The ATF Wants To Know Who Your Friends Are 131
i_want_you_to_throw_ writes "You have a Friend Request from: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms... 'Confirm'? 'Not Now'? Seriously, the ATF won't try to friend you on Facebook. The ATF doesn't just want a huge database to reveal everything about you with a few keywords. It wants one that can find out who you know. According to a recent solicitation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the bureau is looking to buy a 'massive online data repository system' for its Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information (OSII)."
Convenience Store (Score:4, Insightful)
In a truely free country the ATF would be a convenience store and not a government agency. In a free country you would be able to buy your alcohol, tobacco, firearms AND explosives from an ATF convenience store.
Re:Convenience Store (Score:5, Funny)
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Closest thing to this when I was growing up was K-mart. This was in Virginia, but *northern* Virginia DC suburbs, so not really hardcore Southern at all.
Anyway, guns and ammo were right there in the sporting goods section with the fishing poles and stuff. They were in glass cases and behind the counter. I'm pretty sure K-mart sold cigarettes and pipe tobacco back then. The alcohol was probably missing though. Definitely no liquor, since Virginia had that monopolized via ABC. As a boy, I wasn't very cu
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I think Wal-Mart sells all three. Haven't been inside a Wal-Mart in a while, but I will probably go ahead and shop there when I finally get around to getting myself a few boxes of Luger ammo.
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I think Wal-Mart sells all three. Haven't been inside a Wal-Mart in a while, but I will probably go ahead and shop there when I finally get around to getting myself a few boxes of Luger ammo.
Not if it is like the Wally Marts around here in Texas. Most have empty shelves when it comes to ammo. Last time I was there they had a selection of 300 win mag, a smaller selection of 30-30 and then some 12 gauge boxes. I order all my ammo by the case load.
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That's pretty much what any store selling ammo looks like. The county sheriff offices in Wisconsin are looking for dealers at gun shows and private reloaders to sell them ammo because they are running low.
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expanding background checks won't stop the black market either because the black market "dealers" won't run the checks because they are, you know, criminals.
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In 1976, my father bought my first revolver for me at a combined liquor and gun store that I'm sure also sold tobacco products. It was located in a major shopping mall (Wonderland, iirc) in San Antonio, Texas. I mean, right out there where today you find Apple stores and Payless shoe stores, a combination liquor/gun store! It was great!
Kids today don't appreciate what they've lost.
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There is a store about a mile away from me that sells coffee, premium cigars, and firearms. It's the strangest combo that I have ever seen in the Pittsburgh area. Now if they just sold beer, they could deal with all three main parts of the ATF.
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Austin, Texas used to have a gun shop with a drive-thru fast food style window for ammunition.
"Do you want some fries with your HK 4.6×30mm's, Sir?"
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Not to get off the watch list...
Anyway, I believe Facebook has a database they are willing to rent access to for a very reasonable fee. The ATF may also want to buy the MySpace database, but it's a few years out of date...
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Palantir is the leader in this field, why not just go with them?
All the tools you need for swallowing up large ill-formed sources of information and dicing and slicing however you want.
Huh? Now Facebook is starting to make a bit more sense. Give them what they keep trying to get (access to everyone, everywhere, all the time) and you have what ATF (and the rest of the Government) are dying to get their claws on.
I didn't think that Zuckerman was smart enough to think this up all by his little self.
What's it to you, slashdot? (Score:1)
Looking for cliques in all of the places. (Score:4, Informative)
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So I guess that ATF just heard about cliques [wikipedia.org] and graph theory. Perhaps knowing the degree of bacon-ness would tell them that this approach to a friend-of-a-friend is useless. As everyone knows, the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon [wikipedia.org] Conjecture" posits that every-one in filmdom is on a path of length at most 6 away from being in a film with Kevin Bacon (link to him yourself, if you want, he's less than 6 degrees away).
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So if Baconicity holds true in all of life instead of just in the film industry graph, then any individual can be linked to a criminal within less than six steps. Oh-my-godzies, we're all linked to criminals!! We all have gang ties!! We're all affiliated with Terrorists!! That linkage list shows it!! It must be true!!! Lock us all up, for our own goods!
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If that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is ridiculous. But that won't stop the government from claiming it to be true and useful and actually use it in courts of law. Shheeeeesh. It's like the old canard about "cocaine residue on money":
-- even national geographic Cocaine on Money: Drug Found on 90% of U.S. Bills [nationalgeographic.com] confirms this to be true
Yet the government often tried to try (yes, prosecute = to try a case) people for being drug couriers/smugglers/kingpins because the money found on their person had drug residue on it. Unfortunately, the penetrance of drug residue on money is so high that there is not a reliable way to link the person's drug use with the drugs found on the money. See statistics 101 to figure that out.
Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places. (Score:4, Interesting)
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I posit that they are using these scientifically useless approaches to flim-flam judges and grand-juries into rubber-stamping warrant requests based on these flimsy pretexts being their probable cause. I say this because this is exactly what they did for drug residue on money. This is exactly what they do when they claim that their drug-sniffing dogs have detected the scent of (ultimately) non-existent drugs. This abuse of process has occurred. And I say that this is subverting true science for the ability to cover their over-reaching for issues of probable cause when no probable cause exists
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Armand Jean du Plessis said in his role as Cardinal Richelieu: âoeIf you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang himâ (look it up). This is what they are doing here. Trying to find dirt in everyone, so that when they want to get you, they've got a so-called valid "probable cause" for doing so. --- sez paranoid me.
Re:Looking for cliques in all of the places. (Score:4, Informative)
Here, this book will help you feed that (rational) paranoia:
http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx [threefeloniesaday.com]
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That page has a frickin 3.5MB image embedded in it. That's ridiculous.
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Glenn Reynolds (http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/) has a great article concerning due process (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713):
Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime
Abstract:
Though extensive due process protections apply to the investigation of crimes, and to criminal trials, perhaps the most important part of the criminal process -- the decision whether to charge a defendant, and with what -- is almost entirely discretionary. Given the plethora of crim
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In my grand unified theory of everything this move is a psychological operation. "Stay away from those firearm nuts, stay away from firearms" is the idea. Soft terrorism. Unsurprising. (Terror is useful for those who already have power, not for those who want to obtain it, see examples that range from the kings, the French revolution, the adverse effect of indiscriminate attacks on the public opinion).
The second reason: mass criminalize everybody first, then pick up the troublemakers and jail them as it sui
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So if Baconicity holds true in all of life instead of just in the film industry graph, then any individual can be linked to a criminal within less than six steps. Oh-my-godzies, we're all linked to criminals!! We all have gang ties!! We're all affiliated with Terrorists!! That linkage list shows it!! It must be true!!! Lock us all up, for our own goods!
Sure, everyone can be linked to some douchebag/terrorist/asshole in six degrees, but if you're linked to a douchebag/terrorist/asshole in one or two degrees, you're probably a douchebag/terrorist/asshole.
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And BTW when will slashdot comments allow unicode so I can spell Paul Erdos correctly?
KB has no Erdos number, but 4 is his Erdos+Bacon # (Score:2)
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But if we consider the concept of a joint Erdos-Bacon number [wikipedia.org] which is the sum of an individual's Bacon number and their Erdos number, then we might be able to go somewhere. Those individuals with joint Bacon-Erdos numbers have a vertex on the B
Best friends? (Score:3, Funny)
Jim Beam, Philip Morris, and the brothers Smith and Wesson, of course.
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Or that gal, Amber from Alaska, Ms. Mary Jane, and Wynne Chester.
Keep your friends close (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep your friends close but keep ATF closer.
AFAIK FB 'friends' in most cases are not exactly what one would consider to be a friend IRL. I mean if you have 1000 friends, what does that mean?
An old tale:
A young man decided to get married, he was busy and asked his father to call 50 people on a list. He said "these are my friends, can you call them and invite them for the wedding ceremony?" The father agreed.
On his wedding day the son confronted his father "I asked you to call all of my friends", "and so I did", "but there were 50 people on my list and I only see 15". "Son, I called all 50 people and told each one of them that you have a problem and you need help and they should meet with you in this exact location at this exact time, so don't worry, all your friends are here now".
Back to the story: of-course government wants to know everything about you, don't you understand, it's for the collective good.
New Proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
Who wants to work on this with me! Seriously people we could do this in a legal way and that would be something that COULD make a difference. Probably not but worth a try...
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This is not a new concept. We used to have that in America. It was called the press, but now the people that are running the press are in bed with the politicians.
Then let's track those fuckers too!
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Brilliant! I'd contribute to that project. Put it up on a crowdfunding platform and before you can say "swipe my Visa" I'm there.
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Just look at my social networks... (Score:1)
Terror Wins (Score:4, Insightful)
The ATF wanting such a database is like terror turned inward. Are we really in such danger that we need all kinds of agencies studying the public? I think it is a bit much. And I am very aware that such information has been compiled, one way or another, since at least the 1950s..
Say hello ... (Score:4, Funny)
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Red Scare v2.0 (Score:3, Insightful)
Seeing that our Government already did an end run around our First Amendment Rights to Freedom of Association in 1950 with the Red Scare under a Republican President, it only goes to follow that we now embrace the Democrat's Gun Scare under Obama.
IT. IS. WHAT. THE. PEOPLE. WANT. AFTER. ALL.
I mean, haven't we already seen a handful of news organisations and blogs outing local gun owners to shame the thousands of gun owners and invite them to be harassed, assaulted or worse? Already, we rightly expell kids from the school system for pointing a finger and saying "pew pewpew" and even dodgeball is facing bannination from the school ground for it's abject violence -- and you better bury those FPS like CoD in your backyard before "we" find them.
Why you ask? Why not? Why not going after anyone who's ever used or owned a gun?
After all, they must be bad people -- and if you know someone who owns a gun, you are probably a pretty bad person your self.
So choose your Facebook friends wisely, or you might have to suffer the "consequences".
Re:Red Scare v3? (Score:1)
Actually, this would be version 3, and again, it would start under a Democratic Party president, although I don't know why that matters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare [wikipedia.org]
Republican Congress (Score:2, Interesting)
Surely the law making is Congress, the Republicans, and the laws being used is the Patriot Act, Republicans.
But, hey nice misdirect. Do you work for Fox?
The Facts (Score:2)
"On May 26, 2011, President Barack Obama used an Autopen to sign a four-year extension of three key provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act while he was in France: roving wiretaps, searches of business records (the "library records provision"), and conducting surveillance of "lone wolves" â" individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups."
This is an issue of freedom. As a card carrying, non pot-smoking, member of the Libertarian Party, I'm more than happy to point out th
The joke is on the ATF (Score:4, Funny)
I don't have friends.
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I don't have friends.
Funny enough, isn't being a loner supposed to be one to those traits that leads to people being knee-jerk profiled the next Unabomber or school massacre perpetrator? Apparently the ATF is busy compiling a database of all the wrong people if what the DHS has told us in the past has any truth to it.
When has it gone too far? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor, theorizes:
-- The New York Time [nytimes.com]
Re:When has it gone too far? (Score:4, Insightful)
The left theorizes that giving this President more power is not as harmfull as if it were Bush because this President is more responsible.
The problem is that the left hasnt the foresight to recognize that the American public is entirely capable of electing someone equally or exponentialy worse than Bush.
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The problem is that the left hasnt the foresight to recognize that the American public is entirely capable of electing someone equally or exponentialy worse than Bush.
they don't need foresight, he's already in office.
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The one good thing that is happening is that a lot of people who voted for Obama are starting to see that the emperor truly has no clothes:
His platform of peace and ending wars has turned into more wars. His economic recovery consists of an inflated stock market propped up by printing $3,000,000,000 a day and a "falling" unemployment number caused by 9,400,000 people leaving the work force since he took office and more each month. His promise of transparent government has turned into a total farce. He th
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Oh really? Please, yell me about all these wars that Obama's started based on lies that are now bleeding our treasury dry.
1. Ever heard of the baby boomers? They're starting to retire, so of course some people are leaving the labor force. 2. Turns out some people will give up when 30 years of GOP economic policy h
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And they laugh when some of us want to starve the beast.
People are very tribal and partisan right now (Score:2)
The lefties were mad at Bush not for what he was doing, but because he was from The Other Guys(tm). He was one of the other tribe, so what he was doing was bad, and wrong, and evil and all that shit. Some people really believed this to an extreme extent. There were people saying Bush had setup FEMA death camps, would declare martial law and stop the election, that kind of thing.
Well now their guy is in power. Hence you see the same shit from the righties. All of a sudden stuff that under Bush was "necessary
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What sides? Obama didn't dismantle anything of the police state created under Bush. Both parties are sponsored by the same corporations, effectively. Yeah yeah, the values they pay lip service differ - so?
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That article you linked to says apprx. nothing about the "remotely equally bad" topic.
The ATF needs a slapdown (Score:5, Insightful)
The Onion's satire becomes reality (Score:3)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty much true.
Remember, the Bill of Rights was a response to criticisms of the Constitution found in the Anti-Federalist papers. Somehow, the term "anti-federalist" seems still to be right on target of you believe in the concepts of the BoR.
And they'll get it. (Score:1)
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I'm intrigued, do you really believe that, or do you dislike the Clintons so much to spread FUD, or are you just fishing?
Snopes: The Clinton Body Count [snopes.com]
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You forgot to mention that Americans do all this while they still can't be bothered to teach their kids how to spell or punctuate.
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