Patriot Act Sloppy Again 03/22/2007 08:34:05 pm by Dan Krohn

	Just as it appears that a member of the Axis of Evil, North Korea, is about to rejoin the international community on a somewhat civil basis, things seem to get mucked up. The United States has had a substantial sum of money frozen which the North Koreans claim is theirs. The U.S. in negotiations has agreed to release the funds. But before agreeing to inspections of suspect nuclear plants, North Korea walked out of the six-party talks because the funds were not moving. What gives? A country wants money, and the country controlling the money wants them to get it. Apparently a not well publicized provision in the Patriot Act is gumming up the works. There is a provision which allows the U.S. administration to punish banks suspected of improper behavior. Surely enabling the transfer of a large sum of money to a renegade country like North Korea would qualify as such improper behavior. So banks and governments in China, Russia and South Korea are refusing to touch it - effectively freezing the transfer to North Korea. A few problems are highlighted by this very silly but dangerous scenario. Dangerous because nuclear weapons in the hands of a government like North Korea’s is inherently uncomfortable and unpredictable. The provision of the Patriot Act involved, like so many of its other provisions, permits action without adequate oversight or consideration. Contrary to typical American philosophy, it authorizes government bureaucrats to impose punishments without a reasonable finding of guilt. Sometimes there is a need to move with great speed, but procedures can be put in place for quick review and correction of bad rushed decisions. Of course, no one ever wants to admit an error, so those making the decisions have preferred there to be no provision for review. And there needs to be some provision for changing a decision rapidly when the politics changes, as this is essentially a political situation. The Patriot Act was passed in a hurry under influence of extreme emotion. This blogger is no expert on this legislation, but has attended seminars and read enough to realize that an American government giving proper consideration to its lawmaking would have passed something much cleaner. The kindest one can be towards this statute is to understand that it was passed hurriedly under overwhelming emotional feelings of fear, grief and anger. This is not the first time a provision of that statute has looked suspect after the passage of time. What should be done? The president and the congress should at this point work together to fix the Patriot Act in nonpartisan cooperation. The American people expect and probably deserve this. But is anyone out there willing to place a bet on that happening? Unfortunately all too many in Washington have placed their oaths of office of loyalty to the United States on a lower rung of the ladder than loyalty to their political parties, their political ambitions and quest for power, their campaign supporters and their personal greed. As long as the people of the United States refuse to deal with the problem electorally - it will persist.

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Texas Invites Identity Thieves? 03/07/2007 02:46:23 pm by Dan Krohn

	From the news and as made clear by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), identity theft is a big and growing concern of Americans. So it is fascinating to see that the Texas legislature is poised to send a gold leafed invitation to identity thieves to stick it to Texans. As has and is happening in many parts of the country, local court clerks are posting public records on the Internet. The logic is simple: (1) these are public records so anyone should have access to them, and (2) it’s far less work for the clerk staffs if people can simply go online and find the public documents they are searching for. On the face of things, this seems like the way it ought to be, but .... Among the documents included in these public postings are all sorts of legal pleadings pertaining to court cases - including divorces. This blogger can confidently state that until recently it was standard practice to include private identity information in divorce papers. Such information included social security numbers, drivers’ license numbers and even (let’s make it easy for thieves) credit care numbers - heck, even some personal health data was there to be found. Indeed after this blogger’s divorce was finalized, one of his first action items was to get credit cards reissued with new numbers that would not match those in the public records (and that was even before all this Internet posting). Now with that kind of information on the Internet, the identity thieves don’t even need to leave home. So it came to pass that a clerk in Ft. Bend County, Texas asked the Texas Attorney General for an opinion on this matter. The Attorney General studied the issue and pronounced that publishing this kind of personally identifiable information on the Net was criminal under current law. Well, this has sent the clerks scurrying to the legislature for relief. And indeed, these are not criminals on whom society should be wasting resources. But the posting of all this data should stop, and portions of clerks’ offices' websites containing this data should be pulled down until fixed. But that’s not the fix being promoted. Rather the Texas House of Representatives just passed emergency legislation exempting the clerks from privacy laws. Wow, what a remedy! Other states have faced this issue and are not posting such material on the Net until the clerks’ offices have gone through the documents and redacted the private information. Presumably the Texas representatives have concluded that the cost of redacting information would be too high - regardless of cost to Texans. One can only hope that the Texas Senate will have better judgement. One other clever idea was proposed to this blogger which might fix the problem. Immediately the official website of the Texas House of Representatives should include the social security numbers, drivers’ license numbers, and perhaps a little more data on each and every representative. What’s good for the goose.....

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Grabbing the Whole Pipeline 03/12/2007 10:29:54 pm by Dan Krohn

	According to a January 30, 2007 CNET story, it has emerged that the FBI routinely engages in something called “full-pipe” recording as its now standard method of investigating Internet activity. This is an interesting and frightening development. Some years ago, the FBI came under fire for a program called “Carnivore” which it was placing at ISP’s in an effort to locate suspicious activity over the Internet. The problem was that Carnivore constituted an invasion of privacy largely ignoring the Fourth Amendment requirements as to reasonable searches. The new “full-pipe” method goes further, and it has emerged without typical court supervision. When an ISP cannot for technical reasons identify for the FBI a particular user’s IP address, the FBI uses this method which entails creating a database consisting of all email or Web browsing or both through the ISP, then using data mining techniques to look through the Internet activity at its convenience. Indeed, because of the convenience, it seems that this has become the default Internet snooping method the FBI uses. And there is no information as to how long the FBI keeps these databases of wholesale Internet activity. So at least thousands of Americans who are not suspected of anything are having their Internet activity gathered and rummaged through by the FBI. Now I often hear from people that they have nothing to hide. But those with truly nothing to hide often have lived exceedingly boring lives; the truth is those making that statement have not thought very deeply. It does not take much imagination to conceive how offensive this methodology could become. Say the Bureau has a huge database and decides to look for illegal pornography. In principle that’s not such a bad thing, except there is no showing of probable cause begore looking for any particular suspect’s activity. Now there may be a claim soon that all the data mining is such as to look for material as to a particular suspect - but we cannot believe that the temptation to look for inappropriate activity without individuals yet identified will be resisted. So for one of their searches they look for all Web browsing activities for the word “breast”. Presumably their methods would automatically delete recipes for turkey and chicken, but we don’t know as there is no real oversight here. So out of the database come all sorts of names including women concerned with breast cancer and artists concerned with the human figure in a way not at all pornographic. How much imagination does it take to think that having spotted someone familiar interested in breast cancer, that the fact of the Internet inquiry might be mentioned to someone who is that woman’s employer or knows that woman’s employer, which employer without saying a word considers this in making a toss-up decision as to which of two people get a promotion. Inevitably abuse will occur. (Is this illegal under the ADA - yeah probably. But how would it ever be known or proven?) And it is with the knowledge that abuse of some sort will occur, that the founders of this nation insisted on the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. If the reader does not like the possible example above, then use your imagination to come up with your own problem scenario. Fact is, what we apparently have going on are secret police searches of lots of people’s email without any showing of probable cause and without the kind of court scrutiny which has historically protected Americans from constitutionally prohibited searches and seizures. Any American who has studied a bit of history should be extremely offended by this! Any American who is not, has largely forgotten the principles on which this country was founded and maintained.

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