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Passport Files of Presidential Hopefuls Snooped
CNN is reporting on the widening brouhaha that began when Barack Obama's passport file was accessed illegally on three occasions beginning in January. Now it seems that John McCain's file was also snooped; and that last year Hillary Clinton's file suffered the same fate. Ars Technica nails the real importance of these breaches, saying that the Presidential hopefuls are "...currently providing the country with a very public lesson in why the 'privacy advocates' who oppose initiatives like Real ID and the executive branch's domestic surveillance programs should really be called 'democracy advocates.' In short..., the entire incident shows exactly why citizens' privacy is critical in a country where citizens compete with one another for control of the government."
This was news a few days ago, and there are sites a lot better than AT that can cover this type of thing.
Government has unprecedented data gathering and search capabilities, and is seeking increases in those capabilities. These capabilities are hard to prevent; even if Real ID and similar programs get turned back increased capabilities are the inevitable result of easy to create networks, increasing computer performance and data storage capacity.
Along with that should go greatly increased penalties for the abuse of these capabilities. Firing a contractor seems hardly sufficient. Anyone performing this sort of act should serve significant jail time, financial penalties, and so on. If repeat offenses occur the company for whom the contractor works should be banned from future government related contracts.
The government folks are snooping goverment records all the time anyway. Just ask Hillary about the FBI and IRS records for political foes the last time she lived at the White House.
And that is why you don't want any MORE info in the hands of the feds than the minimum needed. In my opinion the guvmint should be required to send you a letter every time it looks up your personal information. This would sure open some people's eyes I bet.
Actually, the private information is guarded against inappropriate access. The fact that you now know about breaches means it is being guarded. The problem was a break down in the communication chain and the proper disclosure to the right people wasn't made available soon enough. There was a failure in the system that ended up delaying us from being informed.
Surprisingly, the contractor was fired and the two workers weren't? I'm not sure why this happened, I would hope that they are given the rules of accessing the information Before they are given access to the information. It sounds to me like the Unions might be protecting their jobs. If it where up to me, everyone who access anything inappropriate would have been terminated on the spot or as close to it as possible to know for sure they did it. You won't have too many people sneaking a peak when it will cost them their jobs.
What's private about passport records? Passport records contain your name, your address, your social security number, your place of birth, and a photo of you. With a sufficiently-large selection of data from the passport records, you could find someone who looked similar to you and could genuinely steal their identity in a long-lasting fashion.
What galls me is that, apparently, the database has a flag that can be set for "famous people", which causes a supervisor alert whenever the file is accessed. Where is the special alert for the rest of us? We're the ones whose data could be abused to wreak havoc on our lives and finances.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
that the program that caught them was one designed to track the access of the records of "high-profile Americans?" Because it doesn't matter if the rest of us have our passport files snooped? What do you need to do, exactly, to be "high-profile?"
According to the article, if they hadn't looked at famous people's records, they wouldn't have gotten caught. In other words it's common for these contractors to look at various people's passport records, only these few were stupid enough to choose to snoop after famous people besides their usual routine of checking on their neighbors, unfaithful spouses, the girl they're stalking, etc.
OK, one last time, democracy and freedom have no inherent connection to one another. What you want is a liberal, accountable government which would make you a "liberty advocate," not a "democracy advocate."
I could care less about the "state of democracy" in America. What I want is the state of the Constitution, something that often is sacrificed by public approval.
One would like to hope that this incident might mean that all 3 candidates now fully understand the importance of protecting everyone's privacy, and will ensure that its kept sacrosanct.
Yes, I don't think that will happen either.
And how does passport records (assuming it is just entry & exit times) relate to Real ID in any fashion?
The issue is not the records, it's who has access to them, and what they do with that access.
You certainly don't have access, but somebody with an axe to grind might. Nixon had his Enemies List. The TSA has the No-Fly List. According to Newsweek, 1.3 million Americans have their bank accounts under the same sort of "special scrutiny" that noticed Eliot Spitzer moving a few thousand dollars around. (Less than the $10,000 banks are required to report.) The bank account monitoring came about due to PATRIOT, by the way.
The government folks are snooping goverment records all the time anyway
Actually that's not as true as you might think, but regardless, it's irrelevant. As this case demonstrates, now the contractor folks are snooping government records too.
My guess is, as more and more data gets collected, we simply won't have privacy any more. The only fix I see is to simply stop collecting (and storing, and making more available, and organizing so intelligently) so much data.
In the Spitzer case, I don't see how his downfall benefits New York. Why are we collecting all this data about people? Whatever good comes of it (if any, can somebody think of any good that's come of it) seems to be completely outweighed by the bad.
Perhaps I'm okay with collecting the data, but it should be abstracted away from the person's identity. You should probably need to convince a judge to issue a search warrant on the basis that User_ID 136137134 is showing a pattern of suspicious activity.
As I recall this is more or less why we have a FISA court in the first place. To prevent exactly the sorts of abuses of surveillance that Nixon, Hoover, et. al. were so fond of.
The issue illustrated is that clerks can get anything stored. Governments and companies like to pretend they are better than others when they keep things they should not. Improper access proves the lie, not that passport records are inherently damaging.
The issue is really about what records should be kept and who owns them. The public does not own the record of my travel unless I'm doing public work. I'm the only person who should be able to make that kind of information available when I chose. The state should not waste money tracking things which can only be abused.
Transparency is not a a substitute for doing whats right in the first place. It's not an equalizer when there's a power difference because it only removes one tiny piece of the difference. Your boss can still fire you, your school can expel you and so on and so forth. When someone does not like you and they have information about you and they can make rules that harm you, they will.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If that's your goal, then push for it to cover private contractors working on a government contract.
Otherwise the FBI, DHS, et. al. could just contract out and never provide any notification, since the government agency in question never accessed a citizens personal information (but their contractor did).
A Human Right
The single most elementary premise upon which a free society is based is that the state has absolutely no right to interfere in any way whatsoever with a citizen who is going about his legal business. None. Any infringement on this standard is the beginning of the end, because it places the welfare of the state above the welfare of the people who are supposed to be its masters.
Yes, sometimes terrorists and common criminals will take advantage of this freedom to inflict damage. That's part of the price you pay. If you aren't willing to pay, or even have your children pay, then pack up and move to Communist China. You and your children will be safe there, as long as you keep your mouths shut.
I can go on for ages with reasons why people who are supposed to be your servants, like politicians, cops and bureaucrats, are always so anxious to persuade you that just a little tiny surrender will save the children and kittens and puppies. It won't, and they'll want more. And more. And more.
And never forget that this one of those cases where mutual accommodation is possible in only one direction. If I impose rigorous privacy laws, I can agree that you don't value privacy and leave you to whatever lifestyle pleases you. You aren't affected in any way, because you can still give as much information as you want to anybody you want to have it. On the other hand, when you impose your anti-privacy laws, there's no room for me to be left alone with my choice.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Indeed, it's been a complaint for a long time, even though Malda and his gang don't claim to publish the latest news in the fastest time possible. In fact, they would rather sit on a story and see how it unfolds so that the discussion can have some perspective.
In fact, there's even a FAQ entry addressing this topic. If you want the latest news as soon as it happens, there's other sites to visit. Like others have said, go to Digg for the links, and come to Slashdot for the discussion.
Yes, "In Soviet Russia, frist psot runs Natalie Portman's Linux" is more insightful than what you read on Digg.
:q!
And even if I didn't support the Real ID (which I don't), I do support the passport database. But this isn't a story about abuse, it is a story about tripwires and safeguards being in place that made it possible for you to know something happened. If anything it is something the government did right.
Why should anyone running for a public office (or holding one) have any assumption of privacy for a US passport?
I would think entry/exit data should be public information, as well as each country visited using that passport, which after all, was provided at public expense, backed by the tax payers, carries with it an expectation of the US government using its influence to secure the safe travel of these people who are de-facto targets of people who would harm the US.
I could make the same case for anyone, really, why should you expect your world travels to be a private matter? What could be more public than world travel?
At most these workers would seem to have violated an unauthorized use of computing resource rules. The fact that it was a political candidate LESSENS the infraction in my opinion.
The fact that they WERE ABLE TO access the information means heads should roll, but not their heads. Why aren't the IT folks being keel hauled instead of these drones? What kind of security does this agency have where the biggest impediment to access is a "thou shalt not"?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I wonder what the Ars Technica/privacy zealots who oppose RealID protection will say when the next hijacked airliner is crashed into a building.
They'll say "wow, and the government issued the terrorists real RealIDs, just like the rest of the terrorists who were all legally identified.
Meanwhile the people collecting my tax money to make yet another piece of plastic ID card will laugh all the way to the bank while people like you stand around drooling and wondering why their magical bits of plastic didn't save anyone.
Haha, you just made his point by still having a step 4.
i.e. Even if there is a supposed protection in place, it will still be abused again and again.
To quote WOPR: "The only way to win is not to play."
I do not want some bloated, mis-managed, government agency to have all of my medical records, employment records, or business records. If anybody thinks some sub-contracted flunky at a keyboard will be happy snooping through the passport records of his fellow citizens after their medical records become available as part of some similarly unsecured, poorly engineered, unsupervised federal bureaucracy, you're kidding yourself. This stuff is rapidly spinning out of control and the only way to put the brakes on it is to head back toward what the country started with: a small, tightly focused federal government that keeps records on its citizens to the minimum degree practical.
This situation was bad enough when the idiots in government had our data. It gets worse now that government is outsourcing work to non-government people who will never be properly held to account; it opens the way for outside entities to gain access to the data by hiring people to do temporary data harvesting jobs, injecting those people into those outsourced government positions, then acting shocked and "firing" them when they get caught (with bonuses and options to be re-hired later by another division...) That may not be what happened here, but it will happen as the government gets more of our data and that data becomes more interesting/valuable to outsiders.
Your privacy, like your reputation, is not a physical thing; once you hand it over or damage it, you can never get it back.
No, seriously, this just keeps coming up and it's retarded. Slashdot readers are anything but a representative sample of American (or any) society. Of course we don't reflect it, let alone the full range of the political (left-right) spectrum.
When the editors post a good story, we get between two and five hundred posts discussing how and why this is alarming, what the possible implications may be, etc. Once moderation is applied we end up with a very high signal to noise ratio. Dissenting views are pretty much always modded up, except when they're trolls or flamebait (and even then, people often take the time to read them and reply). Other sources are often quoted or linked to, and those posts get modded up too. In other words, we get a good, interesting (possibly insightful, or informative, sometimes even funny) discussion.
When the editors post something stupid, we get between two and five hundred posts pointing out the error and ripping on the editor that put it on the front page. Occasionally, a thread or two spawns discussing some tangentially related subject that ends up being interesting on its own merrits.
As far as I'm concerned, the system is working as intended. Seriously, who would you rather discuss politics with? The Digg crowd? The people that leave comments on Youtube? Seriously, answer that question and go there. Then come back and tell us what you find. Haven't you noticed slashdot becoming more of a political "tool" then a place to discuss news for nerds. No. Most of us are capable of independent thought. That's why we're all here, sharing our thoughts and adding the insights of others to our own. At the very least we're sharpening our ideas by arguing against those we disagree with.
The fact that we often agree in large numbers speaks more to the fact that we're a self-selected group than anything else. The fact that the editors pander to us says more about their lust for precious ad revenue than their political views. Not all herds are made of sheep. And even if they were, kdawson (it's him everyone bitches about, right? I honesty don't pay attention to the editors' names) sucks at playing sheep-dog.
Kind of a non-story for me. Reading articles on this it really seems like it was a curious employee who wasn't paying enough attention to the warnings given and or consequences about private data. Honestly I blame our celebrity lifestyle for this. Everyone is so wrapped up in famous people they forget about what they are authorized to do. I find it hard to judge someone for letting their curiosity get the better of them.
If you were given the power, how many of you would resist the urge to look up Natalie Portman's [insert your favorite opposite sex celebrity here] passport?
That's what most of the information is pointing to. (Unless of course this is what they want me to conclude.) Now if it's politically motivated such as Nixon era privacy breaching I'd probably feel differently about it.
Translation: Utterly and completely without cause I'll put in some unrelated hot-button stuff and then try to pretend I didn't.
Translation: Utterly and completely without cause I'll put in some unrelated hot-button stuff and invoke scary scenarios forwarding my own agenda.
Etc... Etc...
And really, that's the whole point of this [Ars Technica] 'news' story - not to tell the news, but to slant it and spin it until it is no longer recognizable and then to attach editorial comments unrelated to main story. If Faux News, CNN, or one of the other big networks did this, Slashdot and the rest of the blogosphere would be up in arms about such journalistic misbehavior.
The republicans make all white house information inaccessible to the Freedom of Information Act and require citizens to log their every move with the government, who is protecting us from the enemy.
Hint: Right now, the "enemy" is the government.
The Internet is generally stupid