US Treasury to Post Previously Private Email Addresses Online

An anonymous reader writes "After receiving around 10 thousand comments about a government proceeding and after promising not to reveal personal info from those comments online, the US Treasury department decided to post email addresses of those who commented online. Sounds like they don't want any more comments about government proceedings. The email harvesters are going to have a great time."

And the FTC explicitly advises against...

Here's a consumer alert [ftc.gov] from the Federal Trade Commission [ftc.gov] on why you shouldn't post your email address online... how ironic!

Maybe people whose address is posted should file a complaint [ftc.gov] with the FTC against the U.S. Treasury Department. I know, the Treasury dept is technically not a "business" (although it's arguable) but it would be funny if the FTC received tons of complaints because of this.

Re:And the FTC explicitly advises against...

Also ironic: the FTC posts their own email address online ([e-mail]) at the bottom of their webpage!

[e-mail]? That's a spamtrap address if I ever saw one!

Yes, it is. In fact, I use that address to sign up for crap somethines when they swear they will not send me spam therefore. Also, the FTC set up that address for people to forward their spam to it for their analysis.

Re:And the FTC explicitly advises against...

Exactly. I don't understand why people give out their regular addresses in this day & age. I have a semi-disposable address that I use for giving out to the untrusted public [& a few mailing lists] & only them. If I'm not expecting a reply, then I don't need to monitor or check it.

Of course, there is always www.spamgourmet.org.

In the end, I blame the email address owners & that organization.

Re:And the FTC explicitly advises against...

If you run the mail server for your domain, then practically any SMTP server can perform this service using what are called "aliases". Personnaly, I run my own domain at home and use the open source SMTP server "postfix" running on RedHat 8.0 to handle the sending and receiving of email. The way it works in postfix is you edit the alias file, adding an entry for the throw-away email address followed by the real email address to deliver the email to. After you are done editiing the file, you run the postalias command to update the aliases database ( postfix read the alias.db file and not the text alias file when making email delivery decisions ). After that is done ( takes 2 seconds for me ), any email send to the throw-away address will be forwarded to the real mailbox you specified.

For people/businesses I work with often, I pretty much keep the alias I gave them on file unless they abuse it ( like sell it or spam it ). Otherwise, will just delete the alias after I am done with it, and then update the database.

Postfix itself has a nice set of anti-spam tools to restrict who it will receive email from and also who it will forward email for. Again, I restrict sending to computers on my home network by IP/Hostname/From/To addresses and it works very well.

Sorry for the long post, but I figure too much information is better than not enough. So I hope this answered your question.

Re:And the FTC explicitly advises against...

Sure... you can file a complaint with the FTC. But you must include your email address.

Hidden email addresses on FTC.GOV

Have a look at the front page of ftc.gov [ftc.gov]

If you highlight the section just below Last Updated: Thursday, January 8, 2004 10:05 AM you'll see two "hidden" email addresses (font color set to white.)

Anyone know what this is about? Spam trap?

Thanks for nothin'

Aside from the rather obvious gold mine for Spammers that this would provide (thanks to the knuckleheads in the Treasury Department), this is an example of openness in government which could be good except that the problem is that they are breaking a promise. Most disturbing is this little item "we will post comments received on that notice on our Web site in full, including any street addresses, telephone numbers, or e-mail addresses contained in the comments." It seems that nobody is allowed privacy in this White House administration except GWB and friends.

Re:Thanks for nothin'

Hey now, just because you cant afford your own "undisclosed location" dont be player hating our VP.

Re:Thanks for nothin'

Hey now, just because you cant afford your own "undisclosed location" dont be player hating our VP.

Actually, we have our own little "undisclosed location" just down the road from our VP's "undisclosed location" in Jackson Wyoming. :-)

Re:Thanks for nothin'

Doesn't the entire state of Wyoming qualify as an "undisclosed location?"

Re:Mm, feds.

No, it's not.

He'll lose his position eventually. If it takes eight years to toss him, it'll take eight years. The problem isn't that ONE person is a dictator.

The problem is that the entire political system has been corrupted at the roots all the way to the top of the tree. So, when this kook and his cronies and the current inept morons at each level of government are gone, they'll be replaced by a whole new set of gibbering morons and self-indulgent puppets.

Yes, it's Democracy. Yes, it's a republic. But, what's the point when you're choices always boil down to dumb, dumber, or dumbest?

If this goes on much longer, that is, if the American populace doesn't start demanding accountability from it's own government, the only solution will eventually be to rip the whole thing up by the roots and put an uncorrupted system back in its place. The odds of a successful transplant on that scale are, to say the least, not good.

Re:Mm, feds.

Maybe the US troops in Iraq should come back to liberate this country.

Re:Mm, feds.

"Maybe the US troops in Iraq should come back to liberate this country."

Maybe they would if they had a reason.

What issue do you think is heavy enough to cause a military force to turn on its own command? There are countless examples from history, so we know that it's possible. But do you really believe the US has such an issue today, or will have, in the forseeable future? What issues would those be?

It looks to me like everybody is pretty much blissfully happy with the general state of affairs, and that the people in the military rank and file are just about as loyal and satisfied as any military organization has ever been in history. For your revolutionary scenario, all that would have to be pretty much the opposite of how it is right now, which is to say nothing of how bad things would have to get before the military *commanders* decided death was a better choice than fighting *for* the country.

Re:Mm, feds.

You assume the dictator is the same person as the chief. Consider how long some of the current administration heads have been working in the government. My favorite example is Jack Valenti. He gets onto the radar of these young nerds because of recent dealings in the entertainment industry. But how many realize that he'd occupied a position of authority for 4 decades? How many know he was in the JFK motorcade?

Consider Ashcroft's career. Did you vote for Ashcroft? He had power 8 years ago, and he will probably still have power 8 years hence, even though Mr. Bush will be quietly enjoying his retirement.

How about Rumsfeld? He didn't just fall off a turnip truck in 2000 either -- he's been pulling strings in Washington DC since the Eisenhower administration! Did you vote for Rumsfeld? Why didn't he disappear after 8 years in the executive team?

The people fucking up the State are NOT elected, and they do NOT have finite limits on how long they can stay in power. Some of the most important people making some of the most significant decisions in the history of the country, weren't even elected by the people.

Too bad the misdirection works so well, making everybody point their blame the temp worker who occupies the hot seat while the real power people stay under the radar for decades.

governmental in-fighting

maybe it's just that the department of treasury figures that spammers support the industry more than they do harm to it. Thus they decided to support the spammers.

You neglect one important point...

We have anti-spam laws now.

Those will stop the spammers and email harvesters.

Clif

Capitalism at work

Just show the treasury you disaprove by not using their products. If enough people do this they'll get the message and change their policies.

Life without physical money...

... is life without privacy.

This story has people complaining that their email addresses are being revealed, and you advocate giving your entire spending history to Visa and its customers?

Re:Capitalism at work

Just show the treasury you disaprove by not using their products.

Awww, but they just spent $32 million on advertising [msn.com] their Fall 2003 product line!

Personally, I'm only using Republic of Texas [republic-of-texas.net] money.

Damned if you do...

If the Treasury Deaprtment didn't post the comments, there would be talk of a government conspiracy to keep the public's voice from being heard.

I don't agree with the Treasury Department violating its stated policy. It's frankly chilling coming from a government agency. (Imagine if they had the same policy with witness protection. "Yeah, well, we were going to give you a new identity, but we ran out of budget money this month.") But either way, they were screwed.

Re:Damned if you do...

What are you talking about? The only reason the treasury is doing this is to punish everyone for sending their comments in. Any one of us could write a perl script in 20 minutes that would process the data and output it in a usable manor. Either everyone at the treasury is an idiot (possible), or they just decided that they didn't care. Honestly, do you think most of these people will send their comments next time the treasury asks for them? I doubt it.

Re:Damned if you do...

Listen, 10000 emails.
I can pretty much go through 10000 emails in one week. One, start by grepping "@" in the comments. Then the 2 letter abbreviation code for states. Then reading it. So their excuse that they cannot go through it all, is bull.

But we can't find out about....

But the public can not find out about the VP's secret energy taskforce.

Sad.

The lesson is...

If you drink, don't scribe.

Perl?!?

WTF?! Have they never heard of Perl??

Bryan

Re:Perl?!?

This is the government we're talking about here. If it's not written in COBOL or ADA they don't want anything to do with it.

Not so bad

They're only not bothering to strip email addresses contained within the submitted comments themselves. As long as you didn't sign your comment or anything, it should be more or less anonymous.

Is this evel legal?

Usual disclaimers apply (IANAL), but when you decide to post on a public website under the auspices of privacy, you have a right to expect that their end of the bargain will be held up, no? Couldn't it be viewed that the privacy statement was a sort agreement between the department and the poster? Now that the department has broken its promise, is there any form of redress a person can seek?

Sue Them

The Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) website has been taken off several times due to lawsuits over their inability to protect information. Maybe a lawsuit would provide for an injunction, at least. Then Treasury could find the time to remove the addresses.

-cp-

President Bush to Liberate Alaska [alaska-freegold.com]

the camel says ...

perl -pi -e 's/\S+\@\S+/\[email_ommitted\]/g' comments_file.txt

Do I win the prize?

I Protest.

I, for one, plan to boycott money.

Of course I'm a student, so I'm pretty much doing that anyway.

Use free email (dead drop) accounts for this stuff

You know this is what dead drop email accounts are for. It is an address that I use to send information but never to receive it, or just receive things once. Simple reuseable 1 way communication.

Free email accounts like Yahoo/Hotmail are great for this.

My Slashdot email, a dead drop yahoo account. That email account I need for registration that sends me a temp password in the email, drop dead account. MSN Messenger and the MS Passport thing, drop dead account.

People I WANT to talk to, my personal email account. People work pays me to talk to, my work email account.

Running my own email server allows another level of indirection. Every company I do business with gets their own email address (well alias to a [e-mail] address).

tagged email addresses

This is why it's good to use email addresses like [e-mail]. Then when the spam starts coming in, you can set up a forwarding rule to send it all to the bonehead who made that decision.

COPPA (Child Online Privacy Protection Act) issue

I assume they aren't going to post the names, addresses, and e-mails of children?

I assume they ensured everyone posting was of legal age?

I assume they know the rules of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act?

If not, they're dumb.

Prediction

Here's my prediction: This is going to change in a few days. What happened is that due to laziness or cluelessness, the webmasters at the Treasury site claimed "Oh, no. Deleting those addresses is impossible." They're going to get a slew of posts calling them idiots and explaining that the fix can be made in 15 seconds. At which point the boss will go back, chew out the webmasters and tell them to fix it.

Certainly this is no reason to stop commenting on proposals. We're talking about a tax on malt liquor-based beverages, for crying out loud! Fighting that is worth a little exposure to spammers!

(Are there really "malt beverage aficionados"? And they communicate with one another)

Regex free of charge

Blockquoth the article:

"The unusually large number of comments received...has made it difficult to remove all street addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses from the comments for posting on our Internet Web site in a timely manner," the Treasury Department...

Its clear they didn't ask a programmer to try.

Just search and replace the following:
[^ ]+@[^ ]+?\.[^ ]+ that should take care of your emails

[()0-9+-]+ should take care of many phone numbers

\d+.{,25}(dr|st|pl|ave|rd|blvd|highway|hwy|tr|terr ) - should take care of many street addresses

(Above are not tested-just some off the top of my head)

I'd suggest replacing them with "x"'s so have some idea what was removed, esp. in cases of false positives.

They Say it's Because they CAN'T Remove Them

For crying out loud. Please tell me you're compelled by the law or by a Supreme Court decision. Tell me you didn't notice. Tell me you don't care about privacy. Tell me it's an April Fools Joke. But please, please, don't tell me you're posting them because you can't get rid of them. It just makes you look silly. The answer is Perl and a competent scripter. Send the data to me after I sign a nondisclosure and I'll clean it for you. It's not that much data anyway.

For Pete's Sake!

RP

Dept of Treasury Addresses

Since it is "public" information the Dept of Treasury should be required to provide (maybe with a FOIA request) the home addresses/telephone numbers/email addresses of all of their employees. That would be inline with what they are doing.

The Treasury Department wasn't ready.....

The following makes no excuses for the US Department of the Treasury. They need to stick by their contract with the commenter at the time the comment was posted. This is an explanation of how the whole process works....

The "public comment period" is standard in most US federal government rulemaking actions. Before the advent of access to rulemaking data via the web you were lucky if you knew there was a rulemaking in process unless you were part of an affected industry or had a lobbyist on staff.

Typically, comments were filed by mail, fax, or courier. The courier provision is provided for the convenience of all those lobbyists and interest groups in Washington D.C.

An issue such as changing the tax rates on malt beverages might get something like 10-100 comments filed. The GS-5 (maybe a 7) in charge of handling the comments would log them properly on a 12th generation photocopy of the "comment log sheet" (or some other similar name) and the comments would be either published with personal information removed (via a big black marker) or more likely ceremoniously placed in a large manilla file and trucked to a records vault.

Enter the Internet - Now the rulemaking process is often posted for the whole world to see. Even with a requirement

Now we've moved to having the rulemaking documents available on the Internet. While still requiring postal/fax/courier hard-copy replies this may have raised the comment quantity by an order of magnitude (100-1000). This greatly perplexed the government. Now they were getting comments from ordinary citizens. In fact, it is likely that the majority of the comments came from individual citizens. What are they to do? Not only is the filing clerk overloaded with the number of comments (and having to make a 13th generation of the log sheet to file them all), but they can't just take the lobbyist/interest group positions and claim it as public opinion.

Now open an avenue to submit comments via email. Post the information to a few lists/newsgroups/web sites and suddenly you've got what happened here. The file clerk is totally overwhelmed. They can't do an automated strip of all personal information because they might miss some. They can't hire more people because its not in their budget. If they did hire more people there might not be funds for all those "fact finding" trips to places that coincidentally have excellent golf courses.

Besides the most important point - now the *VAST* majority of the received comments are from individual american citizens. Whats is a government agency to do without the firm and easily heard voice of lobbyists to guide them? They might actually have to *READ* the comments and do some data analysis on what the citizens actually want.

The best way to deal with this is for everyone that commented to send a written formal request that their personally identifiable be removed from the filing direct to the Treasury Department. Then send a similar dead-tree complain to the FTC. A letter to all 3 of your congressmen won't hurt either. It will give them a great opportunity to posture.

Um... interesting...

Wouldn't this violate the Privacy Act of 1974 [usdoj.gov]?

No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains, unless disclosure of the record would be--

(1) to those officers and employees of the agency which maintains the record who have a need for the record in the performance of their duties;

(2) required under section 552 of this title;

(3) for a routine use as defined in subsection (a)(7) of this section and described under subsection (e)(4)(D) of this section;

(4) to the Bureau of the Census for purposes of planning or carrying out a census or survey or related activity pursuant to the provisions of Title 13;

(5) to a recipient who has provided the agency with advance adequate written assurance that the record will be used solely as a statistical research or reporting record, and the record is to be transferred in a form that is not individually identifiable;

(6) to the National Archives and Records Administration as a record which has sufficient historical or other value to warrant its continued preservation by the United States Government, or for evaluation by the Archivist of the United States or the designee of the Archivist to determine whether the record has such value;

(7) to another agency or to an instrumentality of any governmental jurisdiction within or under the control of the United States for a civil or criminal law enforcement activity if the activity is authorized by law, and if the head of the agency or instrumentality has made a written request to the agency which maintains the record specifying the particular portion desired and the law enforcement activity for which the record is sought;

(8) to a person pursuant to a showing of compelling circumstances affecting the health or safety of an individual if upon such disclosure notification is transmitted to the last known address of such individual;

(9) to either House of Congress, or, to the extent of matter within its jurisdiction, any committee or subcommittee thereof, any joint committee of Congress or subcommittee of any such joint committee;

(10) to the Comptroller General, or any of his authorized representatives, in the course of the performance of the duties of the General Accounting Office;

(11) pursuant to the order of a court of competent jurisdiction; or

(12) to a consumer reporting agency in accordance with section 3711(e) of Title 31.

I don't see "published on a public website" anywhere in there...

If...

If we can't trust the government with our email addresses, WHY oh why do we trust them with 55% of our income each and every year?

Old news, they anouced this on Dec. 2, 2003.

Look, it was crappy that they went back on their word but this isn't the beginning of some totalitarian state. The TTB normally receives around 20 comments for something like this and this time they received close to 15,000. They got slahdoted.

The TTB announced their plans to publish the full content of the emails and letters on Dec 2, 2003 [ttb.gov]. They gave everyone who contacted them a way to prevent their addresses from being published. Granted, not many people read the Federal register but given the budgetary constraints that the TTB has this was the best way.

Also, everyone is assuming that it is the emails that are the problem. TTB also received 4,800 letters and faxes. Normally they receive about 20 comments. It's really easy to redact information from 20 comments but 4,800 letters, that will take a lot of time and manpower. Taking the info out of the emails requires a technical know-out that maybe out of reach of the person who's main job is dealing with 20 comments at a time. Is the TTB supposed to put out bids for a contractor to come in a write a Perl script to do a job that a person normally does in two minutes with a marker and hitting a few control x's? Is it worth the delay in the public posting the comments?

If you are one of those email addresses...

If you are one of those email addresses, you should sue to get an injunction against the gov't. Where is the EFF on this one?

A smallish idea... SHARE THE LOVE!

If this is done, why not show the people at the treasury WHY it's a bad idea through a little.. Uh. Kinesthetic Learning Excersise.

Why get the personal names, email addresses, and street addresses of those who made the decision and share the love? Wasn't this sort of thing done with a certain spammer in Michigan?

You could start with Treasury Secretary John Snow...

And by strange coincidence...

...they're all Democrats! ;-)

Bush Policies at Work

The Bush administration doesn't give a damn about public comments. In fact they despise all input from the "little guy". When they started getting too much negative email about the invasion, they made it so you had to jump through many hoops to send a comment, and then you could only comment on their "approved topics" [slashdot.org]. Not only do they not want to listen to you, they won't tell you who they are listening to [csmonitor.com].

They're not conservatives. They're plutocrats.

Re:surprise surprise

Free speech includes the right to speak anonymously (McIntyre vs Ohio Board of Elections), so people can express opinions without fear of reprisals, whether from the government or from non-government parties.

BATF invited people to exercise their right of anonymous speech: they asked citizens for their opinions, said please give your contact info so we can get back to you with followup questions, but we won't publish your info, so random loons won't see it and bother you. Then they decided to publish the info anyway, opening the senders to reprisals, i.e. punishing people for exercising the right of anonymous speech.

Think about what happens if you know about an ongoing crime (e.g. your mayor is taking weekly payoffs from the Mafia) and you tell the FBI on condition of anonymity (i.e. you can't testify as a witness, but you give them info to help them organize their own investigation). You might be fine giving the FBI your name and phone number so you can keep assisting them, but you definitely don't want them to notify the Mafia of where the info is coming from. The people you're concerned about reprisals from are not necessarily the government.

Worst lesson ever.

Insightful?

A lot of people fucked with people who had a lot more power than them (American revolution comes to mind for Slashdot's US centric crowd, many other revolutions in history) and won!

The lesson here is organize.

Re:What's the lesson?

power

Your pessimism is unwarranted. Read some Jean Baudrillard; power is nothing more than an illusion, and more than that, its an illusion that is over. The mass, with its black hole intensity of gravity, can destroy the illusion of power in an instant.

Why do you think "fraudsters" like Frank Abignale and Kevin Mitnick get sentences that are longer than those given to murderers? Its because they, through thier actions, reveal the true nature of the social and the illusory nature of power. Power doesnt exist, only deterrence exists.

Go and read "In The Shadow Of The Silent Majorities". It will completely transform your ideas about government and power.

Re:surprise surprise

Still feel good about voting the republicans in ?

I still haven't gotten around to making a bumper sticker that says "Don't blame me, I don't live in a swing state."