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Passport Files of Presidential Hopefuls Snooped
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Mar 22, 2008 06:34 PM
from the now-please-put-real-id-to-bed-without-its-supper dept.
from the now-please-put-real-id-to-bed-without-its-supper dept.
CNN is reporting on the widening brouhaha that began when Barack Obama's passport file was accessed illegally on three occasions beginning in January. Now it seems that John McCain's file was also snooped; and that last year Hillary Clinton's file suffered the same fate. Ars Technica nails the real importance of these breaches, saying that the Presidential hopefuls are "...currently providing the country with a very public lesson in why the 'privacy advocates' who oppose initiatives like Real ID and the executive branch's domestic surveillance programs should really be called 'democracy advocates.' In short..., the entire incident shows exactly why citizens' privacy is critical in a country where citizens compete with one another for control of the government."
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I guess you could spin this into anything (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I guess you could spin this into anything (Score:5, Funny)
Bribes to congressman should be legal; they're going to take bribes anyway, so if they're illegal it will accomplish making congress look bad, which in turn diminishes the integrity of the government and country which is bad for us all.
Except bribing congress is pretty much legal already, and I'd imagine they came up with a better excuse than that for why
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Re:I guess you could spin this into anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I don't think that will happen either.
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Re:I guess you could spin this into anything (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hint: Right now, the "enemy" is the government.
How about understanding who owns the records? (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue illustrated is that clerks can get anything stored. Governments and companies like to pretend they are better than others when they keep things they should not. Improper access proves the lie, not that passport records are inherently damaging.
The issue is really about what records should be kept and who owns them. The public does not own the record of my travel unless I'm doing public work. I'm the only person who should be able to make that kind of information available when I chose. The st
Re:I guess you could spin this into anything (Score:4, Informative)
Unmasked, policeman who gave two killers their victim's address after road rage row [dailymail.co.uk]
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Re:I guess you could spin this into anything (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry, "RealID protection" I fail to see how having an ID is protection at all. The topic of course is about peoples private information being looked at. We currently don't know if it was given to anyone or what purpose the access was done. But I suspect that the passport information contains things like passport number and SSN and other identifying information. Well identity theft is a serious costly issue to all of us, now isn't it. I would imagine that the information in the passport file would contain some lovely information that could be used for identity theft. That of course would be rather dumb for the celebrities this article is about, but it seems that only some of the more important names were flagged for the type of alert that caused this to be exposed. Who knows how many others have had their information comprimised, illegally I might add.
Now lets all get a database of information on everyone. That will solve the problem, require everyone to have an ID that they will be required to carry, that solves the problem doesn't it. Wait a minute what was the problem, identity theft? If someone has a fake ID that looks good, well then they are that person, if they have the background information like the ssn, address, and those little numbers on the back of the card, well then they are that person. Substituting an external tag for a person, substituting a copyable, forgable, piece of identification for a living breathing person, does not solve a problem, it only says we trust and ID more than we do a person, we trust our information database more than a living breathing citizen. If someone wanted to blow up a building, they can forge the documents, and pictures and the building will be history. Better to find out why anyone would want to blow up a building and see to it that the reasons don't exist. In the case of 911, it was our presence in the Middle East that Bin Laden was pissed about. That presence cost us the trade towers. We (the country leaders) of course wanted to be there and had no fear, because we are the super power, so there, bring it on.
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Beyond Fear (Score:3, Interesting)
Ur, last time i checked, he also doesn't believe in democracy. Let's stop that craziness and then we'll be perfectly safe, right?
The Wikipedia article on the McVeigh bombing [wikipedia.org] states that the prosecution's hypothesis was that he was driven by hatred of the US because of various things including: tax increases, the Waco siege and Ruby Ridge. After that bombing, you immediately supported the elimination of tax increases and FBI raids on
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They'll say "wow, and the government issued the terrorists real RealIDs, just like the rest of the terrorists who were all legally identified.
Meanwhile the people collecting my tax money to make yet another piece of plastic ID card will laugh all the way to the bank while people like you stand around drooling and wondering why their magical bits of plastic didn't sa
Slashdot. Your source for 3 day old news (Score:4, Insightful)
Time to increase the penalties for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Along with that should go greatly increased penalties for the abuse of these capabilities. Firing a contractor seems hardly sufficient. Anyone performing this sort of act should serve significant jail time, financial penalties, and so on. If repeat offenses occur the company for whom the contractor works should be banned from future government related contracts.
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Along with that should go greatly increased penalties for the abuse of these capabilities. Firing a contractor seems hardly sufficient.
Firing does seem inadequate, but you want go easy on the knee jerk throw all the baddies in jail response, given that the US already has one of the highest incarceration rates expressed as percentage of population. Simpler would be to cut off a hand for the first offense, the other hand for a second, and so on from there depending on what body part they are using to access a computer. I think most would stop with the first amputation.
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Government has unprecedented data gathering and search capabilities, and is seeking increases in those capabilities. These capabilities are hard to prevent;
Along those lines: technology has increased the capability for copying and sharing intellectual property. So, shouldn't we have much stiffer penalties on things like filesharing and copying of music? Perhaps we should allow the RIAA to directly arrest people they suspect of these crimes, or perhaps shoot them on sight? After all, technology makes this a much more serious issue.
What I want to know.. (Score:5, Funny)
Did anyone else notice... (Score:2, Informative)
Does it bother anyone... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Looking at the wrong records get you caught (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Looking at the wrong records get you caught (Score:4, Interesting)
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The biggest issue is being completely missed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I the only one who finds it a bit convenient that word of the snooping wasn't released until two days after the contract was awarded, over two months after the first snooping against Obama occurred? You'd almost think they had some friends in high places who made sure it didn't become public, since that's the kind of revelation that could have put a big roadblock on their contract award.
I wonder what those involved in suppressing the information will be receiving from Stanley? A cushy job or consulting contract? Campaign contributions for high ranking State Department staffers who might be thinking about a run for Congress in 2010 should the republicans lose the White House?
Democracy advocates? (Score:5, Insightful)
I could care less about the "state of democracy" in America. What I want is the state of the Constitution, something that often is sacrificed by public approval.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It certainly makes more sense to confound freedom and democracy than it does to confound liberty and liberal, certainly in modern use. I'm very much in favor of liberty, which is why I've never considered myself a liberal (in the modern sense). Federal government insertion into every aspect of our lives
Outrageous and Unfair (Score:5, Funny)
Snooping in Passports? Yet we want them to... (Score:3, Informative)
OK, so you don't care about privacy... (Score:5, Insightful)
The single most elementary premise upon which a free society is based is that the state has absolutely no right to interfere in any way whatsoever with a citizen who is going about his legal business. None. Any infringement on this standard is the beginning of the end, because it places the welfare of the state above the welfare of the people who are supposed to be its masters.
Yes, sometimes terrorists and common criminals will take advantage of this freedom to inflict damage. That's part of the price you pay. If you aren't willing to pay, or even have your children pay, then pack up and move to Communist China. You and your children will be safe there, as long as you keep your mouths shut.
I can go on for ages with reasons why people who are supposed to be your servants, like politicians, cops and bureaucrats, are always so anxious to persuade you that just a little tiny surrender will save the children and kittens and puppies. It won't, and they'll want more. And more. And more.
And never forget that this one of those cases where mutual accommodation is possible in only one direction. If I impose rigorous privacy laws, I can agree that you don't value privacy and leave you to whatever lifestyle pleases you. You aren't affected in any way, because you can still give as much information as you want to anybody you want to have it. On the other hand, when you impose your anti-privacy laws, there's no room for me to be left alone with my choice.
Why the assumption of privacy ? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would think entry/exit data should be public information, as well as each country visited using that passport, which after all, was provided at public expense, backed by the tax payers, carries with it an expectation of the US government using its influence to secure the safe travel of these people who are de-facto targets of people who would harm the US.
I could make the same case for anyone, really, why should you expect your world travels to be a private matter? What could be more public than world travel?
At most these workers would seem to have violated an unauthorized use of computing resource rules. The fact that it was a political candidate LESSENS the infraction in my opinion.
The fact that they WERE ABLE TO access the information means heads should roll, but not their heads. Why aren't the IT folks being keel hauled instead of these drones? What kind of security does this agency have where the biggest impediment to access is a "thou shalt not"?
The real lesson here is... (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not want some bloated, mis-managed, government agency to have all of my medical records, employment records, or business records. If anybody thinks some sub-contracted flunky at a keyboard will be happy snooping through the passport records of his fellow citizens after their medical records become available as part of some similarly unsecured, poorly engineered, unsupervised federal bureaucracy, you're kidding yourself. This stuff is rapidly spinning out of control and the only way to put the brakes on it is to head back toward what the country started with: a small, tightly focused federal government that keeps records on its citizens to the minimum degree practical.
This situation was bad enough when the idiots in government had our data. It gets worse now that government is outsourcing work to non-government people who will never be properly held to account; it opens the way for outside entities to gain access to the data by hiring people to do temporary data harvesting jobs, injecting those people into those outsourced government positions, then acting shocked and "firing" them when they get caught (with bonuses and options to be re-hired later by another division...) That may not be what happened here, but it will happen as the government gets more of our data and that data becomes more interesting/valuable to outsiders.
Your privacy, like your reputation, is not a physical thing; once you hand it over or damage it, you can never get it back.
Non-story (Score:3, Insightful)
If you were given the power, how many of you would resist the urge to look up Natalie Portman's [insert your favorite opposite sex celebrity here] passport?
That's what most of the information is pointing to. (Unless of course this is what they want me to conclude.) Now if it's politically motivated such as Nixon era privacy breaching I'd probably feel differently about it.
Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Translation: Utterly and completely without cause I'll put in some unrelated hot-button stuff and then try to pretend I didn't.
Translation: Utterly and completely without cause I'll put in some unrelated hot-button stuff and invoke scary scenarios forwarding my own agenda.
Etc... Etc...
And really, that's the whole point of this [Ars Technica] 'news' story - not to tell the news, but to slant it and spin it until it is no longer recognizable and then to attach editorial comments unrelated to main story. If Faux News, CNN, or one of the other big networks did this, Slashdot and the rest of the blogosphere would be up in arms about such journalistic misbehavior.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyways, the connection is merely someone's loose opinion.
Re:What's private about passport records? (Score:4, Informative)
Stronger privacy protections? Less intrusive government?
My, what an awful political tool
Step 2. Databse gets abused
Step 3. Reforms are 'enacted'
Step 4. Go back to step 2
The only reason this case of abuse was noticed is because high profile people have a tripwire attached to their records to alert a supervisor whenever those records are accessed. The people who pass laws have built in special privacy protections for themselves and anyone with money, fame, or notability. You think it would be front page news if a contractor was probing through the passport records of sumdumass (711423)?
If you can't see the relationship between a contractors snooping through a Passport database and the potential for contractors snooping through a Real ID database... you must be willfully blind.
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In Soviet Slashdot, groupthink posts you! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, seriously, this just keeps coming up and it's retarded. Slashdot readers are anything but a representative sample of American (or any) society. Of course we don't reflect it, let alone the full range of the political (left-right) spectrum.
When the editors post a good story, we get between two and five hundred posts discussing how and why this is alarming, what the possible implications may be, etc. Once moderation is applied we end up with a very high signal to noise ratio. Dissenting views are pretty much always modded up, except when they're trolls or flamebait (and even then, people often take the time to read them and reply). Other sources are often quoted or linked to, and those posts get modded up too. In other words, we get a good, interesting (possibly insightful, or informative, sometimes even funny) discussion.
When the editors post something stupid, we get between two and five hundred posts pointing out the error and ripping on the editor that put it on the front page. Occasionally, a thread or two spawns discussing some tangentially related subject that ends up being interesting on its own merrits.
As far as I'm concerned, the system is working as intended. Seriously, who would you rather discuss politics with? The Digg crowd? The people that leave comments on Youtube? Seriously, answer that question and go there. Then come back and tell us what you find.
The fact that we often agree in large numbers speaks more to the fact that we're a self-selected group than anything else. The fact that the editors pander to us says more about their lust for precious ad revenue than their political views. Not all herds are made of sheep. And even if they were, kdawson (it's him everyone bitches about, right? I honesty don't pay attention to the editors' names) sucks at playing sheep-dog.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It wouldn't be so bad if the politics introduced where neutral in the stories and the users take it from there. But all the stories are Evil Republicans, Baby Eating Bush, and so on.
Powers-that-be-bashing is always going to be the order of the day among a largely libertarian crowd. The editors are just clumsily following along with the trends we set. I could be wrong, I guess we could test that by picking out opposed stories that made it to the firehose, and see how their chances of hitting the front page relates to their rating from before.
Now if you want to talk about the mainstream media (where many of these stories come from), well, that's something different entirely. I can't rea
Re:What's private about passport records? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is why you don't want any MORE info in the hands of the feds than the minimum needed. In my opinion the guvmint should be required to send you a letter every time it looks up your personal information. This would sure open some people's eyes I bet.
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Re:What's private about passport records? (Score:4, Insightful)
If that's your goal, then push for it to cover private contractors working on a government contract.
Otherwise the FBI, DHS, et. al. could just contract out and never provide any notification, since the government agency in question never accessed a citizens personal information (but their contractor did).
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Re:What's private about passport records? (Score:4, Interesting)
As a former government contractor I can say with a fair amount of confidence that we are safe from "government officials" looking up our records in Federal databases. Most of them are doing good to get through their morning e-mail without a call to the help desk. The really technical ones can manage simple spreadsheets (although in my experience this involved a fair amount of hand-holding too).
I'm not sure if the problem here is that the average citizen doesn't know the difference between a contractor and a "government official" or if the reporters involved just weren't sure which one it was. Chances are that if you call the IRS, Social Security Administration, or State Department you are going to be talking to a contractor, not a "government official" or even (if we want to consider a third category) a government employee. They don't do database updates, they don't do secretarial work, they don't write computer programs, they certainly don't make their own travel arrangements (Clinton/Gore's government re-invention program relieved them of this onerous responsibility) and they can sit right next to a ringing telephone for hours without being bothered by it.
So, now, the question remains for those who are in favor of the government doing more and more things for us, all of such things involving the collection of various bits of data about ourselves: Who would you rather have access to that data... (a) a contractor, who as we've seen might use idle time to sneak a peek at their neighbors info, or (b) a government employee (or official) who might also do such things, but in addition might accidentally delete or mangle your records because they don't have a clue how the data is organized.
By the way my answer is (c) none of the above. There is no technology fix for this. If you don't want your data looked at, then don't have it out there. That means you have to take a certain amount of responsibility for your own lives. Tough huh?
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Well... (Score:5, Informative)
(I find it sad that in America, private property is often guarded with deadly force, but private property is replaceable, whereas privacy has no protection at all and privacy can never be replaced. Once privacy is lost, it is lost forever.)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Surprisingly, the contractor was fired and the two workers weren't? I'm not sure why this happened, I would hope that they are given the rules of acces
You're short some information. (Score:5, Informative)
Regardless, while this is private information, it's not exactly SENSITIVE private information. There's really nothing in these files that isn't a matter of public record (when you applied, where you lived when you applied, name, birthdate) or isn't going to be terribly interesting for any political reason (SS#).
It's pretty safe to assume these breaches were merely the result of idle curiosity, as there's really no other reason to even bother looking at these files with such uninteresting information. That would also explain the fairly wide access thousands of people have to these files.
And to the GP:
Yes, an Obama campaign supporter (donated $2,300) runs one of the contractors whose employees looked at the files. But a Clinton campaing supporter (donated $1,000) runs the other one. Pretty much a wash, unless you're McCain.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Regardless, while this is private information, it's not exactly SENSITIVE private information. There's really nothing in these files that isn't a matter of public record (when you applied, where you lived when you applied, name, birthdate) or isn't going to be terribly interesting for any political reason (SS#).
Actually, that's not true. There was a news story yesterday that said that passport records also contain the results of any background checks the government runs when deciding whether to issue you a passport. Why dig up dirt on someone yourself when you can have the government do it for you?
Re:What's private about passport records? (Score:5, Insightful)
What galls me is that, apparently, the database has a flag that can be set for "famous people", which causes a supervisor alert whenever the file is accessed. Where is the special alert for the rest of us? We're the ones whose data could be abused to wreak havoc on our lives and finances.
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You are soooo right! (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh God Yes!!! I agree so much with that statement.
I don't know about you, but there's no way in hell I could walk into a bank and say that I'm Barak Obama; regardless of the documentation I have (I'm short and all white.) Or Hillary for that matter - I'm male. But, I could walk in with any one of other hundreds of thousands of identities and wreak havoc. My banker told me that she gets at least one person a week trying to steal someone's identity. Hence the endless questions when opening an account. It's also for the (non) PATRIOT Act bullshit - but that's another topic.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What's private about passport records? Passport records contain your name, your address, your social security number, your place of birth, and a photo of you.
According to the BBC News article
"US passport files include data such as age and place of birth, foreign travel records, and a Social Security number."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7309165.stm [bbc.co.uk]
I'd be interested to know if UK passport files include foreign travel records (since I have one).
Re:What's private about passport records? (Score:5, Informative)
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If they already can't keep a cap on the passport data they are responsible for now, why would they be trustable with more of our information?
Re:What's private about passport records? (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue is not the records, it's who has access to them, and what they do with that access.
You certainly don't have access, but somebody with an axe to grind might. Nixon had his Enemies List. The TSA has the No-Fly List. According to Newsweek, 1.3 million Americans have their bank accounts under the same sort of "special scrutiny" that noticed Eliot Spitzer moving a few thousand dollars around. (Less than the $10,000 banks are required to report.) The bank account monitoring came about due to PATRIOT, by the way.
The government folks are snooping goverment records all the time anyway
Actually that's not as true as you might think, but regardless, it's irrelevant. As this case demonstrates, now the contractor folks are snooping government records too.
My guess is, as more and more data gets collected, we simply won't have privacy any more. The only fix I see is to simply stop collecting (and storing, and making more available, and organizing so intelligently) so much data.
In the Spitzer case, I don't see how his downfall benefits New York. Why are we collecting all this data about people? Whatever good comes of it (if any, can somebody think of any good that's come of it) seems to be completely outweighed by the bad.
Perhaps I'm okay with collecting the data, but it should be abstracted away from the person's identity. You should probably need to convince a judge to issue a search warrant on the basis that User_ID 136137134 is showing a pattern of suspicious activity.
As I recall this is more or less why we have a FISA court in the first place. To prevent exactly the sorts of abuses of surveillance that Nixon, Hoover, et. al. were so fond of.
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Re:What's private about passport records? (Score:5, Interesting)
What Realid also does, is force states to combine all of their records together where the federal government can access them, and allows the federal government to join that data with private and government data for whatever purpose it wants.
All of that data in one place is a really big prize for somebody wanting to mess with somebody's life -- especially when you consider that DHS has consistently failed security audits for it's computer networks.
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