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DEA Paid Amtrak Employee To Pilfer Passenger Lists
Via Ars Technica comes news that an Amtrak employee was paid nearly $900,000 over the last ten years to give the DEA passenger lists outside of normal channels. Strangely enough, the DEA already had access to such information through official channels. From the article: The employee, described as a "secretary to a train and engine crew" in a summary obtained by the AP, was selling the customer data without Amtrak's approval. Amtrak and other transportation companies collect information from their customers including credit card numbers, travel itineraries, emergency contact info, passport numbers, and dates of birth. When booking tickets online in recent years, Amtrak has also collected phone numbers and e-mail addresses. ... Amtrak has long worked closely with the DEA to track drug trafficking activity on its train lines. The Albuquerque Journal reported in 2001 that "a computer with access to Amtrak's ticketing information sits on a desk in the [DEA]'s local office," wrote the ACLU.
Let's guess who gets in trouble...
The employee selling the data..check (low level scape goat)
Maybe an IT guy that allowed excessive permission.. maybe he just gets fired...
Any DEA agents or upper level management who authorized illegal and warrant-less data collection? NO
Any Amtrak executives for allowing it to be provided (through the employee or the terminal in the DEA office?) NO
If we are lucky we will hear some strong words at a congressional hearing, and that will be the end of it.
Silence is a state of mime.
Maybe it's just a case of what the news industry calls "independent verification". Of course, the way it typically works is that the original source X passes copies to friends Y and Z, who slightly paraphrase the wording and send it in to the news organization through different channels. X, Y and Z then all get paid for their work. Governmental information agencies have long understood how this "verification" process works.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Do people really have to provide passport numbers and dates of birth to get on the train in America? Unbelivable.
Has the DEA been sending him a yearly 1099 for taxes? if not, then the IRS needs to audit the DEA.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Articles such as this will henceforth only be of interest to me if they include examples where my data is not collected.
Whirrr...click. Adjustment Bureau confirms your new filter parameters.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Sounds like someone was circumventing controls. The DEA had access... but did everyone in the DEA have access? I doubt it. One department likely had the data and getting to it either required evidence some didn't want to bother with, or was political, or maybe involved transferring money from your department to the controlling department. I've seen businesses where IS has control of an application, but what they claimed it cost per license was high enough that another department went out and bought the application themselves. I can't help but think this is the sort of thing that lead to this.
Sounds like perfectly normal business to me. Getting paid $900.000 to tell you something you already know? That's called Consulting.
This is probably rather controversial, but it should be said. The DEA was never created in order to police drugs.
Richard Nixon created the DEA in part as a reaction to the 60's neo liberal counter culture, and in part at the behest of southern constituents in response to the 1964 civil rights amendment. this is evidenced by the fact that the DEA targets disproportionally minority communities for enforcement, regardless of the well documented fact that affluent communities exhibit similar levels of drug posession. its also supported by the lack of any DEA presence or investigation during the iran contra scandal as well as the existence of numerous politicians and heads of state whom have repeatedly divulged their consumption of narcotics despite our nations zero tolerance policy.
as the push for drug sentencing reform continues, the DEA is finding itself increasingly useless as anything but an obstructionist wing of the government clinging for federal dollars. Blowing a million dollars on an amtrak mole despite existing access is just one example, but their raids on California dispensaries and legislative obstructionism shouldnt be ignored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Good people go to bed earlier.
The staggering idiocy of paying a million dollars for something you already have or the all-too-common practice of law enforcement to regard the Constitution as an irritating afterthought.
Surely this is illegal? I know that the US has no privacy laws, but it is still theft. Both he and the individuals purchasing the stolen data should be prosecuted.
Of course, it won't happen because "War on Drugs", and anyway, anything the US government wants is ok.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Why? Seems like exactly the opposite — DEA does know, Amtrak has the information, and DEA arranged for the information to be available to them at ease...
I'm not surprised either, but I don't see, how this is unconstitutional. The Constitution has nothing on the right to travel and, if you ask a government official, you'll quickly realize, they consider traveling to be a privilege instead.
You can not buy an Amtrak ticket anonymously. And you can not give your ticket to anyone else. With air-tickets this fraud was put upon us (years before 9/11) with the argument, that the airline and the law-enforcement need to screen the passenger names against list of criminals — so they need to know all names in advance.
But most Amtrak tickets are purchased within hours before departure, AFAIK, so this argument would not hold.
We need the traveling to be explicitly declared a right, that only the Judiciary can suspend after a trial — rather than a mere privilege, that the Executive can withdraw on their whim (such as by adding you to a "no-fly" list) or, indeed, demanding to "see your papers" (and recording them for future use).
I can't see it happening any time soon, though. Bushitler-created TSA has only expanded under the Nobel Peace Prize Administration — and now insists on covering not just air-travel, but all mass transit. Driving a personal car has required a government permission for near a century, and being driven by someone else is increasingly difficult too.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
One can only shake your head.
hmmm, class action lawsuit? this is a security breach.
the DEA were the hackers here, they took personal data without permission. this should be a class action suit against both amtrak and the DEA. will some lawyer out there start writing it up???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It pretty much goes like this:
1) Purchase ticket using unique email address.
2) Almost immediately receive spam to that email address from a spoofed source.
3) Realize Amtrack is (knowingly or unknowingly) selling your personal contact information to anyone who will pay.
It makes sense that if this Amtrack employee was selling the customer contact info database illegally to the DEA there likely were other buyers too that are much harder to catch in the act. Furthermore it makes sense that if the DEA would spend that much money buying the information illegally they'd have no qualms about reselling it once they purchased it to recoup some of the cost for other operations, or potentially even profit from it.
In this situation Amtrack is sadly hardly unique either. This is pretty much the name of the game with most companies that require you to hand over your contact info in order to do business, regardless of what their Terms of Service might say about it. At some level in the chain of command there is always a point where someone has access to customer information that is of a value enough orders of magnitude more than their salary that the temptation to do something dishonorable far outweighs the fear of getting caught.
That's just amazing. Any company I've worked for, I'd be strung up by the heels for giving away customer data, let alone selling it for the better part of a million dollars. One article notes "It was not clear whether the DEA has rules against soliciting corporate insiders to provide confidential customer information in exchange for money." Really, they need a specific rule against that? I can see a DEA official whispering in someone's ear "Shut up, shut up, let it go and just let her retire."
Actually, if the employee was selling Amtrak's proprietary information without Amtrak's consent and was keeping the money, they are guilty of embezzlement and DEA employees may be guilty of crimes related to arranging that activity, e.g. conspiracy or solicitation.
If the employee was selling Amtrak's proprietary information and giving the money to Amtrak, the DEA was breaching its contract with Amtrak. The DEA has to share the proceeds of drug busts based on information that comes from Amtrak with Amtrak, and this method circumvented that deal.
Amtrak is just a one source, of many. Intelligence agencies not only get the information, but also get this information via different channels to have redundancy and to verify those copies against each other. Sources do not know about each other. That is basic rule in operations against the enemy. To begin with, most likely Amtrak serves have been hacked by NSA long time ago and they have the information directly. In addition to that they have insiders, on the payroll, to get the same data as well as interpretations on the data. Call it "customer" support. There is the last avenue, "constitutional", is to go and get subpoenas or other boring methods. Such redundancy was needed to give impression that the public has "privacy". Spying was performed first and, later, when the case was built, "different" sources were shown. All for the appearance of "privacy". Greyhound buses, Urban transit, Amazon, Ebay, iTunes, Fedex, USPS, EZ pass,: everyone has a "file" recorded in relationship databases available for query.
Hey, babe. Take a walk on the wild side...
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You ignorant bigoted piece of shit. Just don't give the prostitute money, and leave her to live her life as she chooses.
Yeah, no fucking way. That's fucking repulsively disgusting.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I greatly dislike prostitution. I regret that some people feel it's the only way they can earn a living. I would prefer that there wasn't a market for such services.
None of that makes me hate people that provide such services.
None of that makes me a bigoted twat that hates transgendered people for no reason other than my own ignorance.
I'd rather be a clown.
Ignorant? Really?
Bigoted against tranny prostitites? On government transportation that the public rides on? HELL, yes. Publicly visited transport should be free of this filth. You're a complete fucktard for thinking this is not completely fucking disgusting and actually supporting it's actions. Just because some assclown wants to pretend it's a woman, that certainly means that it isn't. Get that seedy shit off of national transportation that people have to pay to be on. Clown.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.