Ars Editor Learns Feds Have His Old IP Addresses, Full Credit Card Numbers 217
mpicpp writes with the ultimate results of Ars's senior business editor Cyrus Farivar's FOIA request. In May 2014, I reported on my efforts to learn what the feds know about me whenever I enter and exit the country. In particular, I wanted my Passenger Name Records (PNR), data created by airlines, hotels, and cruise ships whenever travel is booked. But instead of providing what I had requested, the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) turned over only basic information about my travel going back to 1994. So I appealed—and without explanation, the government recently turned over the actual PNRs I had requested the first time.
The 76 new pages of data, covering 2005 through 2013, show that CBP retains massive amounts of data on us when we travel internationally. My own PNRs include not just every mailing address, e-mail, and phone number I've ever used; some of them also contain: The IP address that I used to buy the ticket, my credit card number (in full), the language I used, and notes on my phone calls to airlines, even for something as minor as a seat change.
The 76 new pages of data, covering 2005 through 2013, show that CBP retains massive amounts of data on us when we travel internationally. My own PNRs include not just every mailing address, e-mail, and phone number I've ever used; some of them also contain: The IP address that I used to buy the ticket, my credit card number (in full), the language I used, and notes on my phone calls to airlines, even for something as minor as a seat change.
Big Brother (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Big Brother (Score:5, Funny)
My Big Brother is also my Uncle Sam. Does that make me inbred?
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The funny thing is, fulfilling his FOIA request is probably the first time anyone in government actually looked at his data.
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Data sent to airlines (Score:5, Interesting)
The Travelocity guy avoided telling the whole story. They do provide relevant information, but if the government has the PNR with all the remarks in it, then it likely came from Travelocity or Sabre.
Travel agencies and 3rd-party web sites, such as Travelocity. put all this encoded stuff into the remarks section of the PNR, it's all that "H-" stuff. When the PNR is sent to the airline, NONE of the remarks are transmitted. The airline doesn't receive your IP address, for example. Seat numbers, phone and contact information are transmitted in Special Service Request (SSR) and/or Other Service Information (OSI) fields. One major exception is that Travelocity and AA share the same PNR when booking AA.
Now, the airlines have to send a whole bunch of data about you to the TSA to get clearance for you to board. Look up Secure Flight / APIS / AQQ and you can learn a little bit about it.
A.
The Stasi & Stripes (Score:5, Insightful)
The government has files on everyone (or nearly everyone); people never suspected of, or implicated in, any crime.
How is this different from what the Stasi did?
Re:The Stasi & Stripes (Score:5, Informative)
"The Lives of Others (German: Das Leben der Anderen) is a 2006 German drama film, marking the feature film debut of filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, about the monitoring of East Berlin by agents of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his superior Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as Dreyman's lover, a prominent actress named Christa-Maria Sieland."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
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Because 'Murica has better propaganda and dumber citizens.
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How is this different from what the Stasi did?
It's *alot* easier now?
Re:The Stasi & Stripes (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this different from what the Stasi did?
They were at least honest about the fact that they were doing it. Also, I don't think it was unconstitutional in Germany, so it wasn't the government acting rogue like we have now.
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In fact east germany had a democratic constitution, most likely due to pressure from the americans directly after the war, so that the soviets don't errect a communist dictature (same in all eastern european countries). The americans failed, but the constitution was democratic. The only truly democratic votes were at the end of the DDR. The voted parliament then declared to join west germany.
Second thing to know: west germany still had claims on east germany, thinking it was one country. This was also the r
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How is this different from what the Stasi did?
The Stasi needed "electricians" to install bugs. We now buy the bugs and install them ourselves.
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Uhh...
What country doesn't have a file on all it's residents? Seriously.
Just think about all the files the US Government has had since the late 18th century. the Census had very good clues to everyone's religion, generally actually had a line for ethnicity, etc. During the first Libertarian-=Conservative period of dominance in the Judiciary the IRS had a database on exactly how much everyone made. A few years later the New Deal added a database on how much everyone makes that's updated every time you get a
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Protip: If every country, including Germany, has files on its individual citizens, then arguing "files on your individual citizens is just like the Stasi" is ridiculous. It's literally like saying "The Stasi paid their agents, all US Government employees must be uncompensated!"
Seriously. How the fuck would Germany enforce it's income tax if it didn't have a file on every German who has income?
If you were talking about the actual contents of the database you might have an argument particularly if you focused
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It's not.
There is a quote from a former Stasi guy (East-German secret police) regarding the Snowden leaks of NSA capabilities: "We could only have dreamed of having such powers."
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I hereby revoke my consent.
Required quote from Casablanca (Score:5, Interesting)
Major Strasser: We have a complete dossier on you: Richard Blaine, American, age 37. Cannot return to his country. The reason is a little vague. We also know what you did in Paris, Mr. Blaine, and also we know why you left Paris.
[hands the dossier to Rick]
Major Strasser: Don't worry, we are not going to broadcast it.
Rick: [reading] Are my eyes really brown?
This isn't news (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, is there anyone out there (reading this site) that doesn't know that you have no privacy anywhere anymore?
The actual question is: what are you going to do about it?
So Feds in the 2000s have the same data... (Score:3)
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PCI-DSS (Score:5, Insightful)
As an organisation accredited to be following PCI-DSS, we would be crucified if the PCI auditor found us holding the PAN (the long number on the front of your credit card, PAN = primary account number) in plain text. Surely the airlines/booking agents should not be passing the PAN to anyone else if they are following PCI-DSS (which is mandatory if you want to accept card payments)?
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Surely the airlines/booking agents should not be passing the PAN to anyone else if they are following PCI-DSS (which is mandatory if you want to accept card payments)?
What part of "any tangible thing" and third party doctrine does one suppose is non-applicable to card numbers?
Government is not bound by rules of the road created by industry.
Re:PCI-DSS (Score:5, Interesting)
As an organisation accredited to be following PCI-DSS
You aren't accredited to be following PCI because nobody is. There is no certificate. There is no special seal of approval. You provided security information to your acquiring bank(s) and you were allowed to process credit card transactions. There's no such thing as certification or accreditation for PCI.
we would be crucified if the PCI auditor found us holding the PAN (the long number on the front of your credit card, PAN = primary account number) in plain text. Surely the airlines/booking agents should not be passing the PAN to anyone else if they are following PCI-DSS (which is mandatory if you want to accept card payments)?
Who says they're holding the PAN in plaintext? They can decrypt it to send it to the Feds as needed without keeping it in plaintext in their systems. The Feds have no agreement with an acquiring bank, so they don't have to worry about how they store it. Nobody can do anything to them. Any agreement the airlines have with their acquiring banks undoubtedly includes plenty of cover for Federal data reporting requirements (likely a blanket "if the Feds come calling, we're just going to give them everything"). So long as the acquiring banks have signed off on it, they're in the clear. And since all these guys would like to continue doing business in the largest economy in the world, nobody's going to say no.
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So your argument is that they're reconstructing the PAN within the remarks section of the PNR by inserting decrypted credit card information back into the record?
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You aren't accredited to be following PCI because nobody is. There is no certificate. There is no special seal of approval. You provided security information to your acquiring bank(s) and you were allowed to process credit card transactions. There's no such thing as certification or accreditation for PCI.
No, there's no certificate, but there is a process of documentation and testing commonly referred to as "certification" before you are allowed to process credit card transactions. I work in point of sale software development and have had to help retail chains overcome problems found in their certification tests. You either don't know what you're talking about, or you're playing a pointless semantic game.
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Remember that PCI-DSS is a fairly new standard. A quick search got me a VISA document that listed january 1, 2008 as the date for phasing out old payment systems that didn't manage card numbers securely.
The plain text credit card number was apparently used in a transaction from 2005. Still a bad idea to use a plain text card number. But ompanies doing stupid stuff like that.is kind of the reason why PCI-DSS became mandatory in the first place.
Does the country you're a national of.... (Score:5, Insightful)
have a constitution that has some reknown, and maybe organized defenders of same?
If so, get in touch with them, organize, get active.
Not effective (Score:5, Insightful)
This kind of mass data collection on everyone is a huge waste of resources. The more people you add to a database, the less relevant it becomes for anything. People who know trade craft, know how to cover their tracks and pollute big data. So this is basically a giant database of amateurs, stupid crooks and ordinary civilians.
Another problem with big data are the large numbers of errors. I've run big databases where users were motivated to provide good data and there were still gaps in the data, misspelled names, numbers transposed, and some entries locked out because they were trying to enter duplicate primary keys. Travel data is coming in fast, I can't imagine what the exception reports look like every day.
Re:Not effective (Score:4, Insightful)
Writing this off as not effective misses the point. Most reasonable people - certainly most reasonable technical people - know this is ineffective. But this isn't about finding terrorists.....
If a defense contractor can convince bureaucrats and politicians that an ineffective big system can effectively ID potential terrorist, then we are left with either a false sense of security and/or a lot of innocent people being treated like potential terrorists. It makes for good security theater at the expense of civil liberties.
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> This kind of mass data collection on everyone is a huge waste of resources.
Compared to the cost of intelligently filtering it down to unpredictably "relevant" information, and only storing that? Picking out only the "relevant" or even "legal to hold" information would be, in espionage terms, a complete waste of time, prone to error and reducing the effectiveness of exactly the sort of personal, detailed information which this helps gather.
I sincerely doubt that the NSA cares about the fine grained accu
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The more people you add to a database, the less relevant it becomes for anything.
Totally. Just like mass-surveys become more and more useless the more people you add to them. And scientific research becomes more and more useless the more data points you gather.
A whole lot of whine (Score:2)
I read the article and while one might question why data is being stored that is almost a decade old, the data itself is not that big of a deal. Basically the airlines store all the information about how he bought the ticket and what his preferences were (seat assignments, meal choices, etc.) The call center agents kept notes on why he called.
All of the information is benign. They kept his credit card information in plain text which is lame, but I have yet to see a story about a CBP breach that led to a
Gestapo like? I am afraid to admit...[Yes] (Score:2)
My own PNRs include not just every mailing address, e-mail, and phone number I've ever used; some of them also contain: The IP address that I used to buy the ticket, my credit card number (in full), the language I used, and notes on my phone calls to airlines, even for something as minor as a seat change.
Someone tell me there's a difference on this issue...Just this issue please.
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Most work was done with informants and tips, letters. A vast network of local people wanting to settle grudges and grievance via denunciation.
A vast happy to help collaborative staff in different nations also worked very hard to clear out their cities..
Very few nations bothered to look into the huge numbers of collaborative staff after ww2. Most just
Folded, spindled, and mutilated. (Score:2)
"The population census has got him down as "dormanted". The Central Collective Storehouse computer has got him down as "deleted". [â¦] Information Retrieval has got him down as "inoperative". And thereâ(TM)s another one - security has got him down as "excised". Administration has got him down as "completed". ⦠Heâ(TM)s dead."
Brazil (1985)
IP's with out ISP logs are useless and even if the (Score:2, Insightful)
IP's with out ISP logs are useless and even if they have them ones from public networks are dead ends unless they have full logs as well.
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IP's with out ISP logs are useless and even if they have them ones from public networks are dead ends unless they have full logs as well.
Perhaps some 20 years ago when millions browsed the web from AOL behind a complex series of proxy server.
Today everyone has always on broadband at home with long lived IP addresses. Knowing the user or household associated with an IP with some degree of accuracy seems to me to be anything but useless.
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If you are paranoid change the router MAC address on a regular basis.
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Not useless.
Can you not cross-reference the IP address of known transactions (booking a flight with credit card/personal info), with unknown transactions (emails intended to be sent anonymously, visits to "offensive/dangerous/terrorist" sites etc) to determine who is doing what?
Yes, there are ways around masking your IP source and identity if you go to the trouble, but that doesn't mean everyone takes those measures.
Just another reason not to fly..... (Score:3)
Re:Just another reason not to fly..... (Score:4, Informative)
My wife and I last flew commercial on 9-10-2001 out of LGA, the day before 9-11. My wife and I decided, the next day that, short of an emergency situation, we were done flying commercial. If we couldn't drive to get there, we didn't need to go. It's not because we were afraid of terrorists, but we saw what a hassle and invasion of privacy it would became.
I hope that when you are driving, you don't use any toll roads and that when you buy gas or anything else, you use cash that you obtained from an ATM when you were at home. Best also not to drive through any intersections with red light cameras. You also might need to put optical filters on your license plates if you don't want to be tracked. There are lots of cameras out there.
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They said 'hassle' not just 'invasion of privacy.' None of the things you listed amount to a hassle similar to that which regular people now face when they try to enter an airport terminal.
But that stuff you rambled on about certainly sounds like a hassle. Is that how you live your life? Really?
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But that stuff you rambled on about certainly sounds like a hassle. Is that how you live your life? Really?
I consider avoiding being tracked by government thugs to the best of my ability to be very important.
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But that stuff you rambled on about certainly sounds like a hassle. Is that how you live your life? Really?
Nope, I don't do any of it. I was just saying that if you are trying to avoid being tracked when traveling by avoiding flying, it won't do you any good. I travel a lot and I assume that I am tracked a lot.
Actually if you travel a lot, the hassle factor gets greatly reduced; when you travel by air frequently, you gain status with the airlines and they treat you much nicer. You also become eligible for TSA Pre / known traveler, which lets you go back to the simple "old school" security which is basically ju
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Some of us have families the other sides of oceans. It's not so easy to give up flying.
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good news!
the invasion of privacy according to the data started long, long before 9/11!
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well, fuck!!! and we thought we were special
Non Story (Score:2)
When the spooks ... (Score:2)
When the spooks treat the entire public as the enemy is probably the the time to recognise the spooks are the enemy of civil society.
PNR's are not new (Score:3)
When I used to work for the IT of a very large travel agency in the late 1990's/early 2K's, our systems interacted with the computer reservations systems (CRS') of the major airlines, hotel and rental car chains. Every little detail of a call, itinerary, preferences and even comments by the travel agents are recorded. This information is collected by both travel agents on behalf of the travel firms so that they can provide better customer service (or, in the case of asshat travellers, give the agent a heads up).
We, as a travel agents could see the PNRs of all the airlines, hotels and rental car companies we did business with. And, we kept information on our corporate and personal clients in our own CRS as well - often, it included information extracted from those other systems so we could present it in a manner useful for our agents.
The point? The point is that this information has been available to 3rd parties for years under agreement. Since 9/11, right or wrong, the gov't has become more interested in your travel plans. This is, especially, true if you are a person of interest. Imagine what they have on your when the merge your credit card info / purchases, gas and food purchases, toll records, call records (meta data or actual, recorded calls) bank records, health records, video feeds, DMV records, and social media...Imagine the picture they can paint on each one of us under the guise of "National Security".
None of this is new. Only now are people beginning to understand what data is collected and available to those who want to know more about you. And, only now, do we as society have the ability to aggregate all this information into a single profile about you. You can can for what they have on you. You, almost certainly, will not like what you see. And, you aren't going to see the intel they extracted from that info.
There is no privacy. We, as a society, have given up privacy for convenience. And, we have accepted what corporations push on us (i.e. ATM fees (which, used to be free, btw) ) as the price for the convenience.
Here's something else to consider - we put money into banks. Those banks use our money to make money via loans. And, they fail to pay any reasonable interest on the money you deposited and allowing them to use (I remember 6% on savings...today? maybe 0.5%..can't even buy A lunch on the interest payment). And, they have the balls to charge you for the "privilege" of having an account and accessing your own money. Worse, you HAVE to have an account if you desire the convenience of a credit card, debit card, loan, or even as a place to deposit your paycheck as many corporations don't like cutting checks. The gov't has access to all these accounts and transactions and we pay for it. This is all in the name of convenience. Convenient, isn't it?
You voted for 'em. (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't about paranoia, it's about the fact that our personal rights are being completely abrogated by governments that are out of our control.
Our true freedom is doomed until we demand action so that due process takes place - legally and by the rules.
It's time to use the system to give itself back to us: with court challenges and by voting out non-supportive elected officials.
Exposure of incompetence and malfeasance with articles such as this are where to begin.
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full Credit card numbers is not just basic Info, imagine a data breach.
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How do you think all those companies let you pay without re-entering payment info?
They store your credit card number.
Sure it sucks if they get hacked or whatever, but that's the way it is.
They whole idea that you can use someones credit card just by knowing some numbers is stupid anyway.
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Untick "keep my credit card information for future payments". In vast majority of the cases, that means company doesn't keep your info after payment has been received.
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is what they really mean.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who believes that, go stand on your head in the corner and be counted.
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I believe it for a very simple reason. In most cases it will say so in site's TOS that they will not keep it should I tell them not to do so.
I find it very hard to believe that a site selling me goods would take a risk of getting hit by a contract breach and all the negative PR that would follow it just to keep my credit card information on file.
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All this info, just lying around, in case they need it. They wanna see what kind of home improvement crap I bought, what brand of tortilla chips I eat, where I gas up at, when I occasionally call on the phone, perhaps they'd like a scratch n sniff X-ray of my colon before I had a polyp removed. Maybe they'd like to hear the last obnoxious joke I told with the punchline of Hillary carrying Obamas two headed love child to term before marinating it in jalepeno barbeque sauce.
I'm pretty boring, and I hate and d
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Actually most get a token from their payment provider and store that for future use - only the very large sites which have their own merchant accounts and card provider systems will store the card details.
In the UK, most card providers require you to enrol into something called "3D Authentication", which sets up a password for your card - when you make a payment online, you put in your card details, billing address etc, and then you are asked for three digits from your 3D Authentication password. The way i
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Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because most of the time the airline blacks out most of the Credit Card before sending it to the Feds. In theory the Fed're only supposed to have the last four digits, because that should be enough (when combined with name and expiration date) to identify the card.
This is actually a pretty typical story on this issue. The Feds collect data that can be very useful in searching for terrorists, but they don't actually look at it much. They do a computer search, and most of it will never come up. So the airline sent them more then it should, and maybe somebody noticed, but nobody cared. So it got sent to his file folders (both electronic and physical). Then he FOIA'd the info, and since nobody FOIA's the info they had no procedure to respond to the FOIA, so he got it in a ridicuklous way (two batches, the first batch of which he had not asked for, and the second batch seems to have been totally unexpected).
If you think privacy rights are incredibly important, and are sincerely worried that Obama isn't enforcing them better, it's terrifying that a federal Agent could have stolen his CC info. And it's even more terrifying that there's no bureaucrat in charge of purging irrelevant info (like his CC number).
If you're me, and you take a more philosophical view of the whole issue, you note that a bureaucrat in charge of looking at his info would have looked at his info. Said info was highly unlikely to leak from the TSA to anyone else unless a) they had probable cause due to some investigation, or b) some enterprising agent decided to go over his file and verify it. Federal agencies just don't share information with each-other the way privacy purists imagine in their nightmares, rather they horde it and then exaggerate the info-horde's usefulness in powerpoints demanding an increased budget.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, do you believe abuses like those described here do not happen as a regular course of business: "NSA Employees Routinely Pass Around Nude Photos Obtained Via Mass Surveillance" http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... [zerohedge.com]
I find that naive. Now, do I care? Not really. But I understand why some people might, and I don't consider that privacy purity.
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Talk about a non sequitir.
Let's say I admitted that Snowden was right about the NSA and naked pictures, why would that imply anything about a completely different agency and text files? I can see how a bored NSA agent might get a kick out of a nudey that looked kinda like Natalie Portman (or even a nudie of Natalie Portman) and show it to other bored NSA Agents, but this is a text file. It's a very boring text file. It says some guy took a flight. He spoke English. It mentioned his preferred meal.
And we can
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Yes, non sequitur indeed. I'm sure government abuses of power are limited to the NSA.
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So your argument is that if government agents abuse power one way it is clear, beyond all doubt, with no actual investigation necessary, they abuse power all other ways?
That is the definition of a non sequitir.
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Governments abuse their power. I did not come to this conclusion from this incident. This incident is yet another example of innumerable examples in history. You think this new scenario is an exception based on... I don't know what.
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Government abuse their power, therefore every government agency you can possibly imagine abusing it;'s power in any way will eventually abuse it's power in exactly that way?
That's not logic. It's projection.
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Exactly. The old adage never was "Corrupt people get into power" it is, "power corrupts". It is not a matter of getting out corrupt people out of power because, it was never the who that was the problem, always the power you were giving them that creates the corruption.
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I think it's safer to say that most human beings will eventually abuse any power given to them. Since governments are run by human beings, it's also safe to say that all governments abuse their power. That's why the US Constitution tried so hard to limit government scope and power. Unfortunately, since governments abuse their power, and sheeple want "someone" to take care of them and protect them, those protections have been whittled away, anyway, but it was a good effort.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
> And we can actually be quite sure it was not widely shared at the TSA, because if it had been some asshole would have stolen his Credit Card number.
Except that they're available, in bulk, to whoever administers that database. And a theft or loss of a backup of that database is hideously unlikely to ever be reported, for "national security reasons" but also to reduce bureaucratic business. And given the history of federal agency personal and political fraud against private citizens, especially politically active citizens, it verifies that they have far too much data, far too easily accessed, available at whim for whatever purpose is desired.
Just because "it's boring text" does not mean it's not incredibly useful for political espionage or frame-ups. Please, do not try to claim that it "wouldn't happen here" The abuse of confidential federal information to harass political opponents certainly _has_ happened here, in the McCarthy hunt for Communits, with the Committee to Re-Elect the President in Nixon's presidential reign whose failures cost Richard Nixon his presidency, and with the Valerie Plame affair during George W. Bush's presidency.
The collection and aggregation of "uninteresting" private information or "metadata" represent risks to political careers and private liberty that will not cease simply because "who would care" or "it's dull". It's hardly dull to be able to use someone's personal information and credit card data to track the nature, times, and location of _every purchase_, and have warrant free monitoring of travels and personal business. And there is, effectively, no oversight of such access because it's the NSA: they operate under a tremendous shroud of national security that prevents rational oversight of such sensitive information.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
You realize Hoover never had access to any non-FBI database? Neither did HUAC at al. And there are plenty of Federal databases besides the FBI. In another thread I mentioned three that are actually a lot more dangerous, and a lot older, then anything we're talking about: the Census, Social Security, and the IRS. Neither the CREEPs nor the Plame Scandal involved the use of a Federal database. Plame was not even a database at all. Rove was talking to a random guy about her husband, and he mentioned the CIA connection. The CREEP did not abuse any Federal databases, it tried to steal information that could not be added to those databases (like reports from the shrink of a guy who pissed Nixon off).
I'll note here you haven't managed to quote the only actual example of a Federal database being used against US Citizens (Japanese internment).
So while I will agree, that in theory this database could be used by a future Hoover, I will also point out that it is quite useful in numerous actual law enforcement situations. Terrorism actually exists, even tho we like to pretend it no longer counts just because almost all the victims are black Africans. I disagree with much of the war on drugs, but the drug runners are not nice people. Both groups use the US Air network, and if there's any pattern to their usage we can't find that out unless it's recorded somewhere. Given that the US Government is pretty consistent in it's evils (they tend to involve totally ignoring the Constitution to get new data, and/or abuse minorities; using data from existing data sources just isn't the MO), the long-term risk of them abusing old data is quite low. Call it 5%.
So we have a database, that will be useful in numerous perfectly legitimate law enforcement operations, and a small risk of it leading to bad things. You're free to conclude any risk is too much, but I think that risk is fine.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Nisei were a wholesale incarceration, and was quite public. I was referring more to illegal acts in living memory. The other acts involved the abuse of private information, held in federal hands. It doesn't have to be in a database. The extent of the data and its ease of access _expand_ the risk, not reduce it.
> So we have a database, that will be useful in numerous perfectly legitimate law enforcement operations, and a small risk of it leading to bad things
The "risk" is real. I'm afraid that its abuse is inevitable with so much data concentrated behind closed doors, without any judicial review or enforceable consequences for its misuse.
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'In living memory'? Ask George Takei what he remembers from his childhood.
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No one should ever be keeping your credit card number without your explicit permission.
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..why would the feds have it? it's not basic info to store of your citizens really.
also storing credit card numbers while rampant in the industries is also something feds shouldn't be having and furthermore it's not something any credit card processing business should be doing ether(payment processor 'gateways' excluded, it's all in the rules if you start processing cc payments.. even if you do recurring charges you as a charger company don't actually need to store the full card data).
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You can have a certain --even high-- degree of freedom, and still be under more or less total control.
The latter is the program that has been initiated quite some time ago.
Those in power, a minuscule pertentage of the population, need to consolidate that power. How you
do that? By gaining total control over the masses
It's so simple it could've been a conspiracy -- if it weren't for the sheer number oif stories like these
popping up every day, and then some.
Get organized!
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Nonsense. For example, if you voted for Ross Perot, you're directly responsible for the Republicans losing the White House. If you voted for Nader, you're directly responsible for the Democrats losing the White House.
Either go back to your government as intended; that is to say, without political parties, or accept the fact that there are, in fact, political parties, and change your government setup to work with that.
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Nonsense. For example, if you voted for Ross Perot, you're directly responsible for the Republicans losing the White House.
That's silly - exit polls showed more Perot voters would have otherwise voted for Clinton than for Bush.
Either go back to your government as intended; that is to say, without political parties, or accept the fact that there are, in fact, political parties, and change your government setup to work with that.
That right there, though, is some good stuff.
Re:if you've voted R or D... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only wasted vote is a vote for provably evil scumbags. To say that someone else might win because I cast my vote for someone who isn't an evil scumbag is extremely short-sighted; nothing is ever going to change if people do not take a stand. And win or not, people voting for third parties sends a message to The One Party.
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Or do you game the system, and aim for the best realistic outcome?
That's not gaming the system; that's being a shortsighted, unprincipled moron and mindlessly going along with the status quo. I assure you that voting for evil scumbags does not 'stick it to the man' or do anything similar; it definitely doesn't "game the system." It's better to have principles and vote for someone you like even if there's virtually no chance they'll win than it is to vote for evil and ensure that nothing will likely ever change. Have fun with your self-fulfilling prophecies.
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It's better principles, maybe, but it also guarantees that your vote is tossed away.
The system, as is, is designed to not allow third parties to win. Therefore, by voting third-party, you're implicitly not voting for a candidate that could actually win.
Like I said in another post, change the system. Somehow.
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I've voted for the lesser of two evils or against one I perceived as provably more evil.
Then, as already pointed out, you're part of the problem. Have fun with your TSA, your Patriot Act, your mass government surveillance, and all the other constitutional and rights violations that the government is more than happy to shove on us, all because of voters' shortsightedness.
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Given that the American government setup was SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED to avoid 'too much democracy,' I'd have to disagree with you, champ.
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SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED to avoid 'too much democracy,'
So you admit we have some.
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On the other hand, having a monarch that in theory has the ability to veto any bill [wikipedia.org] Parliament passes, but said privilege is in a Schroedinger state because they haven't exercised it since 1708 strikes me as a bit weird.
Is the U.K. a monarchy or a republic? Seems debatable.
(assuming since you said "bloody" you're from the UK)
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So, if I participate in protests, vote for people aren't evil scumbags, get involved in my local government, and try to convince others to do the same, I'm directly responsible for evil scumbags being voted in, even though I have nothing to do with that? We're not even much of a democracy at all.
It seems more like you're trying to convince yourself that even doing the bare minimum (not voting for evil scumbags) is fine because other people who do don't accomplish much.
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Wait, no... Fuck you!
Re:this is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
The surprise twist ending is when we end up with an authoritarian regime because too many people just sighed and said, "this is news?" any time something that should outrage us happened.
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Vote your heart when it comes to elections, even if statistically speaking, the candidate is going to lose. If enough people stopped voting for the lesser of two evils, and for someone whom they really want to be elected, I wonder what will happen?
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You guys are stuck with a stupid two-party system, all you can do is vote for the lesser of two evils.
Re:this is news? (Score:5, Funny)
You guys are stuck with a stupid two-party system, all you can do is vote for the lesser of two evils.
The solution is obvious: vote Cthulhu [google.com]
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I've never actually had this experience when dealing with an airline; I typically have to explain the situation to each employee, often more than once.