Safeway Club Card Leads to Bogus Arson Arrest 505
Richard M. Smith writes "Tukwila, Washington firefighter, Philip Scott Lyons found out the hard way
that supermarket loyalty cards come with a huge price. Lyons was arrested
last August and charged with attempted arson. Police alleged at the time
that Lyons tried to set fire to his own house while his wife and children
were inside. According to KOMO-TV and the Seattle Times, a major piece of evidence used against Lyons in his arrest was the record of his supermarket purchases that he made with his Safeway Club Card. Police
investigators had discovered that his Club Card was used to buy fire starters of the same type used in the arson attempt. For Lyons, the story did have a happy ending. All charges were dropped against him in January 2005 because another person stepped forward saying he or she
set the fire and not Lyons."
How did they get the safeway info?? (Score:3, Interesting)
What issue? (Score:4, Interesting)
Card Sharing @ Safeway (Score:2, Interesting)
This Has Been Well Documented (Score:3, Interesting)
The emphasis is mine.
Fly-buys is a large loyalty scheme in Australia. AUSTRAC are the spooks responsible for tracing money as it flows through the economy.
Basically, the government is well aware of the abilty of loyalty schemes to trace otherwise untraceable cash transactions, and they would rather the public didn't know about it (as proven by the bungled attempt at censorship).
Re:Your Rights Online?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is why I used a fake name and address when I signed up for my loyalty cards.
I've never seen any supermarket employee ask for ID when you fill out a loyalty card application. If anything, the employees are completely indifferent about letting customers borrow each others' cards, and will even provide spare cards of their own for customer who forget theirs.
Just use a fake name and address that are not obviously bogus, get the price discount, and stop worrying.
Same thing with DNA tests (Score:2, Interesting)
I could get a few hairs from someone, murder his wife, spread his hairs all over the place and the police would most probably think it was him (he was in his bed sleeping at home with nobody to witness)
BUT ITS just a CLUE. If i had worn a neoprene suit no genetic data would have dropped by me. The police would think that person is guilty. A good police investigator would know its only a hint and not enough to convict someone. Unfortunately the public is thinking that this data is confirmed.
Re:How did they get the safeway info?? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The wife? (Score:3, Interesting)
No fire-starters in the party supplies that I remember, but it would make an interesting blip in someone's record. (Especially when we did the same in the liquor store afterwards. Hmm.. One bottle of wine and .. Holy Frack! Red flag their health and car insurance!)
Insurance implications of Loyalty cards. (Score:5, Interesting)
- you apply for health insurance;
- your insurer looks up your loyalty card records, and says "I see you've been buying fatty foods, pizza, chips, chocolate. "
- same insurer checks your credit card records: "I see no Gym payments here, you don't work out, do you?"
- "At least you don't smoke, then we'd refuse to insure you at all."
- "OK, we can insure you, it will just cost you much more, because of your lifestyle. We will use any excuse to charge you more."
The same goes for life insurance, or car insurance if you are noted buying alcohol.
I know about the UK Data Protection Act and similar EU laws (I'm a Brit living in Ireland) - I've had people tell me not to worry, this can't happen, the law prevents it. Yes, they do - today - but these laws were put in place by politicians, and can be nullified just as easily, if an apparent reason emerges.
Example: in the UK, what if the Health Secretary is told that prioritizing NHS treatment in this way will save £billions? There goes your legal protection. It might not need to go to a Parliament vote, with the powers (s)he already has. Checking your records for apparent negligence on your part is a lot cheaper than putting you through a physical examination, right?
Not just the government uses this data (Score:5, Interesting)
Some examples:
-A large chain of grocery stores that also had pharmacys sold the data about what medications their customers bought to an insurance company. The insurance company ran the medication list against each policy holder's health insurance info and then cancelled people who bought drugs like heart medication without the insurance company being aware of it.
-Another chain had a promotion tied to their loyalty cards that gave customers a turkey for Thanksgiving based on how much they spent and it also gave them more stuff is they bought specific things. When the statement of exactly what was purchased came to the chain's CEO's home, it revealed to his wife that he bought huge amounts of flowers for his mistress and it resulted in his divorce.
-A single mother who had just lost her young son in a car accident bought some baby gifts in a chain grocery store and used her frequent shopper card when she paid in order to get a small discount. The purchases of these items caused her to be flagged as a new mother and be immediately put on a ton of mailing lists relating to "the joy of motherhood", etc. Hardly a pleasant reminder after losing her only child.
I guess that my point in posting this is that the privacy issues with these cards are quite far reaching. They can have real personal impact and their use should be considered VERY CAREFULLY. They can have benefits that one might find valuable, but they can have devistating and totally unforseen consequences.
Caviat Carrier?
The real issue here (Score:4, Interesting)
- You could be accused of crime based almost solely on things you bought at the store. The dude put out the fire and called 911. Not exactly a bright arsonist, now is he? I blame the prosecutors as much as the cops. Who looks at a shopping receipt and a tracking dog and thinks they have a case against the person who put the fire out? And the dude was a fire fighter. You'd think someone with intimate knowledge of the business could come up with something that isn't going to leave as much evidence behind.
- Once information about you exists somewhere it can be used for things you might not be able to envision at the time you turned the information over. You bought kerosene for a space heater, fertilzer for your lawn, some batteries and a spare garage door opener because your wife's car is a purse on wheels and she lost it. Then one day Homeland Security is showing up at your door. Unfortunately that's not unreasonably paranoid these days.
Still think you have nothing to hide? What's really pathetic is that people who really know trade craft and are willing to actually do something bad with those materials also know how to make it difficult to track their purchases. If they have an organized network some of those materials may have been purchased months or years previously by middle buyers now long gone who had no idea why they were buying two tons of fertilizer a few bags at a time.
Re:The wife? (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me say that again -- the Safeway card was only one of many things that suggested that he did it.
The only thing that really fits those facts are that somebody else in the household did it. I hadn't really considered that until somebody mentioned it here (I wasn't really thinking about it) but it makes sense.
You're not Miss Marple either, and you're not their mother. Give them a break.Re:Happy ending? (Score:3, Interesting)
If the evidence against someone leaves the defendant without a shadow of a doubt guilty, but he is not, then they have lied. If I am ever accused, I plan on suing the accusers after the trial for lying under oath because any evidence you put against me is either circumstantial, or a lie. Either they lied, or they wasted my time.
In the case of the man in the story, there is one piece of circumstantial evidence and one hazy past event (unsure circumstances). Anyone who would convict him with just that hasn't fulfilled their job as juror.
Re:Happy ending? (Score:1, Interesting)
Higher levels of governement will come to the rescue? In fantasies perhaps, I was also close to a case where my area's version of a SWAT team was called, for whatever twisted reasoning, to a potential suicide. They arrived at the wrong address, hid in the bushes in the dark and cut down a man with a shotgun who thought he was protecting his mother from a serial rapist preying on older women loose at the time. I had a girlfriend in new and she related in the closed hearings afterwards (permant publication ban) that the nature and angles of the entry wounds indicated indicated obvious automatic weapons fire, which the officer denied claiming he was just "very good." Good enough for the court, who ruled the only action warranted was making the SWAT team wear clearly identification on their uniforms henceforth.
The fantasy you want to believe is they way the courts are supposed to work, the reality is it's one available only to those with the financial means.
Very Close Call IMHO (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't.
Here in Illinois, 50% of those on death row were proven by genetic analysis to be innocent of the crimes of which they had been convicted.
50%.
One in two people sentenced to death had been wrongly convicted, and were only exonerated pre-mortem because they happen to have enough appeals in place to postpone their executions until a technology came along able to prove they weren't the culprits. These people were in some cases convicted on evidence a hell of a lot more flimsy than a Safeway Club Card purchasing record, and they were sentenced to die.
The numbers were so horrific that our Governor at the time, a Republican who until then had supported the death penalty, placed a moratorium on all further executions in the state, and rightly so.
Of course, this "new" technology, like any other, is falable, and in a case like this one (where everything's gone up in smoke, and where the accused lived there anyway) entirely inapplicable, so lest someone think "but now we have this new panacea, so it won't happen anymore" I can only say, don't kid yourself.
Justice in America is appallingly hap-hazard. Police are lazy. They latch onto a theory they like and make the facts fit their expectations. The lose, damage, and misinterpret evidence all the time. District Attorney's persue careers based on rates of conviction, and often have little concern for the actual guilt or innocence of those they are convicting (there have been a couple in recent memory here in Chicago who have been proven to knowingly convict innocent people, in at least one case because he was more interested in putting the scapegoat behind bars and looking good to an angry public than in serving justice).
Having served on a couple of juries, I can say from my own experience that juries are faced with severely filtered and diluted information, outright misinformation, and a great deal of emotional manipulation from both sides. Their odds of getting something right don't seem to be much higher than what we would get if we simply flipped a coin to determine guilt or innocence.
I understand people who break and run when accused of a crime they didn't commit. The prisons are full of people wrongly convicted, and the streets with people who got away scot-free (and of course the opposite is also true, the prisons are also full of guilty people correctly convicted, and the streets with people justly acquited). It is an utter crapshoot as to whether or not you are correctly found guilty or notguilty, or incorrectly found notguilty or guilty, and this guy got incredibly lucky.
Re:Close call? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not necessarily the case. For example, a relatively local fire department, wishing a new fire hall, decided that burning down the fire hall was the solution. Failing the first time, they tried again.
In a lot of cases, it's not the fascination with fire, but the need to be a hero.
In others, where the size or need for the F.D. was in question, arson is a simple way to "prove" the necessity.
A couple cases where I've known the individuals, the cause was boredom. The fire fighters wanted something to do.
All these individuals are deeply disturbed. A reasonable individual does not see such a violent act as a "solution," does not need to prove their heorism, does not make political points by violence, nor do they threaten the lives of other fire fighters for kicks.
They are deeply disturbed, but they aren't your classic pyro. If anything, a lot of pyros tend to do well as fire fighters. If they recognize that they have a problem and channel their urges into fighting fires, they can do well.
A local steel mill had a pyro for a "salamander," someone who went around keeping the fires lit. Only after the steel mill closed did he become a danger to society again.
If the lawyer is presenting the truth, she or he would wish me on the jury. If the lawyer is shovelling the semi-solid metabolic waste products, their jury consultant will tell them to get me out of there with the very first pre-emption.
I've actually helped defend a fire fighter from charges that he committed arson. He was innocent - eventually (as in this case) someone else was found to be the perp. In my case, it was another fire fighter, who attempted to frame the first fire fighter.
I'd trust circumstantial evidence over eyewitness testimony any day. About 1/2 of the eyewitness testimony I've heard when in court or at a coroner's inquest would have been funny were the matter not so serious. About a quarter of the remainder was plausible but contradicted by videotape or other hard evidence.
Circumstatial Evidence is often pretty thin (Score:3, Interesting)
Loyalty programs do not mean higher prices (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously you give up a bit of information to gain some benefit, and that's the case in a myriad of things we do each day. You provide info for credit card applications, job applications, drivers license applications, purchasing items online, etc.
Re:The wife? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, it's OK for the store to collect data of little value and then nullify their customer's right to privacy by providing it to the police so their customers can be falsely accused of a gruesome attempted felony? Are you really supporting this data collection?
BTW, One of the reasons that grocery shopping is such a PIA is the way the marketing idiots have arranged the store as a maze to increase sales. Customers are herded all over a large store just to buy the staple items most people want, with lots of opportunities to buy more stuff en route. Ever wondered why dairy is in one corner, produce is in the next county, etc.? If they'd put each item in one logical location instead of spreading them all over the store, and stop rearranging the store every other month to keep people confused, customers could find what they want and spend half the time doing it. But they'd rather waste your time to produce a 10% larger average grocery bill. Some marketing wiz got a promotion for it. Of course, that promotion was bestowed by the previously promoted room temperature IQ marketing wiz who never considered the obvious fact that customers would shop more often and probably spend more money if the store didn't go out of their way to create a customer hostile shopping experience. Ever find the display you want, and it's empty, then find the same item someplace else in the store where it's co-located with something else? Why don't they just dump all the store contents in a big heap in the middle of a warehouse? That should keep customers looking (and buying) for days.
Where I live, one grocery store, Krogers, has a near monopoly. There are few other decent choices. You think it's OK for a company to coerce customers into giving up their personal data and then a short time later charging them more for this privilege? Is that a legitimate offer, or a deceitful abuse of a near monopoly?
Re:The wife? (Score:1, Interesting)
There's little choice. Here we have Kroger. They want nearly twice as much for almost everything in their store without the Kroger Plus card.
So either you pay double, or you get the card.
So I got the card, and filled in fake information. They still gave me a card, which worked fine. Giant Eagle said they would mail me the card in a week, but gave me a temporary card, which works just fine to this day. If it stops working, I'll stop shopping there.
Also, I never buy anything questionable with the card. If I had the intention of doing something bad with something I bought, I would simply say that I didn't have my card, and pay in cash only. Why leave a record trail?
Bottom line is the privacy invasion sucks, but when 98% of America doesn't give a shit about privacy and personal freedoms, you don't really have a choice but to follow suit, or pay double. And since I'm not rich...