The ATF Wants To Know Who Your Friends Are

i_want_you_to_throw_ writes "You have a Friend Request from: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms... 'Confirm'? 'Not Now'? Seriously, the ATF won't try to friend you on Facebook. The ATF doesn't just want a huge database to reveal everything about you with a few keywords. It wants one that can find out who you know. According to a recent solicitation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the bureau is looking to buy a 'massive online data repository system' for its Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information (OSII)."

Comments

Convenience Store

[Anonymous Coward]

In a truely free country the ATF would be a convenience store and not a government agency. In a free country you would be able to buy your alcohol, tobacco, firearms AND explosives from an ATF convenience store.

Re:Convenience Store

[djl4570]

Ahhh .. Deluxe Liquor and Sporting Goods in Roseville, Ca. How I miss thee. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (Both rifles and handguns) in one convenient stop. Store closed years ago but the memories live on.

Re:Convenience Store

[maz2331]

There is a store about a mile away from me that sells coffee, premium cigars, and firearms. It's the strangest combo that I have ever seen in the Pittsburgh area. Now if they just sold beer, they could deal with all three main parts of the ATF.

Re:Convenience Store

[digitalchinky]

I suspect the ATF can no longer get the data for free from anyone these days - particularly so now that Facebook has to please its shareholders. The days of government being able to stick their own hardware in the corner of the data center for free are probably over. Now they have to pay (probably a lot more), just like everyone else.

Re:Convenience Store

[jameshofo]

a gun in every hand and crack in every pipe!

Re:Convenience Store

[jameshofo]

and yet they still can't make windows phones popular

Re:Convenience Store

[istartedi]

Closest thing to this when I was growing up was K-mart. This was in Virginia, but *northern* Virginia DC suburbs, so not really hardcore Southern at all.

Anyway, guns and ammo were right there in the sporting goods section with the fishing poles and stuff. They were in glass cases and behind the counter. I'm pretty sure K-mart sold cigarettes and pipe tobacco back then. The alcohol was probably missing though. Definitely no liquor, since Virginia had that monopolized via ABC. As a boy, I wasn't very curious about alcohol so I don't remember if they had beer but maybe they did.

Re:Convenience Store

[BenEnglishAtHome]

In 1976, my father bought my first revolver for me at a combined liquor and gun store that I'm sure also sold tobacco products. It was located in a major shopping mall (Wonderland, iirc) in San Antonio, Texas. I mean, right out there where today you find Apple stores and Payless shoe stores, a combination liquor/gun store! It was great!

Kids today don't appreciate what they've lost.

Re:Convenience Store

[Scarletdown]

I think Wal-Mart sells all three. Haven't been inside a Wal-Mart in a while, but I will probably go ahead and shop there when I finally get around to getting myself a few boxes of Luger ammo.

Re:Convenience Store

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Austin, Texas used to have a gun shop with a drive-thru fast food style window for ammunition.

"Do you want some fries with your HK 4.6×30mm's, Sir?"

Re:Convenience Store

[akboss]

I think Wal-Mart sells all three. Haven't been inside a Wal-Mart in a while, but I will probably go ahead and shop there when I finally get around to getting myself a few boxes of Luger ammo.

Not if it is like the Wally Marts around here in Texas. Most have empty shelves when it comes to ammo. Last time I was there they had a selection of 300 win mag, a smaller selection of 30-30 and then some 12 gauge boxes. I order all my ammo by the case load.

Re:Convenience Store

[kwbauer]

That's pretty much what any store selling ammo looks like. The county sheriff offices in Wisconsin are looking for dealers at gun shows and private reloaders to sell them ammo because they are running low.

Re:Convenience Store

[doesnothingwell]

In the backwoods midwest, Bowling Green, Ohio you could buy ammo, alcohol, and tobacco at the local convenience store until 2001 or so. I haven't been back there recently.

Re:Convenience Store

[PPNSteve]

Oh man I hear ya there... was such a great store!

Re:Convenience Store

[kwbauer]

expanding background checks won't stop the black market either because the black market "dealers" won't run the checks because they are, you know, criminals.

What's it to you, slashdot?

[oldhack]

"People" (I mean that in the loosest sense) here don't got no friends anyways.

Looking for cliques in all of the places.

[girlinatrainingbra]

Are they looking for cliques in all of the wrong places? Or are they attempting to subvert the system by turning everyone into a suspect because of their "degree of association" to criminal elements, smugglers, and terrorists just because everyone is linked to everyone else?
.
So I guess that ATF just heard about cliques and graph theory. Perhaps knowing the degree of bacon-ness would tell them that this approach to a friend-of-a-friend is useless. As everyone knows, the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Conjecture" posits that every-one in filmdom is on a path of length at most 6 away from being in a film with Kevin Bacon (link to him yourself, if you want, he's less than 6 degrees away).
.
So if Baconicity holds true in all of life instead of just in the film industry graph, then any individual can be linked to a criminal within less than six steps. Oh-my-godzies, we're all linked to criminals!! We all have gang ties!! We're all affiliated with Terrorists!! That linkage list shows it!! It must be true!!! Lock us all up, for our own goods!
.
If that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is ridiculous. But that won't stop the government from claiming it to be true and useful and actually use it in courts of law. Shheeeeesh. It's like the old canard about "cocaine residue on money": -- most paper currency in the USA has cocaine residue on it
-- even national geographic Cocaine on Money: Drug Found on 90% of U.S. Bills confirms this to be true

Yet the government often tried to try (yes, prosecute = to try a case) people for being drug couriers/smugglers/kingpins because the money found on their person had drug residue on it. Unfortunately, the penetrance of drug residue on money is so high that there is not a reliable way to link the person's drug use with the drugs found on the money. See statistics 101 to figure that out.

Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places.

[girlinatrainingbra]

"So?" you ask? Look at the links about drug residue on money, and look up how little science and statistics is behind the so-called "accuracy of identification with fingerprints". The point is that the government is very likely to use long-path lengths to indict/accuse/try/convict people even when there is no evidence.
.
I posit that they are using these scientifically useless approaches to flim-flam judges and grand-juries into rubber-stamping warrant requests based on these flimsy pretexts being their probable cause. I say this because this is exactly what they did for drug residue on money. This is exactly what they do when they claim that their drug-sniffing dogs have detected the scent of (ultimately) non-existent drugs. This abuse of process has occurred. And I say that this is subverting true science for the ability to cover their over-reaching for issues of probable cause when no probable cause exists
.
Armand Jean du Plessis said in his role as Cardinal Richelieu: âoeIf you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang himâ (look it up). This is what they are doing here. Trying to find dirt in everyone, so that when they want to get you, they've got a so-called valid "probable cause" for doing so. --- sez paranoid me. ;>)

Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places.

[anagama]

This is what they are doing here. Trying to find dirt in everyone, so that when they want to get you, they've got a so-called valid "probable cause" for doing so. --- sez paranoid me. ;>)

Here, this book will help you feed that (rational) paranoia:
http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx

Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places.

[girlinatrainingbra]

Wow! Thanks for that amazing link. Now I've got a few more real life examples to show to some of the nay-sayers around me in my life. It is sad that the paranoia is rational and valid.

Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places.

[marcello_dl]

In my grand unified theory of everything this move is a psychological operation. "Stay away from those firearm nuts, stay away from firearms" is the idea. Soft terrorism. Unsurprising. (Terror is useful for those who already have power, not for those who want to obtain it, see examples that range from the kings, the French revolution, the adverse effect of indiscriminate attacks on the public opinion).

The second reason: mass criminalize everybody first, then pick up the troublemakers and jail them as it suits you, the law is on your side. This is very handy and a symptom of failing democracy.

Fighting crime, not that I am an expert, should be to WEED OUT the innocents, not increase the database of suspects, that's increasing noise.
But even if I am wrong and you need the database, the best data is to be gathered at ISP level, FB and GOOG work on subsets. So why not asking them instead.

Some might believe removal of firearms is in the collective good, they might be right, but to me it is just the same old story of powerful interests looking to augment their power by reducing everybody else's. Nothing new under the sun.

Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That page has a frickin 3.5MB image embedded in it. That's ridiculous.

Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places.

[Goody]

So if Baconicity holds true in all of life instead of just in the film industry graph, then any individual can be linked to a criminal within less than six steps. Oh-my-godzies, we're all linked to criminals!! We all have gang ties!! We're all affiliated with Terrorists!! That linkage list shows it!! It must be true!!! Lock us all up, for our own goods!

Sure, everyone can be linked to some douchebag/terrorist/asshole in six degrees, but if you're linked to a douchebag/terrorist/asshole in one or two degrees, you're probably a douchebag/terrorist/asshole.

Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places.

[jameshofo]

but your innocent until proven guilty, that is ... if your accused of a crime.

Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places.

[musterion]

Glenn Reynolds (http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/) has a great article concerning due process (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713):

Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime

  Abstract:
Though extensive due process protections apply to the investigation of crimes, and to criminal trials, perhaps the most important part of the criminal process -- the decision whether to charge a defendant, and with what -- is almost entirely discretionary. Given the plethora of criminal laws and regulations in today's society, this due process gap allows prosecutors to charge almost anyone they take a deep interest in. This Essay discusses the problem in the context of recent prosecutorial controversies involving the cases of Aaron Swartz and David Gregory, and offers some suggested remedies, along with a call for further discussion.

Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places.

[Beorytis]

I've been wondering, what's Kevin Bacon's Erdos number?

And BTW when will slashdot comments allow unicode so I can spell Paul Erdos correctly?

Best friends?

[Anne_Nonymous]

Jim Beam, Philip Morris, and the brothers Smith and Wesson, of course.

Re:Best friends?

[Scarletdown]

Or that gal, Amber from Alaska, Ms. Mary Jane, and Wynne Chester.

Keep your friends close

[roman_mir]

Keep your friends close but keep ATF closer.

AFAIK FB 'friends' in most cases are not exactly what one would consider to be a friend IRL. I mean if you have 1000 friends, what does that mean?

An old tale:

A young man decided to get married, he was busy and asked his father to call 50 people on a list. He said "these are my friends, can you call them and invite them for the wedding ceremony?" The father agreed.
On his wedding day the son confronted his father "I asked you to call all of my friends", "and so I did", "but there were 50 people on my list and I only see 15". "Son, I called all 50 people and told each one of them that you have a problem and you need help and they should meet with you in this exact location at this exact time, so don't worry, all your friends are here now".

Back to the story: of-course government wants to know everything about you, don't you understand, it's for the collective good.

New Proposal

[cosm]

I propose an open-source decentralized big-data platform for tracking all politicians, their movements, who they talk to, where they've been, they're locations, their correspondence (that's public), their donations, criminal backgrounds, known associations, and everything about them in an easily searchable, index-able manner.

Who wants to work on this with me! Seriously people we could do this in a legal way and that would be something that COULD make a difference. Probably not but worth a try...

Re:New Proposal

[cosm]

This is not a new concept. We used to have that in America. It was called the press, but now the people that are running the press are in bed with the politicians.

Then let's track those fuckers too!

Re:New Proposal

[dbc]

Brilliant! I'd contribute to that project. Put it up on a crowdfunding platform and before you can say "swipe my Visa" I'm there.

Re:New Proposal

[themusicgod1]

Just so you know, if you try this they will kill you.

Just look at my social networks...

[aurashift]

I used to be friends with this guy named Tom, but I haven't talked to him since 2004.

Terror Wins

[b4upoo]

The ATF wanting such a database is like terror turned inward. Are we really in such danger that we need all kinds of agencies studying the public? I think it is a bit much. And I am very aware that such information has been compiled, one way or another, since at least the 1950s..

Say hello ...

[PPH]

... to my little friend!

Re:Say hello ...

[witherstaff]

So the ATF is after adult cam friends too?

Red Scare v2.0

[l0ungeb0y]

Seeing that our Government already did an end run around our First Amendment Rights to Freedom of Association in 1950 with the Red Scare under a Republican President, it only goes to follow that we now embrace the Democrat's Gun Scare under Obama.

IT. IS. WHAT. THE. PEOPLE. WANT. AFTER. ALL.

I mean, haven't we already seen a handful of news organisations and blogs outing local gun owners to shame the thousands of gun owners and invite them to be harassed, assaulted or worse? Already, we rightly expell kids from the school system for pointing a finger and saying "pew pewpew" and even dodgeball is facing bannination from the school ground for it's abject violence -- and you better bury those FPS like CoD in your backyard before "we" find them.

Why you ask? Why not? Why not going after anyone who's ever used or owned a gun?
After all, they must be bad people -- and if you know someone who owns a gun, you are probably a pretty bad person your self.

So choose your Facebook friends wisely, or you might have to suffer the "consequences".

The joke is on the ATF

[trout007]

I don't have friends.

Re:The joke is on the ATF

[SeaFox]

I don't have friends.

Funny enough, isn't being a loner supposed to be one to those traits that leads to people being knee-jerk profiled the next Unabomber or school massacre perpetrator? Apparently the ATF is busy compiling a database of all the wrong people if what the DHS has told us in the past has any truth to it.

When has it gone too far?

[Feyshtey]

When will the public finally decide that the US Govt has gone too far? Honestly I would have thought it'd been years ago. The left was going batshit crazy 6+ years ago about the imperialistic Bush administration, but apparently the new flavor of crazy this administration is pulling is all hunky dory.

Re:When has it gone too far?

[FooAtWFU]

"apparently the new flavor of crazy this administration is pulling is all hunky dory."

Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor, theorizes:

Mr. Obama "believed the cartoon version of the Bush critique so that Bush wasn't just trying to make tough calls how to protect America in conditions of uncertainty, Bush actually was trying to grab power for nefarious purposes. "So even though what I, Obama, am doing resembles what Bush did, I'm doing it for other purposes," Mr. Feaver added.

-- The New York Times
(disclosure: Feaver is a partisan with ties to the Bush administration.)

Jennifer Granholm supports this notion:

"We trust the president," the former Michigan governor told the Times, "And if this was Bush, I think that we would all be more up in arms because we wouldn't trust that he would strike in a very targeted way and try to minimize damage rather than contain collateral damage."

-- The Guardian
(The British columnist here goes on to assert: "That many Democratic partisans and fervent Obama admirers are vapid, unprincipled hacks willing to justify anything and everything when embraced by Obama - including exactly that which they pretended to oppose under George W Bush - has also been clear for many years.")

Re:When has it gone too far?

[Feyshtey]

So in summary;
The left theorizes that giving this President more power is not as harmfull as if it were Bush because this President is more responsible.

The problem is that the left hasnt the foresight to recognize that the American public is entirely capable of electing someone equally or exponentialy worse than Bush.

Re:When has it gone too far?

[Anonymous Coward]

The one good thing that is happening is that a lot of people who voted for Obama are starting to see that the emperor truly has no clothes:

His platform of peace and ending wars has turned into more wars. His economic recovery consists of an inflated stock market propped up by printing $3,000,000,000 a day and a "falling" unemployment number caused by 9,400,000 people leaving the work force since he took office and more each month. His promise of transparent government has turned into a total farce. He throws a bone to drug-rights or gay-rights activists just often enough to keep them strung along. He continues the wars on the first, fourth and fifth amendments that Bush started, and now he's added a war on the second.

Come January 20, 2017 so many people on the left are going to be absolutely fed up with him. Hopefully the people on the right will maintain their anger, direct it towards the new (R) president, and together they can be mad enough at the government to get something changed.

I mean really changed this time.

Not Obama "changed."

Re:When has it gone too far?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the left hasnt the foresight to recognize that the American public is entirely capable of electing someone equally or exponentialy worse than Bush.

they don't need foresight, he's already in office.

Re:When has it gone too far?

[fche]

And they laugh when some of us want to starve the beast.

Re:When has it gone too far?

[The Master Control P]

"His platform of peace and ending wars has turned into more wars."

Oh really? Please, yell me about all these wars that Obama's started based on lies that are now bleeding our treasury dry.

and a "falling" unemployment number caused by 9,400,000 people leaving the work force since he took office and more each month.

1. Ever heard of the baby boomers? They're starting to retire, so of course some people are leaving the labor force. 2. Turns out some people will give up when 30 years of GOP economic policy has left us staring down the abyss of Depression. Yet routinely since spring 2009, monthly job reports have come with a "jobs created but not enough due to people rejoining the labor force" label attached.

Re:When has it gone too far?

[MimeticLie]

Replace "the left" with "Democrats" and yes.

Re:When has it gone too far?

[Attila Dimedici]

The problem with your logic is that the size of the population of the U.S. that is within the bounds of what is considered "working age" is larger today than it was when Obama took office. So, the number of people leaving the workforce cannot be explained by baby boomers retiring, since that does not represent enough people.

Re:When has it gone too far?

[Attila Dimedici]

Oh, I forgot to mention relative to your "staring down the abyss of Depression" comment. Since WWII there have been multiple recessions, this is the first one where the number of jobs was not higher 4 years after the start of the recession than at the high point of jobs before the recession began. There are fewer Americans employed today than at the high point before the recession began, even though we have been in "recovery" for over 4 years.

Re:Red Scare v3?

[nicoleb_x]

Actually, this would be version 3, and again, it would start under a Democratic Party president, although I don't know why that matters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

The ATF needs a slapdown

[kawabago]

Their goals are ridiculous in free country. A country isn't free if it's government knows what everyone is doing all the time. Besides that, why weren't they asking for this information 10 or 20 years ago? People had connections in the past but the government never sought to know everyone's. The only result of all this total information awareness so far is to find out the CIA Director was having an affair. Billions of dollars could be better spent on infrastructure.

The Onion's satire becomes reality

[shking]

CIA's 'Facebook' Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs

Re:The Onion's satire becomes reality

[static0verdrive]

Yessir! A one-stop-shop for the authorities (or anyone smart enough to side-step their "security").

Re:Why not just go with Palantir?

[ColdWetDog]

Palantir is the leader in this field, why not just go with them?

All the tools you need for swallowing up large ill-formed sources of information and dicing and slicing however you want.

Huh? Now Facebook is starting to make a bit more sense. Give them what they keep trying to get (access to everyone, everywhere, all the time) and you have what ATF (and the rest of the Government) are dying to get their claws on.

I didn't think that Zuckerman was smart enough to think this up all by his little self.

Republican Congress

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely the law making is Congress, the Republicans, and the laws being used is the Patriot Act, Republicans.

But, hey nice misdirect. Do you work for Fox?

Re: STUPID GOVERNMENT

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see any homophobia (that is, fear of homosexuals) in that comment.

My friends?

[jcr]

My friends are anyone who upholds the bill of rights. Sounds like that doesn't include anyone in the ATF.

-jcr

Re:My friends?

[dbc]

Pretty much true.

Remember, the Bill of Rights was a response to criticisms of the Constitution found in the Anti-Federalist papers. Somehow, the term "anti-federalist" seems still to be right on target of you believe in the concepts of the BoR.

People are very tribal and partisan right now

[Sycraft-fu]

The lefties were mad at Bush not for what he was doing, but because he was from The Other Guys(tm). He was one of the other tribe, so what he was doing was bad, and wrong, and evil and all that shit. Some people really believed this to an extreme extent. There were people saying Bush had setup FEMA death camps, would declare martial law and stop the election, that kind of thing.

Well now their guy is in power. Hence you see the same shit from the righties. All of a sudden stuff that under Bush was "necessary for our safety" and "reasonable" they are all bent out of shape and screaming about. You look around, you hear the same FEMA camp shit about Obama.

That's part of the problem is that many people have a "good guy, bad guy" view on politics right now so when their guys are doing things, those things are ok because their guys are the "good guys". That means that people who oppose things at one point will support them later.

Re:People are very tribal and partisan right now

[The Master Control P]

This would be a more convincing Both Sides Are Equally Bad if both sides were even remotely equally bad.

Re:People are very tribal and partisan right now

[Johann Lau]

What sides? Obama didn't dismantle anything of the police state created under Bush. Both parties are sponsored by the same corporations, effectively. Yeah yeah, the values they pay lip service differ - so?

Re:People are very tribal and partisan right now

[fche]

That article you linked to says apprx. nothing about the "remotely equally bad" topic.

And they'll get it.

[GigaBurglar]

Watch as everybody does nothing. Piece by piece - goodbye privacy hello criminal travesty.

Re:who do I know?

[davester666]

Not to get off the watch list...

Anyway, I believe Facebook has a database they are willing to rent access to for a very reasonable fee. The ATF may also want to buy the MySpace database, but it's a few years out of date...

Re:Now why would they want this?

[oobayly]

I'm intrigued, do you really believe that, or do you dislike the Clintons so much to spread FUD, or are you just fishing?

Snopes: The Clinton Body Count

The Facts

[nicoleb_x]

"On May 26, 2011, President Barack Obama used an Autopen to sign a four-year extension of three key provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act while he was in France: roving wiretaps, searches of business records (the "library records provision"), and conducting surveillance of "lone wolves" â" individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups."

This is an issue of freedom. As a card carrying, non pot-smoking, member of the Libertarian Party, I'm more than happy to point out the failures of Dems and Reps. Too bad people can't always see the real issue because their party politics blinds them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

KB has no Erdos number, but 4 is his Erdos+Bacon #

[girlinatrainingbra]

Hmmm... For Bacon to have an Erdos number, Kevin Bacon would first have had to have a paper published with co-authors who could then be linked to Erd``os. But I do not believe that Kevin Bacon has published a paper. So we're right out on an Erd``os number for KB.
.
But if we consider the concept of a joint Erdos-Bacon number which is the sum of an individual's Bacon number and their Erdos number, then we might be able to go somewhere. Those individuals with joint Bacon-Erdos numbers have a vertex on the Bacon graph and a vertex on the Erdos graph, thus allowing travel between the Bacon graph and the Erdos graph. The individual with the smallest Bacon-Erdos number would then be able to provide the shortest path from Kevin Bacon on the Bacon graph to Erdos on the Paul Erdos graph.
.
A quick look at the Erdos-Bacon number article on wikipedia shows that the minimal Erdos-Bacon number (in their given examples) is held by Steven Strogatz, a professor at Cornell who has Bacon number 1 and Erdos number 3 with a combined Bacon-Erdos number of 4.
.
Thus you can get from (0), Kevin Bacon, who was in a film (Connected: The Power of Six Degrees) with
(1) - Steven Strogatz, who published a paper with
(2) - Nadim Ali , who published a paper with
(3) - Peter Salamon, who published a paper with
(4) - Paul Erd''os . Thus a path is drawn.