourself were it to be exposed.
So the whole sneaky argument of "do you have anything to hide" becomes a semantic one, one in which we all
privately answer "yes" to, but because of the implication we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Even the very question is in and of itself an invasion into our privacy. That very question turns privacy upside down and invites further inquiry. Instead, the question should be answered with a question -- the same question -- thrown back at the person asking it. And if said person says "no", then start asking that person really private questions and see how they respond. Questions like, "do you do cunninglingus with your wife" or similar. That act, by the way, is still considered illegal in some states!
So, the truth is, if you are human at all, you have something to hide. That is nothing to be ashamed of. There is nothing wrong with that. Privacy, by its very definition, is all about "hiding" details of your life you don't wish the world to know -- and of course, is nobody's business, anyway.
So, really, the question is really saying "Do you have anything to be private about", and nearly everyone of course will answer "yes" to that. If you have something you wish to keep private, then you have something you wish to keep hidden. Period.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I have a family member that works for an insurance company and she uses the companies gov database access for date screening.
One database issue I've thought about lately is due diligence in hiring. If a person submits a resume, that resume should be completely parsed and stored in a database and the original destroyed by someone who has no contact with anyone involved in checking data, verifying the data or analyzing the data. While all the data should (in theory) be verified, doing so without historical databases is difficult. Most of this verification probably does not need to be done in a way where the identity of the person the information is about.
For instance, say there is an address in a resume. Did that address exist at the time the resume said it did? If the address is for a business, did the business reside at that address when it said it did. If there is a phone number associated with an address, was that association in effect when the resume said it did?
If electronic databases are available, all of this can be done by program. It may be possible to manually do a bunch of this, but most organizations wouldn't prefer to do things that way. But in a manual verification, each piece of information needs to be tagged in some way with the identity of the person who submitted it. This could easily be some random string made up when the information is checked out, and is only used again to check in the results of the verification. After that, this random string is forgotten/destroyed.
If all of the anonymous information in a resume checks out, then a person starts to verify information that requires the person's identity. Did they actually take the course specified at the time they said they did? The check-out/check-in of the data from a database works better, as the view needed only needs to consider the data in question, not the entire record. And it is better done as, check all the persons taking courses at institution A; instead of checking all the courses done by person A. Of course, the institution in question can help in shrouding data by assigning random strings to organizations seeking to check information that act as one-time student IDs. The checks for registration are then done against the shrouded IDs.
I note that the summary feels the need to mention the IRS, even though the IRS had only a brief paragraph in the article saying they had taken action against some snoopers. Some things you should know about the situation at the IRS:
The IRS was misused by Richard Nixon. Congress responded with certain privacy protections aimed right at the agency. As a reslut, for the last 30 years or so the IRS has been better than most places when it comes to snooping. Not perfect, but generally ahead of the curve.
25-30 years ago, when online data was just becoming ubiquitous within the agency but auditing protocols were laughable, snooping was more common. Nowadays, things have swung the other direction. Some, particularly the Union, would say too far. Currently, if you work at a Taxpayer Assistance Center helping the public, it's entirely possible that an investigation will be triggered when you assist someone (a complete stranger to you) who, it turns out, happens to live in your apartment block or your subdivision (along with a few thousand other people). The data mining that goes on, matching people's database accesses with any possible connection with their lives, is thorough to the point of ridiculousness. I have no doubt that the majority of people at the IRS who snoop get caught. I would not be surprised if the 219 disciplinary actions referred to in the article were 99%-plus of the perpetrators in the reported time period.
And the penalties are *harsh*. Disciplinary actions are taken for inadverdent accesses. Deliberate accesses get you fired. Flagrant deliberate accesses result in jail time. Yes, jail time. I've seen employees hauled out in handcuffs for this stuff. (I've also seen a flagrantly deliberate access case that resulted in jail time that was a total miscarriage of justice. The perp was previously a rising star as an Officer. She was a wonderful young woman. Then, she had a major stroke and lay on the floor of her apartment for three days over a weekend before she was found. Afterwards, her mental capacity was severely reduced and she could no longer do the Officer job, so she was moved to a support position. The organization really tried to keep her employed so she could keep her health insurance. People really went out on a limb for her, even though if you knew her before and after, you could have easily concluded that she should have left the Agency on a disability retirement. Given her reduced mental abilities, it just didn't click in her mind that it was a serious violation of the law to look up the tax records of every one of her coworkers so she could compile a list of their birthdays so she could plan parties. She was that far gone. When she was prosecuted, her lawyer was strictly forbidden by her family from using any sort of diminished capacity defense. They were too embarrassed that their superstar child had become...well...what she had become. They preferred she go to prison rather being forced to publicly admit they had a less-than-perfect daughter. So she went to prison for a while, lost any shot at a disability pension, and God only knows whatever became of her. It was rumored that her parents took her back to Korea but I never found out for sure.)
Finally, why the big increase in incidents? Simple. Up until about 7 years ago, the IRS was a very convenient political punching bag. Politicos loved to cut funding to the IRS because that always played well with the constituency. As a result, the agency hired damn near nobody for about 15 years, from the mid-1980s to about 2000. Recently, though, we've started hiring in droves. The newbies, who don't yet appreciate the culture and public service mission of the agency, are doing things they figure no one will care about. They're getting caught. That's a good thing.
219 disciplinary actions out of about 100,000 employees is, in the real world, pretty damn good.
Yes, I work for the IRS. No, this is not official communication; it represents my personal feelings only.
It is of my opinion that the .gov can pretty much do what it wants until gets caught. All through history we hear about "illegal" this or that. The .gov takes the stand: "Better to do and ask forgiveness later". If it wants to find something out, it will.
The other side to this is something learned through nature: Don't draw attention. In some cases that is impossible. You could be driving in traffic and someone nails you from behind. Bam, karma stepping in. That aside though, it is possible to do what you want as long as you have a broader vision of how what you do affects your surroundings. When you keep that in mind, you can measure your activities.
No, I don't really have anything to hide; but Still, I don't go out into public and willingly strip either.
As long as sheeple sign up for 'customer appreciation' cards and willingly respond when asked for a phone number at places like Worst Buy the companies will continue to collect the information. It is profitable to track your sheeple for later shearing. It is not profitable to police your employees abuse of your sheeple under the current system. So this should be no surprise to anyone. The only way to combat this as an individual is to refuse to provide data and provide bad data that screws up the database whenever possible (have 6 cards if you must have one). Reduce the profitability of the shearing they plan. Or if the lady working the register is hot reply only if I get your phone number also :-)
Meh, it is not illegal to have secrets.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Kind of bothered some of them, but instead of learning crypto basics, they yelled at me. I do not understand this behaviour, can Slashdot explain ? It's the difference between explaining to someone that their bedroom window is easily viewable at night, and being the person actually looking in that bedroom window at night, pounding on it when they are naked.
You have a well-meaning intention, but you are causing the exact harm you wished them to avoid. And they are doing to you what they would have done to anyone else who would have read their "interesting" messages to "everyone who was interested". You're not helping them at all. If you had instead asked their permission ahead of time to do what you were planning to do, read the messages only to them, and shown them how easy it was to read the messages with Wireshark, they would probably have been a lot nicer, and would not have yelled at you since you told them ahead of time what you would be doing and they gave you permission, and you didn't "harm" them or their reputation.
Even if they still couldn't be bothered to run encryption, they would now be doing an accurate risk assessment, and might keep more incriminating details out of their messages.
Here, here.
If you haven't seen it, check out the movie "the lives of others", it's about the stasi in the former east germany.
There's one beautiful scene where the secret police are breaking into a guy's apartment to wire the place. The secret police realize that the neighbor across the hall has been watching them through the peephole.
The commander pounds on the door, and says to the neighbor, "one word of this to anyone, and your daughter loses her place at the university."
It's such a lovely example of how those in power can abuse information that people wouldn't even consider private or personal (is there anybody who wouldn't want their friends/neighbors to know about their daughter's university career?) by keeping a file on basically all citizens.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Many many years ago I heard the same tin-foil hat fears. OMG! SPIEZ!
There was an article about grocery store rewards cards and how evil empire corporations would track everything you bought and how that information could get out and ruin your life. It was accompanied with some story about a parent who was suing for child custody and their ex pulled out a shopping list full of alcohol and junk food. Funny how after all those warnings I haven't heard a word about it since.
Here we are again, same crap, different underwear. Using the word "Epidemic" is totally rediculous and is designed to do nothing but freak out the paranoids over what is once again an over-blown concern. People have been able to hire P.I.'s and get loads of information on you for decades so why the fuss now? Are we really this desperate to be miserable and unhappy that we have to cling to every single bullshit article that warns us about the same stupid crap over and over?
It's time to take the tin foil hats off. MIT proved they don't work anyway.
The "Nothing To Hide" argument was effectively addressed and invalidated by Daniel J. Solove in:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID998565_code249137.pdf?abstractid=998565&mirid=1
I think originally learned about this article on an old Slashdot story...
Ah yes, here it is: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/2054219
How about this:
I'm a partner in a group involved in the acquisition of several companies. The SEC says I have things to hide.
Have gnu, will travel.
>Who let the all the people unable to make this distinction loose on the internet?
AOL...
>Why are there so many?
In the 1980's laws changed, and the mentally ill are no longer confined against their will unless they pose an immediate threat of bodily harm to themselves or others.
>Why are there so many who insist on making the correction in the wrong direction?
The voices inside their head compel them.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
... not simply go against the concept of "Innocent until proven Guilty" ?
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
So the article summary tried to disprove the notion that you have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide by citing a case where a guy had something he had to hide?
Brilliant!