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

[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

[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.

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.
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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.

[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.

Best friends?

[Anne_Nonymous]

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

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...

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!

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.

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."

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

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?

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.

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